The Lost Dog
Michelle de Kretser
The Lost Dog
Tom Loxley is holed up in a remote cottage in the bush, trying to finish a book on Henry James and the Uncanny when his dog goes missing, trailing a length of orange twine, tied with firm knots. Tom's lonely childhood in India taught him to tie knots but not to hold on...The house belongs to Nelly Zhang, an elusive artist with whom Tom has become enthralled. The narrative spans ten days while Tom searches for his dog...and loops back in time to take the reader on a breathtaking journey into glittering worlds far beyond the present tragedy, from an Anglo-Indian childhood to the brittle contemporary Melbourne art scene, from Tom's scratchy, unbearably poignant relationship with his ailing mother to the unanswered puzzles in Nelly's past - her husband also disappeared in the bush.And the reader fears for Tom as well as for the dog. Set in present-day Australia and mid-20th century India, here is a haunting, layered work that vividly counterpoints new cityscapes and their inhabitants with the untamed, ancient continent beyond.
3.6 out of 5 based on 7 reviews
|
Omniscore:
|
| Classification |
Fiction |
| Genre |
General Fiction |
| Format |
Hardback |
| Pages |
304 |
| RRP |
£16.99 |
| Date of Publication |
May 2008 |
| ISBN |
978-0701182106 |
| Publisher |
Chatto & Windus |
| |
Tom Loxley is holed up in a remote cottage in the bush, trying to finish a book on Henry James and the Uncanny when his dog goes missing, trailing a length of orange twine, tied with firm knots. Tom's lonely childhood in India taught him to tie knots but not to hold on...The house belongs to Nelly Zhang, an elusive artist with whom Tom has become enthralled. The narrative spans ten days while Tom searches for his dog...and loops back in time to take the reader on a breathtaking journey into glittering worlds far beyond the present tragedy, from an Anglo-Indian childhood to the brittle contemporary Melbourne art scene, from Tom's scratchy, unbearably poignant relationship with his ailing mother to the unanswered puzzles in Nelly's past - her husband also disappeared in the bush.And the reader fears for Tom as well as for the dog. Set in present-day Australia and mid-20th century India, here is a haunting, layered work that vividly counterpoints new cityscapes and their inhabitants with the untamed, ancient continent beyond.
Reviews
The Financial Times
AS Byatt
“This is the best novel I have read for a long time. The writing is elegant and subtle, and Michelle de Kretser knows how to construct a gripping story... This writing is new and constantly surprising, without being showy or quirky. It is exact, like Penelope Fitzgerald; it is strange, like Patrick White.”
24/04/2009
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The Independent
Boyd Tonkin
“Many British readers still expect a literary Australia of broad vistas and open hearts. Yet de Kretser depicts an arch and arty Melbourne, so steeped in coterie in-jokes and post-modern ironies that it could make Shoreditch feel like Saskatchewan... The Lost Dog showcases not only a writer as subtly perceptive about feelings as ideas, but one who, via Tom, traces a thinker's quest to overcome cerebral detachment.”
20/06/2008
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The Sunday Times
Lindsay Duguid
“De Kretser's dramatically compressed narratives move from vivid scene-setting and imagist description to passages of recollection and meditation. Her eye for colour brings into focus both the bright present and the more softly lit past... The Lost Dog opens up rich vistas with its central idea and introduces the reader to a world beyond its fictional frontiers.”
24/04/2009
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The Guardian
Ursula K Le Guin
“I want to praise Michelle de Kretser for being good and beautiful, while scolding her for being afraid to show her goodness and beauty... A mystery is involved; there are a great many echoes and doublings and ghostings; perhaps more than one lost dog... But the echoes are rather hammered home... In her valour, however, lies the virtue of her book, a fine novel, containing in it the promise of even better and more beautiful, less self-conscious works to come.”
14/06/2008
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The Observer
Carmen Callil
“de Kretser's prose can soar into beauty and sink like a stone. Sentences such as: 'The edifice of her imaginings was tagged with his luminous urgency' are all too frequent... These lapses aside, the language is full of light, colour and precise observation and, better still, the author can handle ethical and political concerns with a light touch.”
24/04/2009
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The New York Times
Alison McCulloch
“ This book’s insights are at times so thickly layered as to leave character, story and reader gasping for light and air. Which isn’t to say they’re necessarily bad insights... her forte is illuminating the lives of such “leftovers of empire,” and she provides more of those delights here. But this novel also continues a steady move away from the concrete world of places and events toward the human interior... De Kretser’s writing is as boldly beautiful as ever, but in “The Lost Dog,” the intellectual inquests become tiresome.”
04/05/2008
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The Daily Telegraph
Stephen Abell
“ ...the first problem is that a missing dog is just not important enough a problem to hold our interest... The novelist gives too much about too little; as [Henry] James reminded us, "excited wonder… must be, increasingly, about something" for it to retain any impact. As some old writer once said, "in art economy is always beauty". How true.”
14/06/2008
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