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A Novel
by Michelle de Kretser
Book Reviewed by:A new novel of startling intelligence from prizewinning Australian author Michelle de Kretser, following a writer looking back on her young adulthood and grappling with what happens when life smashes through the boundaries of art.
It's 1986, and "beautiful, radical ideas" are in the air. The narrator of Theory & Practice, a young woman originally from Sri Lanka, arrives in Melbourne for graduate school to research the novels of Virginia Woolf. In the bohemian neighborhood of St. Kilda she meets artists, activists, students—and Kit. He claims to be in a "deconstructed relationship." They become lovers, and the narrator's feminism comes up against her jealousy. Meanwhile, an entry in Woolf's diary upends what the narrator knows about her literary idol, and throws her own work into disarray.
What happens when our desires run contrary to our beliefs? What should we do when the failings of revered figures come to light? Who is shamed when the truth is told? Michelle de Kretser's new novel offers a spellbinding meditation on the moral complexities that arise in the gap between our values and our lives.
The narrator, a critic herself, is writing her thesis on the construction of gender in Virginia Woolf's work, a concentration she struggles with after discovering a racist description of E. W. Perera, a Ceylonese barrister active in the Sri Lankan independence movement, in the author's diary. A Sri Lankan immigrant to Australia familiar with Perera's legacy, the narrator sets about reconciling her admiration for Woolf with the writer's racism through her own interpretation of the novel The Years. De Kretser's novel itself becomes an imaginative response not only to Woolf's novel, but to the greater question of the many ways a person might choose to employ the knowledge they have and to live in the world with others. While the narrator's work on Woolf seems worthwhile, when placed beside what we come to know of her life as a whole, the Before and After of her university days, it shrinks when compared to the contours of her existence, of how she processes experience, of how we later understand that she was right about some things and wrong about others...continued
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(Reviewed by Elisabeth Cook).
The Years is the last of Virginia Woolf's novels to be published during her lifetime, in 1937. Beginning in 1880 and following three generations of the Pargiter family across five decades to the "present day," it captures intimate moments between characters and internal monologues against the backdrop of historical events and changes in British society.
As in Woolf's more popular novels To the Lighthouse (1925) and Mrs. Dalloway (1927), the passage of time in The Years is a major theme, but even more so here, with the narrative eschewing close character development and traditional story structure in favor of the bigger picture. A New York Times critic called it "her richest and most beautiful novel, out of many years in the practice of ...
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Ali Smith
Michelle de Kretser is to my mind one of the finest writers alive and Theory & Practice a lightning strike of a book.
