Pulse en una miniatura para ir a Google Books.
Cargando... Questions of Travel: A Novel (2012 original; edición 2013)por Michelle de Kretser (Autor)
Información de la obraQuestions of Travel por Michelle De Kretser (2012)
Cargando...
Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará.
This book is among the worst I've honestly ever read. I'm still struggling to understand the point of the book. It's essentially a double-narrative following the stories of Ravi and Laura over the course of 30 years. The two characters and their stories are completely unrelated for the vast majority of the book. The narration is scattered, rambling, and extremely difficult to follow. There are moments when things are incredibly vague and/or confusing, frequent jumps in time/flashbacks, and random characters and events that don't seem to serve any purpose than to fill a few extra pages. I was surprised to learn this book actually won an award. It was a chore to read this book and I don't recommend it to anyone. (eGalley provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.) This highly acclaimed and awarded novel did little to inspire our group. The mingling of Laura and Ravi’s stories tended to confuse rather than bind, and most of us found ourselves lost in the language rather than thriving in it. Not the reaction we generally look for in a novel. Therefore, our discussion centred mostly around travel verses tourism, as this was the only real theme we could identify with. In doing so, we shared some wonderful travel stories and chatted about the pros and cons of travelling, where it took us and what we gained from it. Most of us have travelled moderate to extensively, so it was a lively discussion. This was all very interesting, but what were de Kretser’s questions of travel … in other words, what was she trying to say to us in this novel? Cheryle struggled big time with this book and even tackled it by reading all of Ravi’s story first, then going back and reading Laura’s. Not with any great success, but at least she gave it an honest shot! In the end we came to the conclusion that literary fiction may not be our ideal read … but as a book club we are always up to the challenge.
This dichotomy – of tourism in troubled places – is at the core of Questions of Travel. Its Australian author Michelle de Kretser, who was born in Sri Lanka, takes us quite happily to Heritage or Thrills, anywhere in the world – to ‘St Petersburg, Jaipur, Ljubljana. Hill trekking in Thailand, a weekend in an abbey on the Isle of Wight’ – but along the way shows us an extra thing or two. Like a taxi-ride that keeps pace with an open-sided truck in Singapore, which is ‘transporting guest workers to and from a building site … One of the dark-skinned men … asleep on a pile of bricks.’ Applied to de Kretser’s work, ‘along the way’ is no idle phrase. A novel about the politics and philosophy of travel, Questions of Travel is also a highly digressive text which, in its waywardness, discards a causal chain of events; it insists on its ‘right to interrupt the narration’ and to challenge ‘the despotism of “Story”’ (as Milan Kundera put it). It is a playful, performative, unsettled and often extremely unsettling narrative, which charts its own fantastic-realistic course. There are many departures from the main line, each detour creating suspense about where we are being taken and how to describe this labyrinth of pathways. PremiosListas de sobresalientes
"Laura Fraser grows up in Sydney, motherless, with a cold father and an artistic bent. Ravi Mendes is on the other side of the world--his humble father dead, his mother struggling, determined to succeed in computer science. Their stories alternate throughout-- culminating in unlikely fates for them both, destinies influenced by travel--voluntary in her case, enforced in his. With money from an inheritance, Laura sets off to see the world, returning to Sydney to work for a travel guide. There she meets Ravi, a Sri Lankan political exile who wants only to see a bit of Australia and make a living" -- from dust jacket. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
Debates activosNingunoCubiertas populares
Google Books — Cargando... GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)823.92Literature English English fiction Modern Period 2000-Clasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio:
¿Eres tú?Conviértete en un Autor de LibraryThing. |
The first third of the novel mainly deals with the interminably boring Laura and her mundane roaming around the usual tourist spots of Asia and Europe. Just as the reader is about to nod off, de Kretser hits you with a head-snapping plot twist that transforms this novel into something very different. The pace and tension pick up from there but unfortunately de Kretser cannot sustain it. The story she tells of Ravi's experiences is emotional, nuanced and topical. However Laura's story is cliched and bathetic, unable to be saved by a surprise ending.
The questions of the title are posed through the key characters' stories. One is "what am I doing here?". Another is "why does everybody have to leave in the end?", immediately followed by "when will it be my turn to leave?'. These deep questions are a great theme for the novel, but could have been much more tellingly explored by cutting Laura's character to the bare minimum and placing the focus on Ravi's more compelling odyssey. In the process, a good editor could have cut 150 pages from an unnecessarily long novel. ( )