- Paperback: 352 pages
- Publisher: Holt Paperbacks; First Edition edition (May 1 2000)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0805064478
- ISBN-13: 978-0805064476
- Product Dimensions: 19.8 x 12.2 x 2 cm
- Shipping Weight: 340 g
- Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #2,349,192 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
Shipwrecks and lost loves, the Mercator projection and sand dunes, 20th-century passions and the age of exploration: this ambitious first novel by James Bradley crosses continents and centuries to explore the notion that Australia may have been discovered by the Portuguese. David is an Australian archaeologist combing sand dunes that he thinks may be hiding an ancient Portuguese ship. What he finds instead is a human body from the 1940s. An old hermit named Kurt Seligmann advances mysteriously to the fore of the narrative, voicing memories that may or may not touch on the history of this corpse. More crucially to the obsessed David, Kurt seems to possess some knowledge of the fabled sand-sunk ship. As the old man slips away into illness, David's former lover, Dr. Claire Sen, joins him at his bedside vigil. David and Claire find their own doomed story subtly twinned in Kurt's tale of obsession and love in wartime Australia.
Genuinely gripping, ingeniously plotted, and always convincingly researched, Bradley's novel has plenty of propulsive intelligence to keep the reader hooked. Bradley's first book was a volume of award-winning poetry, and he brings a poet's aptitude for language and repeated images to Wrack. Sometimes, however, this preoccupation hamstrings an otherwise compelling adventure tale. Imagery of shards crops up incessantly, which is perhaps a bit literal-minded for a novel with an archaeologist protagonist. "A memory, or perhaps less than a memory, a shard, a fragment" is a typical (fragmented) sentence--not very helpful prose and not even very nice poetry. If a book is going to invoke Michael Ondaatje as heavily as this one does, it needs to deliver more compelling writing. Still, fans of The English Patient--and Dava Sobel's Longitude, for that matter--should find much to admire in Bradley's cleverly looped and configured tale of ships at sea and lovers in sand. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
A seamless fusion of dramatic wartime love story, historical fiction and archeological murder mystery, Australian writer Bradley's accomplished debut novel has a dreamlike compulsion. Archeologist David Norfolk, obsessively searching for a 16th-century Portuguese ship wrecked on the coast of New South Wales, digs up the body of a man shot to death 50 years earlier. An Ondaatjean hermit, cantankerous, cancer-ridden and living in a nearby shack, holds the clue both to the victim's identity and the ship's whereabouts. As David and his ex-girlfriend Dr. Claire Sen tend to the dying recluse, Kurt Seligmann, and resume a romance of their own, they listen to their patient reminisce about the years 1937-1942, when he was an archeologist from Sidney, living in occupied Singapore and embroiled in an affair with the wife of his mentor and best friend, Fraser McDonald. (The corpse on the beach, it turns out, could be Fraser.) Seligmann, too, once searched for the wreck that Norfolk seeksAa ship that, if found, could challenge Tasman and Cook's claim to have discovered the continent and would explain the presence of the land mass on Renaissance maps. Bradley adroitly interpolates details of the fierce rivalry between the 16th-century Spanish and Portuguese empires, and fascinating lore on mapmaking. His prose, which alternates between clipped, declarative statements and lyrical, metaphor-filled cadenzas, may make too sweet a meal for some readers. The novel's concluding wordsA"the past is... a shifting sea with nothing at its center, except illusions, and loss"Aexemplifies the kind of generalization that weakens this otherwise suspenseful story. Yet Bradley's skill in interweaving the novel's strands to create a graceful meditation on death, ambition and obsession creates a memorable novel. (May) FYI: Wrack won two Australian literary awards and was shortlisted for the 1998 Commonwealth Writers Prize for best first book.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
First Sentence
The various discoveries which had been made upon the coasts of Terra Australis antecedently to the present voyage are of dates as widely distant as are the degrees of confidence to which they are respectively entitled... Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
The various discoveries which had been made upon the coasts of Terra Australis antecedently to the present voyage are of dates as widely distant as are the degrees of confidence to which they are respectively entitled... Read the first page
Explore More
Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items. |
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most helpful customer reviews
2.0 out of 5 stars
Good Author - Disappointing Novel,
By disheveledprofessor (the home of the Blue Angels) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Wrack: A Novel (Paperback)
This was the first novel by James Bradley I have read, and I was disappointed in it -- but I will read another.I picked up "Wrack" because of the idea of mapmaking. I anticipated a riveting novel and the unraveling of a puzzle, along the lines of Sobel's Longitude [yes, I realize it is not a novel]. The plot was predictable, and the ultimate denouement was an anticlimax. That said, I think Bradley is a gifted writer. Two quotes: "Although he ... believes in the coded and ordered knowledge of science, the structured discourse of academic debate, he feels the pull of other places, other times." And: "We know so little. And it's only when we come to try and understand why something might have happened that we realize how poor and cheap our tools of understanding are. Forensics, memories, the law; but in the end they're all just matches we're striking in the darkness." Bradley is able to do what few contemporary writers even attempt: he expresses, and expresses well, our unuttered fears and limitations. A writer with that talent deserves a second reading.
3.0 out of 5 stars
Wrack - It's not as simple as you think,
By Amelia (Sydney, Australia) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Wrack: A Novel (Paperback)
I read 'Wrack' for my final year at High School in Australia and upon first reading it found it to be uninteresting and dreaded spending a year studing 'Wrack'. After re-reading it and discussing it with my teacher and classmates I discoved the many layers of this very deep and suprising novel. Bradley explores so many issues in this book and examines the characters relationships on many levels that I finished my school days feeling that I had read a great novel by a very talented writer. So give 'Wrack' a chance - it's a great book!
1.0 out of 5 stars
The worst book I have ever read.,
By A Customer
This review is from: Wrack (Hardcover)
I read the reviews on the book's back cover and expected greatness. As the first review stated I indeed kept turning the pages -- but only to skip over the chapters that had little or no bearing on what the book was about. It was truly disppointing.The plot is predictable, and the lack of proper quotation punctuation makes it difficult to follow.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Want to see more reviews on this item?
|
Most recent customer reviews |
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
