"[H]er contentment filled the morning, the heavy, round, golden morning, sounding its red hibiscus note. She had waited sometimes for something to happen. Now existence justified itself." (117)
"Theodora did not turn because she knew that Mr. Rapallo would not possess a face. She accepted his dark hand. No one remembered Mr. Rapallo's face. He was Nicois, perhaps, or even a Corsican. Mr. Rapallo, you felt, would disappear." (165)
"Oh, but I am right", said Lieselotte. "We have destroyed so much, but we have not destroyed enough. We must destroy everything, everything, even ourselves. Then at last when there is nothing, perhaps we shall live." (176)
"It is strange, and why are we here?", said the voice of Theodora Goodman, parting the water.
"I guess we have to be somewhere," replied Mrs. Rapallo (201)
"You are intoxicated by your own melancholy", said Sokolnikov. "You expect too much of life". (214)
"[T]here was no end to the lives of Theodora Goodman. They met and parted, met and parted, movingly" (300) ( )

The slow fall of madness ( )

The Aunt’s Story, Patrick White’s powerful, psychologically complex, stylistically challenging third novel, probes the life of a tragically unfulfilled woman in early 20th-century Australia. In part one, Meroë, we meet Theodora Goodman, born into privilege and raised in a household clinging to the stuffy remnants of Victorian England. Her father, a landowner, is a neutral presence in her childhood and for the most part emotionally absent, while her mother—domineering, eternally dissatisfied and unfeeling—does not bother to conceal her preference for Theodora’s prettier, vivacious sister Fanny. For her part Theodora, plain, dour and conditioned by her mother’s casual cruelties to think poorly of herself, is content to exist in Fanny’s shadow. Theodora’s youthful attraction to a neighbour, Frank Parrott, goes undeclared. Years later, convinced of her own lack of worth, she rejects the overtures of a wealthy suitor. With Fanny married to Frank and raising two children, when her father dies Theodora is left to care for her mother, which she does uncomplainingly for years until her mother’s death. In part two, Jardin Exotique, newly liberated Theodora, at the age of forty-five, has embarked on a world tour, which takes her to various destinations, eventually depositing her in 1930s Paris, in a hotel where she meets and interacts with a group of needy, narcissistic, neurotic individuals of various nationalities. And in part three, Holstius, her European adventures at an end after the hotel burns down, Theodora, while crossing the United States by train on her way home, contemplates with something like horror the drab, solitary future awaiting her. Suddenly and inexplicably, compelled by a strange restlessness and sense of foreboding, she disembarks somewhere in the mid-west, wanders into a small town, and attempts to make a home for herself in an abandoned house at the top of a hill. In outline, the novel sounds like a sad and pathetic life story: a lonely spinster who has endured a stifled existence and made a habit of suppressing her emotions finally loses her marbles. In fact, The Aunt’s Story is a mesmerizing and disturbing novel of great originality, wit and candour. The angular, tortured, surrealistic qualities of Patrick White’s prose are for the reader startling and frequently disorienting, but undeniably captivating. We experience everything through Theodora’s eyes in a kind of distorted interior monologue—something like a funhouse mirror. This distortion is most pronounced in the middle section, Jardin Exotique, where we see that Theodora’s self-loathing and cloistered, repressed existence have made her withholding and secretive, fearful of ridicule, and that she has become someone who lacks the emotional vocabulary to form meaningful bonds with other people. She shares little about herself with those she meets at the Hôtel du Midi, instead allowing herself to be drawn into their dramas and petty feuds and seeming to live vicariously through the stories they tell about themselves. By the time her journey takes her to America, her grip on reality has become tenuous and she is hallucinating. The novel is without doubt a work of uncompromising genius. Maybe not everything in these pages works, but in 1948 Patrick White is taking enormous risks as he strives to push prose fiction into a realm of deeper psychological richness. ( )

Story of a complex lifetime of an aunt, told with all of White's substantial skill. ( )

A very odd little book, as if Henry James and D. H. Lawrence had collaborated on a miniature Magic Mountain*, then given it an Australian bildungsroman opening section for no very obvious reason. Does that appeal to anyone? I presume not.

Despite which, I'm really looking forward to re-reading this. White does things with words that are literally (in the literal, figurative, literal sense of literal) incredible, and the second section, in which our heroine and/or one of her friends goes insane, is a masterpiece. But it's a masterpiece that I didn't realize was a masterpiece until the section had ended, and at times it felt very, very pointless. The opening section, which describes aunt Theodora's childhood, is also a bit cliched: the 'different' young girl has trouble fitting in and so on.

But re-reading will solve these problems. I suspect that if you know from the outset what's happening, you'll find A'sS enjoyable and moving.

*: does anyone else think Patrick White looked an awful lot like Thomas Mann? ( )