CARPENTARIA
Alexis Wright
Publisher - Giramondo (Addenda in NZ) $38

Surely the most feted, most reviewed and most praised book published in Australia in many a year? And the biggest novel to boot at more than 500 pages.

Here are some of the comments:

Liam Davison writing in the Sydney Morning Herald:

Alexis Wright's second novel is a vast, sprawling affair that extends magically beyond its hefty 500 pages. It takes you outside the expected scope of narrative time to a place that is simultaneously familiar and astoundingly new. So comprehensive is Wright's vision that reading it is like looking at her world from the inside. It's an unashamedly big book - big in scope, ambition and physical size - and well-suited to the Gulf country it sings. It is also an important book.

Alison Ravenscroft writing in The Age:

The novel starts slowly and winds itself up into a fast story of violence and murder, little Aboriginal boys flogged by Bruiser and who then, with no hope, hang themselves in their cells. It is a story of old conflicts over land and belonging. But it is always a story of hope, enduring and enigmatic.
This is the kind of writing in which a reader can put their entire trust in the narrator, put the weight of their doubt in the narrator's hands. It is like being spoken to by someone with a voice you can trust, someone standing close by. It is as if you could hear their intake of breath, the compassion in their voice, their amusement at the foolishness of mortals. In Wright we have a writer who is working with the question of the oral and the written word and has come up with a grammar, punctuation and sentence construction that is of someone telling a story. Of all this novel's wonderful inventions, the narrator may be the most remarkable.
Carpentaria is a big book, more than 500 pages, big enough to enter a world, to feel as if you once lived in a town called Desperance.

And what the Miles Franklin Award judges said on announcing Carpentaria the 2007 winner:

Alexis Wright’s powerful novel about the Gulf country works on many levels and registers. At its centre is Norm Phantom, an old man of the sea and custodian of indigenous lore, his wife Angel Day, and their son Will, who is involved in a deadly fight for land rights against the shadowy proprietors of the huge Gurfurrit mine. At one level, the novel is a gripping account of that campaign and the mining company’s violent and illegal attempts to protect its interests in the Gulf. At another level, it is a stunning evocation – some will want to call it magic realism or postcolonial allegory – of a sublime and often overwhelming tropical world that is still inhabited by traditional spirits like the rainbow serpent, the groper, the sky people and the ghosts of the dead. These ancient spiritual forces work through the elements of sky and sea and land to throw off the presence of the strangers and restore this remarkable place to something like its ancient rhythms. The novel’s climax is quite literally apocalyptic, drawing together its different stylistic registers of myth, allegory and social satire; its conclusion is cathartic and even inspiring.

And Dr.Cathie Dunsford writing in the Asia Pacific Writers’ Journal:

Not since the bone people took the world by storm and won its Maori author Keri Hulme the coveted Booker Prize, deservedly, has a book of this magnitude appeared from indigenous Australian/Aotearoan authors that could captivate its readers with the power of Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria.

What more can one say? These are but a few of the enthusiastic reviews for this astonishing book. Read it and see for yourself what all the fuss is about.