Dream Stuff

by David Malouf

From the image of a small boy entranced by his mother's GI Escort, yet still hoping for the return of a father 'missing in action', to the portrait of an adult writer trying to piece together a defining image of his late father, these outstanding stories conjure up with sharp intensity the memories and events that make a man.

These powerfully vivid stories range over more than a century of Australian life, from green tropical lushness to 'blacksoil country', from scrub and outback to city streets - evoking dark shadows beneath a bright sun, and lives shaped by the ghosts of history and the rhythms of unruly nature.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Australia, Literature, 20th Century

240 pages, Paperback

First published June 6, 2000

About the author

David Malouf is a celebrated Australian poet, novelist, librettist, playwright, and essayist whose work has garnered international acclaim. Known for his lyrical prose and explorations of identity, memory, and place, Malouf began his literary career in poetry before gaining recognition for his fiction. His 1990 novel The Great World won the Miles Franklin Award and several other major prizes, while Remembering Babylon (1993) earned a Booker Prize nomination and multiple international honors.
Malouf has taught at universities in Australia and the UK, delivered the prestigious Boyer Lectures, and written libretti for acclaimed operas. Born in Brisbane to a Lebanese father and a mother of Sephardi Jewish heritage, he draws on both Australian and European influences in his work. He is widely regarded as one of Australia's most important literary voices and has been recognized with numerous awards, including the Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature.

Reviews

[Paula · Rating 5 out of 5]

Malouf deserves the Nobel.

[Ibaker · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a collection of (very) short stories and is David Malouf at his best. Just in the style of The great World, this collection captures a bunch of ordinary singular aussies (with their global and local, and social and familial heritage) living and dealing with their everyday and unspectacular suburban or rural lives, in their social, physical and temporal contexts. On top of that, the characters are subtley but purposfully drawn to be the "you and me" in the stuff that goes on in the social, familial and environmental everyday life. One could say perceptive and descriptive in the way it captures the everydayness of our lives, and again in a vernacular and description of images that is applicable to New Zealand despite its Australia context.

[Old Man JP · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another exceptional book by David Malouf. This is a collection of beautifully written short stories. Some of the more notable stories are: "At Schindler's" about a young boy whose father is missing and never returned from war and how he and his mother slowly accepted the fact, "Night Training" about a young seventeen year old who joined the military and how he and another young soldier were singled out by an officer to harden them for what was to come and two stories that were rather disturbing, "Lone Pine" and "Black Soil". Both of these stories were amazingly written but a little horrifying.

[W.B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection of short stories came to life inside me. I was easily able to inhabit all these stories because of the author's adroitness at description and ability to flesh out his characters. Malouf writes gorgeously ornate sentences that, nevertheless, never feel like overkill. These long, twisty sentences, laden with clauses, the reader soon comes to appreciate, are born from an urgency to understand human nature, to inhabit a variousness of bodies. Malouf is indeed a shape-shifter. I generally believe his characters, the many people he inhabits in these stories, and wants us to inhabit alongside him. (This is starting to sound very Being John Malkovich.) And that's saying quite a lot when we're talking about a story like the closing one, "Great Day," in which more than half a dozen individuals are given the sort of character development you expect to be accorded one or two or possibly three characters in a work of short fiction.

This is Australian lit. Malouf has lived an international existence since early adulthood, but his native country is the focus here. I said above I "generally" believe his characters, because I had one quibble with two of the stories in this collection. Malouf has a ten-year-old narrate one story and a twelve-year-old narrate another. In both instances, the words which come out of the mouths of babes occasionally strain credulity to the breaking point. For example, in "Blacksoil Country," a story about the fraught engagement between Australian aboriginals and settlers, he has a twelve-year-old speak like this: "I never once heard him put it down to anything he had done himself, to the trouble he had knuckling under or settling. It was always someone else was to blame. Or some power of bad luck or malice against him, going right back, and which he saw in the many forms it took to bring him low." And I don't believe the ten-year-old narrator of "Closer," a story about the ostracizing of a family member because of his sexual orientation, would say something quite like this: "Insects, tiny grasshoppers, sprang up and went leaping, and glassy snails no bigger than your little fingernail hung on the grass stems, quietly feeding." Not quite that way. Malouf tries to heed his narrator's age and keep the sentences shorter, more clipped, but slips up occasionally and it ends up sounding more like himself observing the scene than his child-narrator.

But these are quibbles. Overall, I didn't think a single one of the stories was bad. I think I was most impressed with "Sally's Story," which is about a young Australian who worked as a "comfort woman" to soldiers during the Vietnam war. Malouf's writing on the subtleties of male sexuality and female sexuality in this piece was really astonishingly good. The story later picks up with the titular character after this strange form of "war service" is over, as she embarks on a new relationship with most of this past submerged like the nine-tenths of an iceberg. There is an unnerving undercurrent in this story which made me wonder whether her last dalliance was going to end in a romance or her murder. Malouf is good at giving you mixed signals in some of these stories and leaving questions wide open. It's fiction like life.

"Jacko's Reach" is qualitatively different from the other stories in the collection. It's a meditation on what locality means, how ground shapes character. It might be read alongside a darker version of this sort of writing, Peter Straub's classic "A Short Guide to the City": http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fic... While Malouf's story is much shorter and not dark in tone at all, it's a similar reflection on how a place can come to acquire a sort of character which shapes its denizens. Another example of literature like this is the sui generis Wisconsin Death Trip.

I saw that other reviewers on here found the long final story, a novella, I suppose, tedious. I did not. It had so many interesting characters, so many eddies of interest, and such imaginative turns, that it held my interest. En bref, imagine the saga of the Kennedy family being told with a great deal of subtlety as an Australian tale. A few of the stories were dark or had very dark elements. I found myself being reminded of Salinger a few times in reading this collection. I'm not sure if the fact that this book contains nine stories (like Salinger's collection with that title) was a coincidence or not.

[Kathy Turner · Rating 4 out of 5]

While walking in Centennial Parklands in Sydney, thinking how to approach a review of Malouf’s short story collection dream stuff, pondering the lovely references to dreams, the obvious place to start, Audley’s words in the final story Great Day came into my mind: I think best with my kneecaps (p.154). That was where I’d start.

‘Kneecap’ thinking produces a leap. The rhythm of walking subdues rationality with all its familiar linkages and opens new possibilities. Not that the new possibility comes out of nowhere. Its existence depends on the very rational thinking which has to be left behind.

Malouf has made the story his medium for a thinking which cannot be told or understood in a purely rational manner. It is dreams which provide the means of writing in just this way.

All the short stories in this collection touch on dreams and the way dreaming and waking intertwine. The first story At Schindler’s tells Jack’s nightmare where dark water rushed and foamed out of sight below, the flimsy structure shuddered and creaked (p. 19)marking his unconscious awareness that his father will not return from the war, and making possible its discovery in his waking life. The story Dream Stuff ends with a dream which remembers for Colin, a writer returning, famous, to his hometown, Brisbane, the ending of a childhood experience of being with his dog as it was dying in the shadows under his home. In the dream he knows he stayed with his dog until it died and only then took the hand which leads him back to the upper world of sunshine. This dream with its awareness of death and the promise of support will be, we know, the support the adult Colin needs to face again a world where he had come so close to another’s anguish so intense that the only escape from it was self-extinction (p. 54).

Despite the power of the relation between dreaming and waking, it is other aspects of dreaming which seem most powerfully at work in Malouf’s ability to tell philosophy in stories. Malouf draws on the awareness of the ephemerality of all things exemplified by dreams. The title of this collection after all calls up Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Prospero’s thoughts:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep

Malouf displays the ephemerality of all life through the dream structure of his story telling. Dreams tell stories, not according to a linear logic of time, the traditional story-telling structure; but with a logic of meaning connection. It is this structure that Malouf so powerfully and skilfully employs in his short stories. It is I think best exemplified by Great Day, the last, and for me, the best of the stories.

The story Great Day wonderfully weaves together one day in the life of a family clan as it gathers at their seaside home to celebrate Audley’s birthday while also assiduously ignoring the celebrations throughout Australia on that day (most probably the 200th anniversary of Australia’s ‘founding’).

Fireworks over Sydney Harbour for the Bicentennial celebrations
http://caroleriley.id.au/wordpress/wp...

Bicentennial celebrations and a response from Aboriginal people:
http://museumvictoria.com.au/collecti...

Such a setting opens for Malouf the chance to explore the contradictions between our ‘white’ settlement and Aboriginal ownership; between our primal longing to be without possessions and our desire for them; between our desires to live as a nomad and to be settled; our desires for being an individual and our longing for togetherness; the uncertainty of our lives’ paths and yet their fatedness as well. The story can support such thinking because of the dream-like structure of the story and the dream-like nature of the events.

The Great Day begins in the morning ,on the headland, in an expanding stillness in which clocks, voices and every form of consciousness had still to come into existence and the day as yet, like the sea, had no mark upon it and follows the family as it gathers at their seaside home for their celebration in the evening to the following morning as the party drifts away and into sleep with just two there to witness the movement towards dawn as the sea breeze picks up stirring the faded chintz at the windows and touching with freshness the stale air in the room.

Throughout the story shifts from person to person, from space to space, from time to time, just as a dream does. The shifting scenes merge imperceptibly with each other acquiring meanings from the shift itself, displaying, indeed, being the very ephemerality of dreams. The meanings become dense, able to carry the thinking about what it is to be human.

Malouf explores the thoughts about human existence without in any way diminishing story-telling. There is much to appeal in the stories as stories, even without considering the larger issues that Malouf so loves. The stories are engaging, often unusual, and always harking back to an earlier era. They invite us in and carry us along. We share Jack’s Christmas holiday in the tent city at Scarborough outside of Brisbane (At Schindler’s); Amy’s intrigued desire to bring her Uncle back into the family after his exclusion for moving to ‘sodom’/Sydney (Closer); Colin’s return to a childhood town after success overseas (Dream Stuff); Greg’s bizarre night training while in the University Air Squadron (Night Training); the story Jacko’s Reach, a place for inventiveness outside the tidiness of the town; the murder of Harry and his wife in Lone Pine; Jordan’s love of the land (Blacksoil); and the family celebration (Great Day).

In the end, against all the bizarreness of life with its connections and disconnections, fate and chance, and the presence of death, Malouf finds a point of acceptance. It comes from a virtue that is little recognised: attention. Audley says People never mention it [attention] among the virtues, but it might be the greatest of them all. It’s the beginning of everything. Malebranche, you know, called it the natural prayer of the soul.

The short stories in this collection draw on Malouf’s own ability to attend to life in all its forms and to celebrate it. It is the miracle that life continues each day (but will end one day) that is his cause for celebration. Again Audley carries Malouf’s thoughts with lines from an Inuit song (I’ve placed the whole song here):
I think over again
My small adventures, my fears.
The small ones that seemed so big,
For all the vital things I had to get and to reach.
And yet there is only one great thing, the only thing:
To live to see the great day that dawns,
And the light that fills the world.

I’ll end with a short vivid almost lucid dream I had the night after finishing dream stuff for it seems to me these qualities in my dream (leaps in space and time and the wonder at it all even though it can be disconcerting) is just what I see in Malouf’s stories: I am in a vast silver grey space ship (like an AI space ship in one of Bank's novels). It hyper-jumps from Brisbane (my home town) to Portland (USA). There, the captain is showing off: “See the ship can stand on its head and twist around on its tale”. I didn’t like it – so disoriented by the shifts in orientation. Then we are flying down an English narrow lane. I wonder how such a vast ship can travel along such a narrow space, but it can, that’s all there is to it. I see purple alyssum growing and move my hand out (surprised it could exist in two such different places at once) and pick some. I gather other purple flowers until I have a small bunch in my hand .

And I'll just add a tiny note: it is a delight to see literature so full of Australia.

[Roger · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's arguable that David Malouf is the greatest living Australian writer. Dream Stuff is a collection of his short stories, and show off not only his flawless technique, but what it is that moves him. Many of these stories are about family, love, and violence.

Malouf has the ability in a few paragraphs to evoke a landscape or a scenario and develop a character or a relationship. Many of the stories revolve around the ways families create a history of avoiding the big issues and focusing on the inconsequential. Malouf cleverly uses the Australian way of unspoken-ness to evoke some of the big issues he wishes to explore.

These issues include the idea of love - what does it mean? Does it last? Should ideology override the bonds of family? What effect does mindless violence have on people?

The main protagonists in the stories vary - a young child, an old man, several women - and all are evoked with skill and beauty. The stories that struck me most revolved around children trying to make sense of their fathers, piecing together their character when they were absent, or trying to understand the decisions they made, with tragic consequences.

Each story is like a highly polished gem, and no matter which way the reader looks at it, this collection sparkles with creativity and style.

Highly Recommended

Check out my other reviews at http://aviewoverthebell.blogspot.com.au/

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really admire David Malouf. He's a fellow Brisbanite, so his writing reflects the places I know from when I grew up. He's got a poetic, lyrical writing style that immerses you in the complex worlds of his characters, and you start to forget that you're actually reading. I haven't read much by him, but what I have has always left me with a sense of lurid breathlessness. So I was very much looking forward to this collection. It started well, with solid stories of times long past, acrid disappointments, the sudden violence that can destroy a life, confusions and reminiscences. But about half-way through, I became bored. I no longer cared about the characters whose lives were dissected across the pages. And the family birthday celebrations of the long, final story, "Great Day", left me cold; missing any real Australianisms, it could have been anywhere, and peopled by its inane characters, with their petty worries and blithe wanderings, it took me several days to finish, and I started to wonder why I liked this writer in the first place. Like all creative people, I suppose he can't always produce good work. I'll try another Malouf soon and see.

[William]

This book Dream Stuff has nine incredible, short stories. All nine stories are different, and each character is shaped, much by “the mysterious rhythms of nature as by the ghost of their own past” David Malouf. This book has a mysterious, poetic, and yet confusing writing style. In one of the stories, Lone Pine, there is this part where I think was poetic, “Darkness was trembling away from the metal, which was hot and down from the metal.” While I was reading that part, it felt very dark and evil, because the word, “Darkness”, is a strong word making me feel like the darkness is trembling away. The writing style is also confusing for me, for instant, in the story, Great Day, one of sentence stood out to me; “Wearing look, behind the startled eye, of practised stoicism.” This part I thought was confusing because, well I just don’t understand that part, which makes it confusing. Dream Stuff has a mysterious feeling to it. When I read the stories, I felt like I’m trying to solve a mysterious and some give goose bumps while reading it, but overall the book is a recommended short story for adults.

In the collection, Dream Stuff, which gives the book it’s title, this story is about a writer who returns to his home town in Brisbane, Australia to give a book reading. This writer comes back to read his book that he wrote, reading about his childhood memories, the violent experience he faced as a kid, the disturbing dream and inexplicable events. While he in back in Brisbane he goes back to London to puzzle up something. As this story comes with mysterious vibes, poetic sentences and yet confusing writing style, Dream Stuff relate to an unpredictability of human experience.

Dream Stuff a book with nine incredible, short stories by David Malouf. This book is recommended for readers age seventeen plus or adults. These stories contain some profanity and mature content. I think an overall rating would be a four out of five. For viewer reading this review, this book is a book that you just need to pick up and read it.

[Rozanna Lilley · Rating 4 out of 5]

A guest left this behind in our house when he returned to England. And I'm so glad he did - what a gem of a book. There is so much to admire in Malouf's writing - the restrained way he interrogates the interior lives of his characters; the sense of searing empathy for children and the betrayals of the adult world; the way he conjures landscapes; the harrowing account of the repercussions of the expulsion of a gay son from his dour religious family. Malouf is interested in pointless brutalities (Night Training, Lone Pine) and in the ways in which we kid ourselves - about romance (Sally's Story) or our family solidarity (Great Day). There's a sense of deep sadness woven through each of these exquisitely crafted short stories. I loved it.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unlike Carey's novel, Malouf's short stories gave me a smorgasbord of Australia. I was able to have a quick taste of urban Australia, rural, mid-century, contemporary, adult, child, dark, lyrical...I am very much looking forward to reading more of Malouf, and if you haven't checked him out, it's worth it.

[Zachary Lacan · Rating 2 out of 5]

(1) Always write your dreams so you remember your dream stuff.
(2) Read this book and learn how lucid fiction is.

[Nhu · Rating 2 out of 5]

The only reason I finished this book was because if I didn't, I wouldn't be able to pass my literature class.

[Anna R · Rating 1 out of 5]

Boring not even worth that one star

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Along with his seven novels and a novella, Malouf has published five short story collections. (Wikipedia lists six, but they include Child’s Play (see my review) which is not a short story collection, it’s a novella, which is sometimes published with other short fiction, giving the impression that it’s the name of a short story collection).

Antipodes (1985)
Untold Tales (1999)
Dream Stuff (2000)
Every Move You Make (2006)
The Complete Stories (2007)

This is the book description for Dream Stuff:

From the image of a small boy entranced by his mother’s GI Escort, yet still hoping for the return of a father ‘missing in action’, to the portrait of an adult writer trying to piece together a defining image of his late father, these outstanding stories conjure up with sharp intensity the memories and events that make a man.

These powerfully vivid stories range over more than a century of Australian life, from green tropical lushness to ‘blacksoil country’, from scrub and outback to city streets – evoking dark shadows beneath a bright sun, and lives shaped by the ghosts of history and the rhythms of unruly nature.

‘At Schindler’s’ — the first story in the collection — is a poignant evocation of an Australian childhood during the war. For the first couple of years that the father is ‘missing’ he is made real and present by his mother’s reminders of him:

His father was missing — that was the official definition. Or, more hopefully, he was a prisoner of war. More hopefully because wars have a foreseeable end, their prisoners come home: to be missing is to have stepped into a cloud. Jack’s mother, who was aware of this, never let a mealtime pass without in some way evoking him.

‘I suppose,’ she would say, ‘your daddy will be having a bite to eat about now.’

They both knew he wouldn’t be sitting down, as they were, to chops and boiled pudding, but it kept him, even if all he was doing was pushing a few spoonsful of sticky rice into mouth, alive and in the same moment as them.

When St Patrick’s Day came round she would say: ‘Sweet peas. They’re your father’s favourites. You should remember that, Jack. Maybe by the time they’re ready he’ll be home.’ (p.3)

Milly even knits a cable-stitch jumper for him, and Jack was astonished by the bulkiness of it. He hadn’t remembered his father being so big.

In a moment when his mother was out of the room he held its roughness to his cheek, but all he could smell was new wool.

Collapsed now between layers of tissue, it lay in a drawer of his father’s lowboy acquiring an odour of naphthalene. (p.3)

But this is Brisbane, where soon American soldiers in their hundreds arrive, and some of them make their way to the dances that Milly attends.

The reader learns in the titular story ‘Dream Stuff’ that another man had in boyhood lost his father during WW2 in Crete, but this story ends without clear resolution of the father’s fate. With hindsight, the reader of ‘At Schindler’s’ might guess what happens to the relationship that develops between Milly and a US serviceman called Milt. Postwar stories emerging from Britain and Australia have revealed over time that most of such relationships didn’t outlast the war, and some ended very badly for the woman.

Malouf’s story, however, focuses instead on the impact of the American presence on a child. Resentfully, Jack observes Milly’s fleeting friendships with the Rudis, the Dukes, the Vergils, the Kents.

[They] were around for a bit and sat tugging at their collars under the tasselled lamps while his mother, out in the kitchen, fixed her corsage and they made half-hearted attempts to interest or impress him, then one after the other they got their marching orders. Within a week or two of making themselves too easily at home, putting their boots up on the coffee-table, swigging beer from the bottle, they were gone. The war took them. They moved on. (p5)

But what happens, as was perhaps inevitable, was that mother and son were not ready to ‘move on’ themselves at the same time.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2025/09/17/d...

[Cathy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this book of short stories a mixed bag. Some I simply couldn't relate to and I kept tripping over the poetic and metaphoric language. I guess Malouf was a poet first, and I feel this book was burdened by poetry. Some of the stories were more interesting than others, such as "At Schindler's," about a boy has to slowly accept that his father, missing in war, would never come home. The best story by far of the whole collection was the final 50+ page story, "Great Day," about a gathering of the Tyler clan, a big boisterous privileged family, to celebrate the 72nd birthday of the blueblood father, Audley. The characters are introduced in a willy-nilly fashion, without much context at all, and I'm not sure I ever really put together who was who. However, the story carried me along and overall, I found it thought-provoking, about the affections and disturbances of families and how the past and memories create a tight-knit clan. Two stories were particularly disturbing, "Lone Pine" and "Blacksoil Country" - both nightmarish. I didn't care for "Jacko's Reach" at all. So many stories tell of familial cruelty, especially "Closer." And most of the characters I had a hard time relating to at all.

[Guenter · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars
I have mixed feelings about this collection of short stories. Malouf is an accomplished writer who explores the sacred and profound though the magical tapestry of words - read p.177 for an excellent sample. But at the same time I found myself having to reread stories because I forgot everything as soon as I turned the page; the tales became as elusive as errant dreams - just as the title suggests. Was this intentional?
After finishing the novel, I feel I should read it again because like will'o wisps each story escapes me. Like a character in an Italo Calvino novel, I tetter on the precipe of reading each of the stories again and again until the end of my days, my life a dream chasing an elusive goal.

[Raphaela Strohmayer · Rating 1 out of 5]

I dont even know what this book was about, I really should have DNFd it, it was not for me. It contained a few short stories and i didnt even get a single one. I guess they all played in Australia in the 50s an 60s and it was just too much for me.

[Mindy Gough · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really enjoyed these stories . . . although paging through the book just now to write this note, I realized that almost all of them were actually pretty dark.
"Great Day" should be a novel - such gripping characters in a (long) short story . . .

[Peter Metcalfe · Rating 5 out of 5]

As an observer of life , there is none better than David Malouf

[shereads · Rating 4 out of 5]

Incredible stories

[Maya · Rating 2 out of 5]

dnf - don’t know if i just wasn’t in the right mindset, i just didn’t really enjoy the writing

[Gay Harding · Rating 1 out of 5]

Too much navel gazing

[David O'Connell · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[William · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book Dream Stuff has nine incredible, short stories. All nine stories are different, and each character is shaped, much by “the mysterious rhythms of nature as by the ghost of their own past” David Malouf. This book has a mysterious, poetic, and yet confusing writing style. In one of the stories, Lone Pine, there is this part where I think was poetic, “Darkness was trembling away from the metal, which was hot and down from the metal.” While I was reading that part, it felt very dark and evil, because the word, “Darkness”, is a strong word making me feel like the darkness is trembling away. The writing style is also confusing for me, for instant, in the story, Great Day, one of sentence stood out to me; “Wearing look, behind the startled eye, of practiced stoicism.” This part I thought was confusing because, well I just don’t understand that part, which makes it confusing. Dream Stuff has a mysterious feeling to it. When I read the stories, I felt like I’m trying to solve a mysterious and some give goose bumps while reading it, but overall the book is a recommended short story for adults.

In the collection, Dream Stuff, which gives the book it’s title, this story is about a writer who returns to his home town in Brisbane, Australia to give a book reading. This writer comes back to read his book that he wrote, reading about his childhood memories, the violent experience he faced as a kid, the disturbing dream and inexplicable events. While he in back in Brisbane he goes back to London to puzzle up something. As this story comes with mysterious vibes, poetic sentences and yet confusing writing style, Dream Stuff relate to an unpredictability of human experience.

Dream Stuff a book with nine incredible, short stories by David Malouf. This book is recommended for readers age seventeen plus or adults. These stories contain some profanity and mature content. I think an overall rating would be a four out of five. For viewer reading this review, this book is a book that you just need to pick up and read it.

[Steve Petherbridge · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is my introduction to David Malouf. I was lucky to find a number of his hardbacks in pristine condition in the Dublin Oxfam Bookshop at €5 each! This book of nine short stories, Dream Stuff is about longing and nostalgia ranging over a century of Australian life. A desire to reach back in time, back to some place which may have never existed, except in our dreams and the self-created impressions of the moments we have lived, which are already gone. The 9 stories here all have a strong element of longing and loss. From At Schindlers, where a boy begins to understand that his father, missing in action during the second world war, won’t be returning, as he develops an attachment to his mother’s new boyfriend, to the nostalgia of the patriarch Audley as he watches the museum which housed his family treasures go up in flames (Great Day). All of these stories feature something now gone, a moment which has disappeared, only to be revisited and recaptured, reassessed, reworked until it takes on a new truth in the internal dream worlds of the narrators which present them.

I enjoyed the stories. Australian short stories that I have read have all created a sense of place and time that is distinctly Australian in many respects and this book is no different. The reader can see why David Malouf is acclaimed and award winning. The writing is quality. I only found one story a bit boring. 1:8 isn't a bad ratio! I look forward to his other books.

A published review:
http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/08/20...

[Thebruce1314 · Rating 3 out of 5]

This author was recommended to me by more than one teacher-friend, so I sought out whatever I could find by him. Malouf's books turned out to be surprisingly elusive, at least locally.

I have been reading a lot of short stories lately, so I was excited to start this, given the high praise it came with. It was a quick read, and I won't say that I didn't like it - there are some beautiful passages that I actually saved to reread later - but I admit that the book as a whole fell a bit flat for me. The stories are more about characterization than plot, and while that's fine, it wasn't really what I was looking for. It annoyed me that most of the stories didn't really end, but rather left the characters dangling in some dark place (these are not particularly happy stories). I suppose there is something to be said for not laying all of your cards out on the table, and allowing the reader some room to use his/her imagination, but sometimes I don't feel like filling in the blanks myself.

I would give Malouf's work another try - it intrigued me that he has opera librettos included on his resume - but I'm not sure that I'd reread this one.

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 5 out of 5]

David Malouf is one of the finest writers I have come across and these stories are breath taking in their beauty and the emotional impact they convey. I am not Australian, have never been there, never wanted to go there - in fact have always rather found the whole Australian 'thing' as expounded by so many as rather tiresome and trite. But there is none of that in Malouf - though I read him as totally Australian in voice and setting - and doing it beautifully. There are plenty of details of the stories on goodreads and amazon - I won't go into further details - all I will add is that if haven't read anything by him then start here. If you have read him then I am sure you will not need any encouragement from me to read this book.

[StephenWoolf · Rating 3 out of 5]

A short story collection that ranges from contemporary to the early times of colonisation, with characters that span from motherless/fatherless children to venerable politicians. A very supple narration that shifts from one point of view to another. The characters often come to some kind of realisation, sometimes enlightenment and a renewed bond to life, the land, or one another. A couple of the stories are more somber and depict random acts of violence (well, the story set the furthest back depicts two acts of violence, one random, one of retribution).

[cameron · Rating 2 out of 5]

1.5 stars

I may direct you towards my Tim Winton Minimum of Two review for a better understanding of this rating, just here it's on a softer scale. I wasn't filled with bitter hatred while reading this collection, only tiredness. Tiredness of all this Australian male writing, unbearable in almost every respect. Malouf's writing is a bit better than Winton's, in my opinion, but still mostly flat. There are many better collections of short stories out there with a lot more to offer than this one.

[Liz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Taking a break from this while reading some others!

I am still reading this... It is a book of short stories which are basically about searching for your true self. Some of the stories are very good, while others are actually boring. The good ones are worth it though - they make you think about your own life in depth and what you would do in particular situations.