The Twyborn Affair

by Patrick White

Eddie Twyborn is bisexual and beautiful, the son of a Judge and a drunken mother. His search for identity, self-affirmation and love takes us into the ambiguous landscapes, sexual, psychological and spiritual, of the human condition.
The cover uploaded is from the first edition hardback (Jonathan Cape 1979)

Genres: Fiction, Australia, LGBT, Classics, 20th Century, Queer, Novels

432 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1979

About the author

There is more than one author by this name on Goodreads. For the Canadian Poet Laureate see "Patrick^^^^^White".

Patrick Victor Martindale White was an Australian author widely regarded as one of the major English-language novelists of the 20th century, and winner of the 1973 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Born in England while his Australian parents were visiting family, White grew up in Sydney before studying at Cambridge. Publishing his first two novels to critical acclaim in the UK, White then enlisted to serve in World War II, where he met his lifelong partner, the Greek Manoly Lascaris. The pair returned to Australia after the war.

Home again, White published a total of twelve novels, two short story collections, eight plays, as well as a miscellany of non-fiction. His fiction freely employs shifting narrative vantages and the stream of consciousness technique. In 1973, he was awarded the Nobel Prize "for an epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature."

From 1947 to 1964, White and Lascaris lived a retired life on the outer fringes of Sydney. However after their subsequent move to the inner suburb of Centennial Park, White experienced an increased passion for activism. He became known as an outspoken champion for the disadvantaged, for Indigenous rights, and for the teaching and promotion of art, in a culture he deemed often backward and conservative. In their personal life, White and Lascaris' home became a regular haunt for noted figures from all levels of society.

Although he achieved a great deal of critical applause, and was hailed as a national hero after his Nobel win, White retained a challenged relationship with the Australian public and ordinary readers. In his final decades the books sold well in paperback, but he retained a reputation as difficult, dense, and sometimes inscrutable.

Following White's death in 1990, his reputation was briefly buoyed by David Marr's well-received biography, although he disappeared off most university and school syllabuses, with his novels mostly out of print, by the end of the century. Interest in White's books was revived around 2012, the year of his centenary, with all now available again.

Sources: Wikipedia, David Marr's biography, The Patrick White Catalogue

Reviews

[mark monday · Rating 5 out of 5]

i picked this up in a hostel donation shelf in amsterdam; it was missing both the back and front covers and the author was unknown to me. i knew nothing about it except that it was something to pass the time reading while high, as my traveling partner slowly regained her health. i think it was the best circumstances in which to read the book; its mysteries and dreamlike meanderings completely free from descriptive and contextual blurb, all explication left entirely to my own impressions. something about the sometimes languorous, sometimes precise writing style and the lingering sense of mysterious motivations barely expressed by the characters was so reminscent of the polite dutch people around me, in their city full of strangeness and charm. reading the movement of the protagonist through periods as an australian jackaroo, a brothel's madame, a soldier in world war 2 france, a transvestite... it felt at first like trying to figure out the narrative of a dream, until slowly, with no great defining moment, everything made perfect and tragic sense. it was a move from a description of a dream into the dream itself. by the end of the novel i felt as if i had looked through the author's eyes and thought the author's thoughts.

in the end, what is the meaning? well, as with all great books, there are many avenues to finding meaning and many sorts of meanings on display, many "points" that can be found and many that are being made, consciously and perhaps otherwise. identity and its potential fluidity. self-affirmation. class and social conventions. masculine & feminine archetypes. an ode to landscapes, both country and city. bourgeoisie vs. bohemia. the peace that some find in war, the war that exists during peace. lots of things. if i had to chose one of the above, i'd say the first: Identity. what is it, anyway?

now a warning: this is dense, dizzying, poetic prose. challenging. think Peake, Pynchon, Paul Scott, etc... he's quite different from those authors but they all share an occasional sort of impenetrability in the writing. well, at least superficially impenetrable - the opposite of a quick and shallow read. wonderful stuff, gorgeous and memorable prose, but not for everyone i suppose.

according to australians i met during the trip, apparently Patrick White's novels are required reading back home, but the kind that few australians ever actually get around to reading. a strange fate for the only australian nobel prize winner for literature! to be known yet unknown - so much like the protagonist of his fascinating novel.

[Justin Evans · Rating 5 out of 5]

White is dense. Here you a book about a woman, who turns out to 'be' a man, who prefers to live as a woman, who decides to live as a man, who (plot spoiler) dies. By the time you've read the back cover, then, you'll know we're already in Tiresias and Orlando territory. The book is a triptych. In the two wings, Ms. Twyborn is in Europe; in the central panel, he's in Australia--so, an inverted Lost Illusions, in which the provincial (i.e., Australian) is in the centre (Europe) at the beginning and end of the book, and returns to the provinces in the middle portion. The individual sections also call to mind endless books: the first third could be a Henry James novel, only with Australian expats instead of American (and, you know, explicit gender trouble). The middle third is much the other big White novel I've read (Vivisector) in its attention to the Australian landscape and the business with Australian identity. The final third takes place in a brothel, and reminds me, at least, of Baron de Charlus towards the end of Proust.

I have no idea if White intended all of these echoes, but I enjoyed them.

Also dense: White's prose. Generally, I'm bored silly by physical descriptions, but White's a so musical and intricate that I compulsively re-read them. Consider this sentence, almost devoid of content, but still breathtaking:

"Where the villa was situated there opened a view of the sea, its hyacinth deepending to purple at that hour of evening, islands of amethyst nestling in tender feathers of foam, clouds too detached in every sense to suggest something physical, only a slash of brash sunset to warn of the menace invariably concealed in landscape and time."

or

"Note yet recovered from the storm of the night before, the whole landscape had remained withdrawn in its sombre self, the sea still streaked with oily black, except when throwing itself against the promontory of rock or the strip of gritty plage, it flashed a frill of underskirt which would have shown up white if it had not been dirtied, toning with grey concrete, black asphalt, the straggle of palms, saw-toothed blades parrying the last of the wind, a line of tamarisks, their cobweb-and-dustladen branches a dead green at the best of times, now harried to a kind of life, overall the coastal spine covered with a scurf of dead grass and network of black vines."

Crikey. As a whole, this book somehow combines the syntax of late James with the physicality (and repetitions) of D. H. Lawrence--while remaining pleasurable.

And the ideas are dense too. Twyborn's gender bending could have been gimmicky, but the Tiresias echoes help to focus on the most important question here: can one embody a myth? And is human sexuality an adequate one? In the first world war, Twyborn comes across a Captain who tells him about fucking a French woman. As he went at it, he had a vision, "like the wings of a giant cocky, soft, and at time explosive." Plainly, he sees the woman as an angel, but closes his story, "Don't know why I'm tellun yer this. About giant cockies. You'll think I"m a nut case... An' don't think I'm religious!... Because I believe in nuthun... NUTHUN!" This anecdote is followed by a passage about Mme. Twyborn's brothel, which is consistently described as a convent--here, "the brisk sound of [the assistant's] brown habit, the rustle of her bunch of keys, if not her rosary, could be heard in the corridors... and as they issued out of the individual cells under her charitable control."

Throughout the novel, the characters appeal to something that can work as their personal myth, but rarely ascend/descend to organized religion. Curiously the only survivor of the second world war is M/me. Twyborn's mother, who spends all of her time in church or reading a prayerbook. She doesn't know her son has died, but she sits, enjoying the birdsong as a bulbul "cocked his head at her, shook his little velvet jester's cap, and raised his beak towards the sun."

So, in sum: great prose, great thoughts, no silly existentialism. One of the best novels I've read this year, but certainly not for everyone.

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

So much to like here - and some deeply impressive writing - but something did not quite click for me. If I had more time and was not fighting the flu I would probably try to analyse why and write more of a review. But I don’t and I am so I won’t.

[Shane · Rating 2 out of 5]

Try as I might I could not get through this book and abandoned it after a hundred pages.
There is beautiful literary writing here, but that alone does not carry a novel.

White seems to have pulled extensively from his life, including the male Greek lover, an aging one in this tale. Eudoxia, the Australian hero (or heroine) dresses as a woman to hide his homosexuality and lives an idyllic life with the aging widower Angelos Vatatzes in a French villa. His mother Eadie’s friend Mrs. Golson and her husband are also vacationing in the same area. Eadie and Mrs. Golson too had once dressed up as a man and woman to go out to a part of town where single women were frowned upon, and this event is seared across Eudoxia’s memory. The Golsons are rich and the husband only signs letters and attends board meetings to keep his enterprise Down Under afloat. In France, Mrs. Golson spots the youthful “Mrs. Vatatzes” from afar and lusts after her. Pelletier, the newspaper vendor by the beach spots Mrs. Vatatzes swiming nude and lusts after her. Even Mr. Golson has his eye on “her.” And poor aging Mr. Vatatzes, who was faithful to his first wife, now dead, fears that he will lose his youthful male lover. And Eudoxia is frustrated because Angelos cannot reciprocate his passion, because “Passion and lust are as necessary as a square meal.”

That’s as far as I got. Why? Because the book seems to go around in a circle of confused gender, sexuality and identity. And masturbation is the only release for these self-indulgent and self-absorbed characters. The scenes are set pieces where someone is recollecting, spying on or visiting someone else. This lack of movement was frustrating and as I wasn’t interested in joining the characters in masturbatory release, I put this book away for another time, when I may be a bit more patient in venturing through the remaining pages.

[Roswitha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Timely yet dated, this novel published in the late 1970s follows one character through three incarnations in the same lifetime, the first of which is so persuasive that the seond comes as a bit of a surprise. I read it cold, with no sense of what was coming, and found the first section puzzling until the second provided revelation. By the third section, you can't help but be disappointed, even saddened, by this character's continuing need for evasion, for concealment. History has caught up with the Eadie Twyborns of this world, perhaps even liberated them. Still, from the South of France to a sheep ranch in the Australian Outback -- described in gruesome detail -- to a brothel in decadent pre-WW2 London, this novel sheds a light on the mysteries of gender and identity.

[Andrew]

Misery! War! Sexuality! Anomie! Oh, modernists...

Echoes of Virginia Woolf throughout the entirety of the book. Patrick White could care less for the voyage of the individual. It's far more interesting to watch identity and society shift and elide.

I don't know that as a novel it was terribly satisfying, but there were some beautiful sequences that made it a worthwhile read. It was a bit too Anglocentric for my tastes, but I can imagine that any lover of the British modernists looking to branch out a bit might adore it.

[Kyle C · Rating 5 out of 5]

Patrick White is a notoriously difficult writer. His narrative style is thoroughly modernist, influenced by Joyce and Woolf, and his vocabulary and prose is recherché and decadent—I am reminded more of Firbank, both authors relishing obscure words for exotic textiles and architectural oddities. White's characters are often queer nonconformists, unmarried and gender ambiguous: in The Solid Mandala, two brothers live inseparably together walking hand-in-hand through their rural town; in The Aunt's Story, a mustached spinster decides to travel alone through Europe on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Often it is his imbecile protagonists who are the recipients of divine revelation: in The Solid Mandala, the slow-witted brother, Arthur, expresses the mysteries of the cosmos through dance; in The Riders in the Chariot, a sexually abused Aboriginal painter escapes to a brothel and tries to abstractly depict his vision of a heavenly chariot. White's novels are grindingly slow, narrative action trailing into dreamy reveries. There is something deliberately illegible about his style.

The Twyborn Affair is my favorite novel so far and the most outré: told in three parts, the novel follows the life of a beguiling changeling: in the first part, she is Eudoxia Vatatzes, the beautiful and charismatic wife of a Greek nobleman, vacationing in provincial France (and being chased and courted by a wealthy Australian woman); in the second part, he is Eddie, a sickly slender boy who has returned home to Australia to work on a cattle station; in the third part, she is Eadith, the bohemian manager of a London brothel who sees prostitution as a religious vocation. Pronouns, terminology and identities are confounded in this story. When he is Eddie, Eudoxia is fighting to break free; when Eadith, Eddie still sometimes emerges. In France, she is Eudoxia; in London, she can be Eadith. When back in Australia, he is the farm-hand Eddie; when Eadith learns of her father's death and decides to return to Australia with her mother, she reverts to Eddie, removing her feminine accoutrements. Europe offers liberation; Australia represents conventional, hard-yakka masculinity.

Her last name "Twyborn" is an ambiguous cipher: Eadith is "twice born" or "born in two". It feels wrong to describe this as the story of a "transgender" woman—the term is too absolute and too categorical for such a mercurial character—but "transsexual" is too outdated and "transvestite" too superficial (it is important to note that when this novel was published in 1979, all three terms were used and were being contested within the trans community). Eadith's sexuality and her gender are fluid and in different times and places, she assumes different roles with men and women. As Eddie, he struggles to get along with the other farm-men but he wonders if it is more to do with his natural affinity with the land ("it may not have been his sexual ambivalence after all which prevented him from identifying himself with other men; his true self responded ore deeply to those natural phenomena which were becoming his greatest source of solace"). But in the end, she identifies firmly as a woman. In the most poignant denouement of the novel, she tells her mother that she is not her son Eddie but her daughter Eadith, to which her mother says, "I've always wanted a daughter". Eadith's mother, Eadie, is also a queer exile from Australian high society, a rumored cross-dresser and lesbian. If it's not a story of a transgender woman, it is a celebration of gender transgressions.

This is a novel with more plot and it is full of comic farce. The ending is simply beautiful.

[George · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting, original, character based novel in three parts about the protagonist, Eadith / Eddie Twyborn. In the first part Eudoxia Vatatzes (Miss Twyborn), a young woman, is having a relationship with an older man in France. In part two, Lieutenant Eddie Twyborn arrives in Australia after World War One, visits his mother Eadie, before beginning work at a sheep station. Eddie’s father is a judge and has connections, enabling Eddie to work on the sheep station. In part three, the protagonist is a female, this time she goes by the name Eadith, the madam of a London brothel.

The protagonist’s relationship with her / his parents is estranged, though there are touching moments in the story when they speak to one another.

The novel confronts the questions of identity with honesty, and sometimes with brutal forthrightness.

As with all Patrick White’s novels, the characters are fascinating and well developed, though in this book the protagonist’s background and childhood are only briefly alluded to.

I am a Patrick White fan and this is my second reading of this novel. I expect I will read it again as I find I enjoy White’s novels even more so on a second reading.

This book was first published in 1979.

[Brent Hayward · Rating 5 out of 5]

Patrick White was a consistently incredible writer and this book, so far, of those I’ve read, is his best. (He said the same thing, in interviews.) The protagonist, Eddie Twyborn, through three incarnations, slips in and out of name, time, geography and gender. Sentences resonate with profundity. The structure is invariably surprising and original. You need to pay attention. Cumulative effects of this book (and any White novel) are a dense, moving source of emotional complexity, so insightful into, well, being human that slow explosions of epiphanies go off one after the other. Plus, in The Twyborn Affair, fringe sexuality and identity issues (PW was a rebellious, cantankerous gay man in an especially challenging era) add an outsider’s poignancy and, at times, an uncharacteristic raunch and even a disturbing dimension, elevating the book above not only others in White’s oeuvre but also Cormac McCarthy’s and Nabokov’s, two writers whose presence is felt (by me, anyhow) whenever I read one of PW’s works. Outstanding.

[Lee Kofman · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Twyborn Affair was a feat of linguistic fireworks. I loved immersing myself in the universe of White’s language and from the second part of this 3-part-novel also became really involved with the narrative. In fact, I ended up being so moved that I burst into tears in a nails salon as I was finishing the book there, to everyone’s considerable embarrassment… This bawling session is a testimony to White’s talent, because I’m a tough audience when it comes to tears, and even more so because the protagonist wasn’t actually, when you think of it properly, done that well. We never really got deeply into his/her mind, and she/he remained somewhat aloof, somewhat unreal. I also thought White’s social satire went a bit overboard, lots of two-dimensional characters. And, wow, does he dislike women… Still, the prose and the narrative twists and the dizzying variety of the novel’s settings all make this book a very worthy read.

[MG · Rating 4 out of 5]

I finished reading this a month ago, so I'm a little blurry on the details now. But one thing I'm sure about is that this book definitely improved with a re-read.

I think I've already mentioned that I read this at a younger and more prudish age. Back then, I had the impression that it was all about flatulence and masturbation and deviant, deviant sex. It impressed me a lot, I think, in a scarring kind of way.

This time around, though, I found it pretty tame. The sexuality was actually handled quite delicately (compared to what we're used to seeing now). The flatulence -- since I was expecting it -- came across as less purely offensive and more indicative of character and atmosphere. And the masturbation was there for literary reasons: it was clearly metaphorical and symbolic and everything, even if it was all slimy and explicit.

I can't summarize the plot without giving away the ending, so let me just wax ultra-vague. Mainly, this novel is about identity. Not just identity as a sexual being, but identity as a person of a particular nationality (in this case, Australian) and within a particular family and community. The characters spend most of their time just groping their way towards what it means to be them. Also: they keep bumping into each other in the dark, skittering apart, and then coming back together again. Maybe, ultimately, that's what it's like to be somebody.

So here we have three E���s: Eudoxia, the enchanting young mistress of an elderly, flatulent Greek man. Poor Doxy constantly asks herself what she���s doing with her life, whilst dodging the sticky romantic fantasies of an older woman whom she recognizes as her own mother���s special friend (though the woman doesn���t recognize her for reasons which will become clear later on).

Then there���s Eddie, son of a respectable Judge, but he goes off into the Outback to work as a farmhand and lose himself in the land, whilst dodging the temptations of his boss's wife and the suspicions of the foreman.

Lastly, there���s Eadith, the magnificent brothel madam, who has to decide what she stands for when war comes knocking on her door. Plus, she has to dodge the propositions of men more interested in her than in her whores.

Okay, fine, I changed my mind. It's not about identity, it's about dodging overly amorous admirers!

And weaving in and out of these stories is a procession of mothers and fathers and other embarrassing persons who remind the E���s who they are and who they���d rather not be.

The Twyborn Affair didn���t have a happy ending, but in the context of what the novel was trying to achieve, it had an appropriate one. A happily ever after in domestic bliss would just be a petty vandalism against all these images of identities in flux. And anyway, this way, it���s more memorable.

This impressed me for all the wrong reasons when I first read it. Now I���m pretty sure I���ll remember it for better ones.

[Andy Quan · Rating 3 out of 5]

An Australian friend recommended that I read Patrick White, and that the Twyborn Affair is the best. It's topical to read now though, as transgender people are having a cultural 'moment' and are everywhere on TV and the media. For a book from 1979 to propose a three-part story, following the protagonist's life as a woman, then man, than woman, it was long ahead of its time.

I wish I would have liked the book more though. I can see its merit, and the way that Patrick White uses voice and different landscapes completely Australian and completely original. Rich Australians travelling and living in Europe, the upper crust of society both there and in country NSW, was interesting. And equally engaging was his lack of modesty or timidity about writing about sex, and bodily functions. A home abortion in a brothel was one particularly graphic scene.

But I found the writing difficult to read, his exaggerated comical caricatures, how brash their social interactions. The language is really florid. Characters are often eating, the grease smearing all over their hands and face, and settling into their clothes; similarly, women's make up is described as caked on, running or otherwise causing problems. It has taken me a very long to get through the book, though I decided to commit to getting through (and admittedly, each part got easier to read; the first is the toughest I think).

Still, it's all just a matter of taste, that there were just a few too many factors that I didn't connect with in his writing and themes. He's a celebrated, Nobel-winning author, and a number of reviewers think this is his best book. I think I'm unlikely to give him another go though.

[Meredith · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a beautifully sculpted book. I have most of White's work still to read, but I do respond to his ability to get under the skin, as it were, of his characters. His descriptive prose is extremely visceral and like all lovers of language he uses surprising contrasts of imagery which are often centred around the body and its functions, its failings, its excretions. Even a stale afternoon tea sponge is described through a bodily metaphor, "It...looked ghastly rich, with raspberry blood trickling down snowy crevasses." There is sometimes an over-reliance on a particular image however. Two or three women on separate occasions are likened to a "raw scallop", making you recoil from an image of plump, inert white flesh and a gross orange mouth, but to use this simile more than once is to dull its effect and jolts you out of the narrative. This is a small criticism though and I absolutely relished White's poetic writing. His descriptions of place are as much about a psychological space as a material one and I like this almost phenomenological idea of every one of us being so immersed in the world that it is inside us as much as it is external to us. I look forward to immersing myself in more of his novels, I hear 'Tree of Man' is superb and then there is the infamous 'Voss' to get acquainted with too.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anyway, I’m not surprised that The Twyborn Affair was a bestseller. It’s easier to read than the High Modernism of Voss and it’s an intriguing read. The curious life and identity of Eddie Twyborn is told in three parts:

in the south of France where Joanie Golson, in retreat from British scorn for ‘colonial’ Australians, discovers and becomes fascinated by ’Eudoxia’ Vatatzes, and there are enigmatic hints of a relationship that don’t make sense;
the interlude on the Monaro where Eddie Twyborn has ambiguous relationships with the local squatter’s wife, Marcia Lushington and the manager Prowse ; and
the life of Eadith Trist, the madam of a high-class bordello in London.
To read the rest of my review (but beware, there are spoilers)
http://anzlitlovers.wordpress.com/200...

[Lizbet · Rating 3 out of 5]

The thing with Patrick White is that it's hard to pick the number of stars to give. In fact, I'm not sure that I really like this star-rating thing. So often I read a book which is beautifully and intelligently written and that you enjoy reading but that you can't say you loved because the author has a clever knack of making things distasteful. So this was a very good book, but not a loveable book.

[Anne Deane · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this book very moving, as I followed three "chapters" in the life of Eddie Twyborn. My score reflects not only White's exquisite sensitivity and humour as Eddie Twyborn explores his sexuality - and the heartbreak of what it is to live in a society that does not accept who one is - but the gems of language and sentence that I am coming to love in White's work. What an artist he was with language!

[Sammy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A soft 5-stars (the first section, for all its deliberate mystery, was at times maddeningly opaque). But I look forward to re-reading this gem in the near future.

[Jim Leckband · Rating 4 out of 5]

I came across this book by randomly choosing a book from the recommendations Goodreads gave me for the psychology genre. At first I was a little mystified - I was expecting to get a non-fiction book of psychological quirks that I find fascinating to read - à la Oliver Sacks. This emphatically was not that book! But after reading, the recommendation was spot on, the psychology of the main character, Eudoxia/Eddie/Eadith, is essentially the core of the book.

In these days of transgender awareness, a straight person might be tempted to think that all this gender fluidity is a new thing - otherwise why hadn't they seen or heard about it? Having eyes do you not see, having ears do you not hear? This book is also about the not-seeing - by others and the main character as well. What is astounding to me is that an older Australian writer in the late 1970's wrote this. I guess that to those who can see, nothing is hidden - and it seems Patrick White can see!

To digress a little bit (ah, who am I kidding, everything is a digression.) - I first read Patrick White decades ago. We had an Australian post-doc in our department and I mentioned that I was reading him. The reaction was so dramatic that I can still remember it. Basically it was a conservative, moral reaction that this was an author to avoid - like he was unclean or something. After reading this book, now I can guess where these views came from.

In any case, this kind of moral repugnance is not present in the book at all. It would have been easy to include some bigot characters to spew about unnatural this or that, but I am glad that White did not make it that kind of book. At its core is the truth that the nature of a human is expressed from within and that truth can lie uneasily with what society expects. Edward Twyborn (born twice? born with two?) in the words of today, identifies as female, but can be attracted to either gender. The three sections of the book follow her from Eudoxia in 1912 as a young wife to a barmy Byzantine Greek in the south of France, to an Australian sheep farm as Eddie in 1920 and finally as a whorehouse madam (!) right before the war in London.

The book is brave in never presenting Twyborn in tormenting anxiety about her nature, it seems she has accepted it. However that acceptance is not without cost as each of these sections portray. The main cost is that Twyborn is afraid of love because she cannot trust the other to accept her as she is. Which is the tragedy of the book as several times it is obvious to the reader that there are those who would. The Hollywood ending puts an ironic stamp on that though. After being estranged from his parents, he finally sees his mother on the street in London and it is apparent finally to Twyborn that his mother always would have accepted him. Twyborn is making his way to his mother's flat when he is killed by a German bomb. But then again, to look at it pessimistically, Twyborn is correct that society is unaccepting, it was a bomb from a society that would kill him without a single compunction.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. It challenges ones own sense of gender identity; it has a unique narrative style; it's very sensual, finding the sacred in the sordid like only Patrick White can tell it; its definitley a re-readable! Pity patrick white is seen as a has-been; i think he was ahead of his time.
for a good discussion on the gender issues in the book, you can read this on Googlebooks

http://books.google.com/books?id=oNn7...

[Ivy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I studied White in Uni, and was impressed by the two books we did. But I wasn't moved. This really moved me. It isn't all grand Australian identity like Voss or Fringe of Leaves, but it is about identity, and abdicating from the pressures of being just one person over a whole lifetime. It's not exactly transgender fiction, but, hey, it's a slippery beast of a book that isn't so much about ideas about gender and identity as a demonstration of the ideas.

And if the above sounds all academicy, then read it because its a mystery and a love story and has amazing mother/son relationship stuff.

[Gregory · Rating 4 out of 5]

What an epic read. This is now my second Patrick White novel. I am beginning to understand what all the fuss is about surrounding this author. This man can write. He constructs his characters beautifully, often with a harsh brutality. His stories travel the continents and evoque a sense of the human condition. A cathedral of love, pain, deceit and confusion. Who we are and how we know ourselves. I am ready for my next hit!

[George Ilsley · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is one of Patrick White's novel which failed to impress. Perhaps it just pales in comparison to his masterpieces, or else the failings just speaks to my own limitations at the time I was reading this. I felt he was holding back here, not writing close to the bone, as it were. Perhaps I should re-read this work, and see if my more mature self would agree with my opinion from yesteryear.

[Sean · Rating 4 out of 5]

Powerful, challenging. This must have been a controversial and divisive text in its heyday. Progressive and brilliant (as always with White). My admiration grows with every book. In an age of Caitlin Jenner one can see how far society has moved in the last 35 years. This takes you back with a sympathetic look at someone living without the resources of the modern age.

[Bettie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bettie's Books

[Carey · Rating 2 out of 5]

Didn't really go for this one...

[Katie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Re-reading this thirty years after the first time, it remains my favourite book of all time.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

The adventures and different lives of a compelling individual who sparks desire in others regardless of what gender is inhabited.

The child of a storied Australian family finds it impossible to adhere to norms or expectations. Fleeing one marriage, Eddie/Eudoxia/Eadith enters a sensual marriage in a small French town with an older man and becomes the object of lust of a woman from the homeland.

As years go by and the world enters different wars, this person explores different facets of their makeup, class, interest, inclination. In each iteration, Eddie/Eudoxia/Eadith is an object of desire by both sexes. The novel is divided into three sections, three experiments at living. With every transformation, parts of the person/personality must be suppressed. With the accretion of experience and the secrecy required to maintain the current persona, Eddie/Eudoxia/Eadith presents to the reader as a chimera. The masking, whether physical or emotional, means that Eddie/Eudoxia/Eadith can never completely engage with the world or individuals in it. Ultimately a sad, yearning, lonely character.

And then the world explodes.

[Zoe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautiful but I don’t think I read this slowly enough to really enjoy it. I can’t decide if I love Patrick White or he bores me shitless but I keep coming back.

[Jamie Hayward · Rating 4 out of 5]

I changed my mind this was really good on a reread + I have a lot of thoughts about it

[Geoff Wooldridge · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of White's later and less well known novels, published in 1978 when he was 67.

It is unusual in its concept, although relatively straightforward in structure.

It at first seems to be about three separate but linked characters, each dealt with in a separate section of the novel.

There is Eudoxia, an enigmatic and sensuous woman living in France at about the beginning of World War 1. She is married to a Greek man, a philosopher and history fanatic, who is much older than she is. Eudoxia meets Joanie Golson, the wife of a wealthy Australian emporium owner, known as Curly. Joanie, who it is revealed has had lesbian lovers and prefers women, is immediately infatuated with Eudoxia.

The first part ends with the death of Eudoxia's husband, Angelo.

The second part, set after the war and up to around 1929, introduces Eddie Twyborn, back in Australia, with his role in the war something of a mystery. Eddie's mother is Eadie, one of the lesbian lovers of Joanie Golson. Eddie's father Edward is a Judge, and he arranges for Eddie to leave the city (Sydney) to take employment as a jackaroo on the property of the Judge's friends, the Lushingtons, in the fertile rural district of Monaro.

Eddie settles in quickly to his new life, becoming friendly with the property manager, Don Prowse and the cook, a salt-of-the-earth type, Mrs Tyrell.

Eddie also soon embarks of an affair with the property owner's wife, Marcia Lushington, which she initiates. Eddie eventually leaves the property after relationships become somewhat tangled.

Part three set in London, just prior and into the early years of the second world war, involves Eadith Trist, who almost by chance becomes the madam of a well-patronised and profitable brothel. The war years certainly help the business along.

Eadith is pursued romantically by a patron, Rod Gravenor, but she refuses to sleep with him, despite his many entreaties and their strong friendship.

What gradually becomes apparent throughout the novel is that the three characters are, in fact, the one person.

The nature of the transformation, from woman to man to woman, is never explained in any physical sense, but each of the characters has attributes and memories of the experiences of previous personae.

White has explored the nature of sexuality, both between and among the genders, and the duality of the nature of human individuals.

Without dwelling heavily on any particular aspect of the human condition, White asks the reader to consider innocence and corruption, tradition and change, and the nature of who each of us really are.

The final portion of the book, where Eudoxia/Eddie/Eadith is revealed to the mother Eadie is evocative but complex, ending in a major blaze resulting from a bombing raid over London.

While I didn't love this book quite as much as The Tree of man, I found it captivating and engrossing, especially the pleasure of basking in White's luminous prose.