Wintering

by Victor Kelleher

Sydney In 1988 Offers Jack Rudd Little Cause For Celebration. Caught Between His Fixation On Bridget, An Aboriginal Activist And His Guilty, Grieving Attachment To Benny, Who Lies In A Coma In A Sydney Hospital, He Is Struggling To Make Sense Of His Experience, Both Past And Present.

188 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

Victor Kelleher is an Australian author. Victor was born in London and moved to Africa with his parents, at the age of fifteen. He spent the next twenty years travelling and studying in Africa, before moving to New Zealand. Kelleher received a teaching degree in Africa and has taught in Africa, New Zealand and Australia. While in New Zealand, he began writing part time, prompted by homesickness for Africa. He moved to Australia in 1976, with his South African wife, Allison, and taught at the University of New England, in Armidale, New South Wales, before moving to Sydney to write full time. Many of the books he has written have been based on his childhood and his travellings in Africa.

Kelleher has won many awards for his books, such as the Australian Children's Book Award.

Reviews

[John Sheahan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is no fantasy / science fiction, which is what I have mainly read of his work os far.
This is adult stuff, recently contemporary Australia, and dark.
Its structure is fractured, fragmented, itself helping to create the mindset of the main character / narrator. Just as I am starting to grapple with the notion of how to tell a story that is, in part, someone else's, so this novel turns up, doing exactly that. Kelleher's is an interesting response. At one point:

"Real? How can any of them [his characters] be real? The people who know what really happened are the ones who were there. I can't speak for them.
Quite a little speech, Jack.
Maybe, but it's true all the same. No one can say for sure what's going on in someone else's life.
She dips her finger in the remains of her coffee and draws a larghe V-shape on the plastic cloth.
What about the dead? she says quietly. They don't have a voice any more. They need us as much as we need them. If someone doesn't speak for them, they stay silent. History stops. And we're all marooned in a present that's going nowhere." [pg 92]

[Alice · Rating 3 out of 5]

Skillfully written as you would expect from Mr Kelleher, however, I found some sections of the book a little turgid - it took me several weeks to read as I kept putting it down and not enthusing about picking it up again. It did give an interesting perspective on a time in Australian history - racial, political and a revolution that fizzled out of existence. If you love his writing you will enjoy it but not for the faint hearted.