Dream Stuff: Stories

This is perhaps one of the most phenomenal books I've read in the past year. Malouf's prose is intricate, flowing, and beautiful, and I found myself taking more time than usual after each story to ponder meanings and significances. Malouf is one of few writers to have completely mastered both style and content; his results are breathtaking. A must read.

David Malouf has written books that I return to and return to again for the language that is wonderful and the sense of place - Australia from its settlers' beginnings to modern time - that tells more about the uniqueness of that continent than a thousand pictures. One of the stories in this collection, Jacko's Reach is one of the most beautifully written evocations of the enduring quality of memory and wild places, full of mystery, that I have ever read. These are wonderful stories.

David Malouf is a brilliant writer, as those readers who have digested "Remebering Babylon", "Conversations at Curlew Creek", etc. can attest. Too often Malouf is classified as an Australian writer, a limiting category for a man who spends half his year in Australia ad the other half in Tuscany! But as far as the content of his works is concerned he references the immense, isolated Australia, a country very much in this century and yet still a part of the Last Frontier image. In his works he describes characters who somehow reflect that isolation, that pioneer spirit, that insular view of the world. In DREAM STUFF we are treated to hugely successful small stories that deal with man's tiny speck of space in a universe full of fear and trials. Malouf is able to completely inhabit the female narrator as in "Closer", a tale of Pentecostal dealing (or rather not dealing) with things sensual. "Sally's Story" is the agar plate for a larger novel - a woman who understands that the only way she will experience life outside her cramped environment is to serve as a "hostess" to GIs on leave from Vietnam. In "Lone Pine" a couple escapes the secure tenderings of the workaday life in the city only to face nature in all its evil forces: their Idyll becomes the stage for murder by seemingly "decent folk". And on it goes. Malouf's language is lush while straight forward, his plots are deceptively simple until he leaves us wondering how to finish the dialogue he has started. Another brilliant book from one of the best writers of our time. Highly recommended.

David Malouf's winning of the first IMPAC Dublin award for Remembering Babylon conferred belated recognition of one of the finest figures in English writing. His string of works, both poetry and fiction, provide the reader with endless opportunities to view life from many sides. He has, as this book shows, a particular talent for presenting the world through children's eyes.Dream Stuff is a collection of short stories mainly centred on how children perceive themselves. There are reviewers who claim Malouf paints a "dark" world. This is a false assessment. A child's outlook has to contend with a variety of needs, often conflicting ones. They have the desire to explore, to escape parental restraint, yet bear an underlying need for security and stability. Malouf is able to convey these contrary aims in subdued, but effective portrayals. The stories in this collection point up those conflicts in carefully measured prose. Throughout these accounts of childhood, memories form a framework. A young man coming to grips with the fact that his missing father is unlikely to return. A religious clan in a midst of a family crisis. A cycle of life from earliest recollections that return to create a reprise of visions spurred by a bizarre assault and its resolution. As others have indicated, it's the final tale in this set that stands out as a jewel among the collection. In this "Great Day" of Audrey Tyler's seventy-second birthday, Malouf demonstrates his matchless skill at presenting his characters. Moving lightly among them with accomplished dexterity, he conveys their persona with a admirable economy of words. Within but a few pages we are given the family history, the depth of feelings and various levels of personal interaction any writer must envy. The old man is the pivot of their existence, a circumstance they all ultimately realize, each in their own fashion.It's amazing to read reviews of this work continually pointing out his Australian roots. None of these stories is fixed in place. Nothing in these stories condemns them to a particular national framework. It isn't necessary to know Australian conditions to absorb what these tales convey. They are timeless and represent environments any reader here might experience. His view of life is far too wide-ranging to try to limit him in a national framework. Malouf has an unmatched ability to transcend age, gender, space and time frames in presenting these narratives. His talent should be recognized for that skill. That ability is quite sufficient for any reader to enjoy this book.

"It was another world up there, a place so hidden and old, so deeply mythologized by the games they played in the twists and turns of its branches, their invented world of tribes and wars and castles, that the moment you hauled yourself up into its big-leafed light and shade you shook loose of the actual, were freed of the ground rules and the habits of a life lived on floorboards and in room".This could almost be a metaphor for this book, this tangled world of yellow flowering native hibiscus into which the boy, Jack, climbs to escape from reality. Another world does haunt these stories: a timeless, Australian world of peculiar light, of myth, and of the dark power of the land in which David Malouf's various characters live. It is so much part of them that they are hardly conscious of it, but it is this, as much as the ghosts, the strange events and fantasies, which is the dream stuff of the book's title.Malouf, an Australian poet who has just been awarded the 2000 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, came late to prose writing. It took him a long time, he said in a recent BBC interview, to discover how to make voices work in prose. But the voices in these stories do work, and they work well. There are male and female voices, young and old, and time spans a period which extends from the Second World War to the present. The unifying element throughout the stories is Australia.The first story is of Jack, an eleven-year-old boy whose father is missing-in-action in a world war which seems far distant from the lives of most Australians. Families spend the long, hot summer holidays in a home-away-from home, camping at the beach. American service men on leave come and go, filling in as escorts for the young, lonely women, and children grow from childhood to adolescence. Jack's young mother comes to accept that her husband is dead long before Jack does, and her life, seen through Jack's eyes, moves on in ways he does not at first understand. Jack is poised between childhood and the beginning of adolescence. And Malouf is expert at suggesting Jack's childish need to keep his world safe and familiar, and the shock of sudden knowledge when he is confronted with things he already knows but has not been ready to accept.For Jack, maturity begins during a fierce thunder storm when he runs for comfort to his mother's bedroom but finds himself, instead, confronting the reality of her relationship with an American friend, Mitch, and a ghostly vision of his father. Nine-year-old Amy, in the next story, 'Closer', is very different to Jack. "We're Pentecostals", she tells us at the start of her narrative. And her language is full of biblical echoes and meanings, some of which she understands and some which the reader understands but she does not. This allows Malouf to tell a story which Amy does not fully comprehend although she is acutely aware of the emotional tensions which surround it.Amy's Uncle Charles lives in So