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Name: Careful, He Might Hear You

Author: Sumner Locke Elliott
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ISBNs:
9781921922244
1921922249

I bought this as an airport read. I had seen the movie as a kid and it surprised me how much of the movie had stayed with me (hold me Logan, hold me).Anyway, I loved this novel. I want to sieze strangers in the street and convert them to this novel. I love the porous nature of reality, the lightning crackle of otherworldliness, and the aunts, oh, I loved the aunts. You know whenever people talk about place being a character in novels I always think, oh, what rubbish, places can't be characters. But in this case, brooding Sydney seems to surge up with intentions of its own in the poetic climax - poetic in that there is a certain cryptic ambivalence about it, and yet it entirely satisfies.This novel belongs to an Australian tradition that in my mind includes Gillian Mears, Rodney Hall, Henry Lawson - a "placey" sort of novel where the landscape is unsettled and unsettling, so identity too is a shifting sort of thing. Society is stitched together, layers of pretense, and civilisation and the city seem at odds with nature trying to reassert itself in a magical sort of way.