Overview

Murray Bail is best known for his internationally best-selling novel Eucalyptus, a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year and winner of the 1999 Miles Franklin Award. The New York Times Book Review wrote that Bail's writing exhibit(s) a surfeit of imagination, skill and style... (they contain) stories within stories, of enigmatic characters and sly questions with many possible answers. In The Voyage, Piano manufacturer and salesman Frank Delage travels to Vienna from Sydney, hoping to introduce a new design to replace the respected old pianos of Europe. He walks the great musical city, offering an impassioned defense of his piano's technical superiority to any who will hear it. When his ambitions are ignored by the city's staid musical elite, Delage's finds his situation suddenly transformed by a chance meeting with Amalia von Schalla, an elegant grande dame of Viennese society. Now sailing home to Australia aboard the container ship Romance with his new bride, Amalia's daughter Elisabeth von Schalla, Delage and his story begin to come to light in a hypnotic sequence of memories, voices, and snatches of conversations. Bail's prose sidewinds like a slipstream as Delage's story moves between the glittering society of the von Schalla's Vienna and the rough landscape of Australia. The Voyage is delightfully Joycean--conveying a sensuous physicality and the immediacy emotion, as well as revealing a great basin of interior life. The Voyage was a finalist for the NSW Premier's Literary Awards Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, WA Premier's Book Awards, and the Queensland Literary Awards.

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9781623658953

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Reviews

The Voyage is also about love--or rather how dislocation, memory, work, loneliness, and love whirl around in our daily experience. The surface of the novel might seem as smooth as the deck of the Romance, but that it because of its brilliant execution. Underneath, the complexities of Downunder roll. Metro (NZ)

His exquisite prose draws us through temporal and geographic movements, leading the eye on and on, trancelike, with no white space to distract or form a natural pause. . . . Bail's novel has the polish and ring of literature that will have lasting appeal. An immensely satisfying book, one that rewards slow and careful reading, it confirms his status as a writer of the highest caliber. --James McNamara, The New York Times Book Review Curiously exciting: one reads in a permanent faint fever, on tenterhooks, never knowing quite where a sentence or a paragraph may veer off to. --John Banville, The Monthly A radical account of displacement, both mental and physical. Murray Bail goes from strength to strength. --Anita Brookner, author of Hotel du Lac With humor and intelligence, Murray Bail explores [the] Euro-centric view in The Voyage . . . sexy, and hugely enjoyable. --Nicholas Shakespeare, author of The Dancer Upstairs In a quixotic narrative that zigs and zags and turns back upon itself, an esoteric exploration of passion and love, memory and ambition is revealed in pointillist fashion. -- Kirkus Reviews Bail produces a novel only every decade, which perhaps explains why he is not as well known as he should be. This novel about an Australian piano-maker in Vienna is sexy and hugely enjoyable. -- Sunday Telegraph The Voyage is a beautiful book, sumptuously executed for all the apparent slenderness of its narrative line . . . We won't see a finer piece of fiction in the longest while. --Peter Craven, The Age This intelligent and shockingly funny novel shifts and shimmers as restlessly as the various seas being crossed . . . Though concise in scale, it is vastly thought-provoking, with some inspired nods to the great Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard's final novel, Woodcutters . . . If ever a novel could be said to exceed the sum of its many sensations, this masterful concoction engages, excites and perturbs with singular virtuosity. --Eileen Battersby, Irish Times Surprising and new . . . [Bail] meticulously fashions a past tense that's made up of various scenes of the story put together, a sort of simultaneous past, vividly present on the page and whirring and turning with the mechanism of its own ingenious making. --Kirsty Gunn, author of Rain and The Boy and the Sea The Voyage is oblique, idiosyncratic and original. To read it is to breathe the rarefied air of an artistic consciousness, nostalgic for literary modernism. --Stella Clarke, The Australian The Voyage is also about love--or rather how dislocation, memory, work, loneliness, and love whirl around in our daily experience. The surface of the novel might seem as smooth as the deck of the Romance, but that it because of its brilliant execution. Underneath, the complexities of Downunder roll. -- Metro (NZ) Bail's long paragraphs slither between Delage's adventures in Vienna and the weeks spent aboard the Romance, the cargo ship making its slow way to the antipodes . . . This novel is not the sum of its preoccupations but an essentially abstract work of art: an invention in the sense that Bach and his contemporaries used the term for some of their compositions. --Andrew Riemer, Sydney Morning Herald The novel reads like a series of pratfalls and recoveries . . . the comedy, and the pathos, is squirrelled away in gestures and situations, and in emblematic moments. --Ivor Indyk, The Sydney Review of Books From the Hardcover edition.

Author Information

Born in Adelaide in 1941, Murray Bail now lives in Sydney. His fiction, which includes Eucalyptus, Holden's Performance, Homesickness, and The Drover's Wife and Other Stories, has been translated into more than twenty-five languages, winning a number of major awards.

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