The Swan Book (2018) by Alexis Wright

 Book Review

The Swan Book (2018)

by Alexis Wright

  I was pretty impressed by Praiseworthy, by indigenous-Australian author Alexis Wright, and published this year.  I didn't love reading Praiseworthy, but I was still impressed because how often does a 672 page stream-of-consciouses'(multiple viewpoints) by an indigenous-Australian writer get picked up for American publication.  Just about never I'm thinking.  The ambition of an author writing in the 2020's who has the fucking balls to write a 670 page novel and hand it in.   It's just impressive and worthy of note.

  I've adopted a specific reading technique for technically challenging/lengthy works of literary fiction:  I don't really start paying close attention until I'm at least 10% through the Ebook/audiobook or 100 pages into a physical copy.  Maybe I don't entirely get what's going on, but with longer books that is often because there is some kind of preamble that doesn't tie to the main text and with technically challenging titles it's the lack of guideposts that create the confusion, so paying more attention isn't necessarily the answer. 

   That was an approach that really paid off in Praiseworthy and I also put it to use for The Swan Book, which is similarly challenging but not as long and is also about climate dystopia and child marriage.  I didn't get too upset about the fact that I had little idea what was going on for most of the book. There is a guy- and he is indigenous, but he is also like, the head of the Australian government, and there is like, a reservation-prison-nation for the indigenous people in Australia and there is a girl who lives in a polluted lake, and he goes there- the politician- and basically kidnaps her and forces her to marry him and then they go on a road trip into the Australian outback, and he destroys the indigenous reservation-prison-nation for some reason and then he gets murdered and his child-bride has to figure out what to do with herself. 

  At some point you get enough context so that the beginning of the book makes sense. Ive a great admiration for novels that use the complicating techniques of literary modernism in contemporary literary fiction but in the context of a blog its hard to recommend to a member of the general reading public, "Yeah, go out and read this book that hardly makes sense." Of course, it DOES make sense, but you have to read the whole book to figure it all out.