Name: Elizabeth Hisserich's review of The Swan Book by Alexis Wright
Item: The Swan Book
Author: Elizabeth Hisserich

Alexis Wright

The new novel by Alexis Wright, whose previous novel Carpentaria won the Miles Franklin Award and four other major prizes including the ABIA Literary Fiction Book of the Year Award. The Swan Book is set in the future, with Aboriginals still living under the Intervention in the north, in an environment fundamentally altered by climate change. It follows the life of a mute teenager called Oblivia, the victim of gang-rape by petrol-sniffing youths, from the displaced community where she lives in a hulk, in a swamp filled with rusting boats, and thousands of black swans driven from other parts of the country, to her marriage to Warren Finch, the first Aboriginal president of Australia, and her elevation to the position of First Lady, confined to a tower in a flooded and lawless southern city. The Swan Book has all the qualities which made Wright's previous novel, Carpentaria, a prize-winning best-seller. It offers an intimate awareness of the realities facing Aboriginal people; the wild energy and humour in her writing finds hope in the bleakest situations; and the remarkable combination of storytelling elements, drawn from myth and legend and fairy tale.

The Swan Book

lucinda ventimiglia

Originally published: Australia: Giramondo, 2013.

A Novel

Elizabeth Hisserich

Not quite sure what to make of this one, which is why I’m not giving it a star rating. At times, I found this book to be a clever commentary on racism, politics, and climate change with a tone that sometimes reminded me of Catch-22, but was also uniquely its own. At other times, I was completely confused as to what was going on and what was real, but I think I was supposed to be confused. I may have gotten more out of this if I was more familiar with Australian history and politics and it’s treatment of Aboriginal people. This book is not wasting its time teaching you that history, but it is seeping you in the despair and frustration it has brought. 

lucinda ventimiglia &
The Swan Book by Alexis Wright

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lucinda ventimiglia &The Swan Book by Alexis Wright

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lucinda ventimiglia &
The Swan Book by Alexis Wright