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Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... McMinnville Public Library | Bishop, S. | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
The only thing harder than losing home is trying to find it again.Cambridge, 1963. Charlotte is struggling. With motherhood, with the changes marriage and parenthood bring, with losing the time and energy to paint. Her husband, Henry, cannot face the thoughtof another English winter. A brochure slipped through the mailbox gives him the answer: "Australia brings out the best in you."Charlotte is too worn out to resist, and before she knows it they are travelling to the other side of the world. But upon their arrival inPerth, the southern sun shines a harsh light on the couple and slowly reveals that their new life is not the answer either was hoping for. Charlotte barely recognizes herself in this place where she is no longer a promising young artist, but instead a lonely housewife, venturing into the murky waters of infidelity. Henry, an Anglo-Indian, is slowly ostracized at the university where he teaches poetry. Subtle at first, it soon invades his entire sense of identity.Trapped by nostalgia, Charlotte and Henry are both left wondering if there is anywhere in this world they truly belong. Which of them will make the attempt to find out? Who will succeed?
Author Notes
Stephanie Bishop is an Australian author born in 1979. She holds a PhD from Cambridge. She is a lecturer in creative writing at the University of NSW. The Singing was her first novel. She was named one of The Sydney Morning Herald's Best Young Australian Novelists. Her second novel, The Other Side of the World, won the Readings New Australian Writing Award 2015. The 2016 Australian Book Industry Awards named The Other Side of the World, Literary fiction book of the year.
She is a lecturer in creative writing at the University of NSW
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (1)
New York Review of Books Review
A PHOTOGRAPH on the pamphlet extolling the benefits of emigration features women in red swimsuits, skidding on water skis across Sydney Harbor - a jarring contrast to the bleak circumstances of a British couple named Charlotte and Henry in their mold-afflicted, too-small house in Cambridge. It's so cold outside that the cows have steam rising from their flanks, and Charlotte, suffering from a debilitating postpartum depression while caring for a 7-month-old, has just discovered that she is, again, pregnant. Set in the mid-1960s and spanning three continents, Stephanie Bishop's "The Other Side of the World" is an exquisite meditation on motherhood, marriage and the meaning of home. The novel, Bishop's second, is a rich period piece that captures an era when "every man and his dog" seemed to be moving to Australia as the country sought to swell its population by offering assisted passage to Britons who were "healthy and of good character." Staring at the brochure, Henry "finds himself filled with a strange nostalgia - for the light, the color of the sky, as if he'd already been there, to Australia." In fact, the picture makes him think of his childhood in India, before the war, before he was sent to England. Nostalgia is a recurring motif in this novel, and Henry and Charlotte are both, in their own ways, already mourning their pasts before they embark on their future. Henry, when Charlotte first meets him, is literally surrounded by books, "piled in a circle around the armchair like a corrugated fortress." A dreamy sort, he is predisposed toward nostalgia. Even when he reads poetry, he "prefers the memory of a poem to the actual reading." Charlotte's initial loss is of herself: A talented artist, she now struggles to paint. Sleep-deprived and disoriented, she has lost track of time and language and has withered physically, with "gray-brown circles under her eyes" and a "yellow tinge" to her skin. She stares at the letter announcing the scholarship to the Royal College of Art that she was awarded at age 17 "as if it were a riddle. A code for a past life now irretrievable." This couple's problems multiply under the southern sun. Charlotte, deeply homesick, meets an attractive male suitor. As an Anglo-Indian, Henry is undermined by racism in casual encounters and at the university where he is a lecturer. Wherever you go, there you are, as the saying goes; and in Perth, Charlotte reflects that they are both nostalgic, this time for "the good life, or at least the fantasy of it." EVEN IF THIS emphasis begins to feel overwrought, Bishop is a stunning writer, and her attention to detail makes each scene visceral. As Charlotte unpacks her linen, she sniffs it "to see whether it still smells of England, of damp mustiness sweetened by the smell of toast and fried onion." The descriptions of India are particularly vivid. Henry, on the train to Delhi after visiting his mother in Simla, sees "three Indian women in iridescent saris emerging from the roadside mists as if rising out of smoke." Its lush and absorbing framework notwithstanding, this is a novel with plot points driven almost exclusively by a woman's grim struggle with depression in an era - or at least in circumstances - that afford little help. "Home is a secret world that closes its door in your absence and never lets you find it again," Charlotte observes, as she writes in her diary toward the novel's denouement. Is this a sentiment the novel really intends to convey or is it the bleak assessment of an overwhelmed mind? Bishop is too skillful a writer to provide a simple answer. In Bishop's novel, 'every man and his dog' are moving from Britain to Australia. SUSAN COLL is the author of five novels, most recently "The Stager."