ie They are  NOT coming from overseas !!

The AUNT'S STORY

- by Patrick White -

ISBN: -

Publisher: Penguin, Adelaide, South Australia   AU5

Published: 1963

Binding: SOFTcover 299 pages

Condition: UNread condition! HERE in MELBOURNE!  as illustrated!

Edition: FIRST Penguin EDITION: First printing

TIGHT,  UNOPENED  SCARCE   HARDCOVER with DUSTJACKET ~  IN  MELBOURNE  ... 

WHY do ebayers buy from US?

Because you KNOW what you're getting. My close up photos are of the actual item!!

Reecognisable orange Penguin edition from 1963 - it remains UNread. Bought and it was displayed in a senior academic's private collection. It is Tight -  neat, no inscriptions or marks within. Appears as in my photos - this is the exact copy!!  A nicely preserved copy - superb!

The actual book itself has no discernible blemish. The illustrated cover is glossy, and bright. Minimal, if any, edgewear, as illustrated.   

Published in Adelaide, South Australia in  1963. 

Incredibly SCARCE title - this is an  UNread copy!!

In original familiar orange 'Penguin' covers SOFTcover binding with striking front cover illustration and AU5 on the spine. You can see (and feel) from the ssmooth spine that it is UNread! It's just as described and illustrated.  COLLECTABLE (Stored with 2018!)

Measures approx.  22  X  14cms   or 8ins  x  5ins.

SYNOPSIS ....

From Australia's first Nobel Prize-winning author.

The Aunt's Story is the third published novel by the Australian novelist and 1973 Nobel Prize-winner, Patrick White. It tells the story of Theodora Goodman, a lonely middle-aged woman who travels to France after the death of her mother, and then to America, where she experiences what is either a gradual mental .

With the death of her mother, middle-aged Theodora Goodman contemplates the desert of her life. Freed from the trammels of convention she leaves Australia for a European tour and becomes involved with the residents of a small French hotel. But creating other people's lives, even in love and pity, can lead to madness.
Her ability to reconcile joy and sorrow is an unbearable torture to her. On the journey home, Theodora finds there is little to choose between the reality of illusion and the illusion of reality. She looks for peace, even if it is beyond the borders of insanity...    

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Patrick White was born in England in 1912 and taken to Australia, where his father owned a sheep farm, when he was six months old. He was educated in England at Cheltenham college and King's College, Cambridge. He settled in London, where he wrote several unpublished novels, then served in the RAF during the war. He returned to Australia after the war.
He became the most considerable figure in modern Australian literature, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. The great poet of Australian landscape, he turned its vast empty spaces into great mythic landscapes of the soul. His position as a man of letters was controversial, provoked by his acerbic, unpredictable public statements and his belief that it is eccentric individuals who offer the only hope of salvation. He died in September 1990.

Wonderful writer - fascinating read

REVIEWS

ABC BOOKCLUB review  ...   .. The Aunt’s Story by Patrick White is the first novel we will be discussing in our Book Club. After the death of her domineering mother, middle-aged Theodora Goodman travels to France, and then to America, where she experiences what is either a gradual mental breakdown or an epiphany. Although the novel was shunned by critics and the reading public upon its initial publication in 1948, White himself expressed a personal fondness for it: 'It is the one I have most affection for,' he wrote in 1959.

KIRKUS review….  A strange and rather confusing story which unfortunately echoes a pattern recognizable to many- the growing into mental unbalance of a woman who has never savored life in her own right. Theodora Goodman, sallow, plain, honest and sensitive child, grew up in a more or less typical small American town, having nothing to show for her life but the care of a crotchety mother- and the pleasure of her niece and nephews. Her one suitor, considered by her mother a most ""eligible"" man, she ""went with"" for a time with no flicker of emotion, and turned down marriage, feeling that she was too plain- and her mother wanted it too much. Freed- at 45-by her mother's death, she sets out to see the world, stepping at last in a Paris pension where she shared the lives of a motley group by enlarging in her imagination upon casual encounters - a period which grew in unreality and incoherence. Then, when the pension burned, she went home where her uncertain sanity quietly disintegrated as her thwarted nature became more repressed and ingrown. The period of her childhood had a certain poignancy, but for this reader the novel loses flavor and interest as the bitter and approaches. - A psychological novel, dealing with mental problems- of appeal to a fairly defined audience.

It's criminal that this book is out of print!! . …. White's third novel is a tour de force - filled with indelible writing that stays with you. As White's biographer David Marr, notes, White wrote a difficult book and knew it, even though the reluctance of many readers to follow him was disappointing. (He tells the story that White used to go round libraries in Sydney, looking at how far people had made it through the book - inevitably they stalled in the second section, which is where things get strange). The story of Theodora Goodman, spinster, sensitive, difficult, and self-aware soul, as she remembers her childhood and early adulthood in Australia and then travels to France and, finally, America in search of ways to become more in tune with the world, this book is one of the most compelling portraits of madness I know. White learned a lot from Woolf in matters of phrasing and structure, but he seems less concerned with being liked or understood. Finishing the book late one night, I had that happy sensation, so seldom given to us, that this was one of the great reading experiences of my life. 

Deeper meaning …. You can't just pick up a White novel and let the story take you. The beauty of White is in the style, not the narrative itself. On the one hand he is alientating and deconstructing the narrative he presents, continually distracting the reader from what is being said by allowing the outer world context to seep into or clash hard against the scene he is presenting. For White, the world itself is his chorus, constantly chiming in to reveal a subliminal, deeper meaning to the trivial. In this way White places the meaninglessness of the mundane within the deeper, metaphysical meaning of the embracing universe. The Aunt's Story is no exception 

Amazing ….. The middle section and the end of this book are perhaps my favorite thing in all the fiction I've ever read. I can still remember the exhilaration and relief I felt when I first read that middle section... like this author Patrick White had at last pierced the veil that is the maddening, oppressive, deceptive false skin of the way things appear to a consciousness that absorbs concepts of identity, time and logic as its earliest, most formative, most imprisoning illusions. I feel that in this book Patrick White has exposed the constructed and illusory nature of all reality, and has argued that the most meaningful reality is the one that embodies and plays out the deepest needs and perceptions of the heart. The ending is entirely believable to me: as believable as a dream, which is the most and indeed only truly believable experience in life.

Age and Sanity ….. Patrick White's third novel meditates on age and sanity. The story of a spinster's descent into dementia, it's at times - well, not so much challenging, but just tedious - but the ending is well worth the journey.

More experimental in some passages than other of White's works, but ultimately quite fulfilling. Theodora Goodman is a fairly sympathetically-drawn character, and it's with mixed emotions she is farewelled.

Compelling  …. White takes you into Theodora's physical world then drops you down the rabbit hole and through the warren of her inner world; provocative and evocative. I read this many years ago and the memory of Theodora endures.

A Literary triumph  ..Theodore was not like other women. She had no time for all the niceties that many take for granted. Afterall, she was stuck at home caring for her bitter,and senile Mother. On the eve of the Mother's death, Theodore begins an odyssey to discover the meaning of life and existence itself. A haunting tale that grips the reader with all the intensity and anguish that a book can muster. A quality book suitable for the thinking reader.

An INTENSE examination of character ……..  I found this piece of undeniable literature very difficult to read. The focus was on the characters, thus making most of the action cerebral rather than physical.

Patrick White gives us his usual sad description of elderly spinster Theodore, who comes from a sheltered but difficult background. After living a life of servitude, which seems to be self inflicted, she launches herself into the wide open world so that she may find truth... I think! Truth(?) is not something a person 'finds' which Theodore eventually discovers.

I could not really understand what she did find, unless it was absolutely nothing. I think I would interpret White's novel as being about how quests for particulars tend to be fruitless and are inclined to end badly. But probably there are many other interpretations of this novel which would be equally as valid as mine.

I could not recommend this novel for the average reader because it is so dense. But those who enjoy prose as poetry and peculiar characters well described (and almost, but not really believable) might find this tale enjoyable - even if it has to be taken in small bites!