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Constant Chatter Shopping Center - Cloudstreet : A Novel
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List Price: $14.00
Our Price: $11.20
Your Save: $ 2.80 ( 20% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Scribner
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9780743234412
ISBN: 0743234413
Label: Scribner
Manufacturer: Scribner
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 432
Publication Date: 2002-06-06
Publisher: Scribner
Studio: Scribner
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Editorial Reviews:
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Hailed as a classic, Tim Winton's masterful family saga is both a paean to working-class Australians and an unflinching examination of the human heart's capacity for sorrow, joy, and endless gradations in between. An award-winning work, Cloudstreet exemplifies the brilliant ability of fiction to captivate and inspire. Struggling to rebuild their lives after being touched by disaster, the Pickle family, who've inherited a big house called Cloudstreet in a suburb of Perth, take in the God-fearing Lambs as tenants. The Lambs have suffered their own catastrophes, and determined to survive, they open up a grocery on the ground floor. From 1944 to 1964, the shared experiences of the two overpopulated clans -- running the gamut from drunkenness, adultery, and death to resurrection, marriage, and birth -- bond them to each other and to the bustling, haunted house in ways no one could have anticipated.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: An absorbing and moving book
Comment: This book follows the lives of two Australian families who share a house from the 1940s to the 1960s. Both families are poor, but one believes in "luck" and the other creates their own luck. It's a wonderful, absorbing portrayal of a wide variety of characters, the ups and downs of their lives and the vicissitudes and joys of their crowded lives. The writing was very engaging, although American readers might have some trouble with some of the Australian language.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A beautiful, lovely story.
Comment: I loved this book. It's the story of two working class families in Perth, Australia, over twenty years time during the 40s/50s/60s. It's really fantastic. The story is rich with details and description, and the characters are extremely well developed and compelling. I was sad to finish it.
Customer Rating:
Summary: My favourite book - an all time great
Comment: I remeber David Malouf talking about good writing - about what distinguishes it - and he said it was the rhythm.
And Cloudstreet has an amazing rhythm, a cadence and tone that sucks you up and propels you forward from the first page to the last and leaves you aching for more.
It is a sweeping saga of post war Australia and through it I could see my grandparents and parents doing their best in this world.
I have probably bought about 12 copies over the years, lending them knowing the chances of return will be squat.
Read it and love it.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Cloudstreet.....or Waterland
Comment: I wish I could give my review the glowing sheen so ubiquitous in all the other reviews, but, for me, this book falls short of the mark in several areas. The most obvious is the bioluminescence of two of the characters, the ghostly aborigine, and spectral Gothic arabesques strewn throughout the book. They mark the work with a distinctly gimcrack feel, and leave one wondering what Winton is all about here.
Elizabeth Ward, reviewing the book for The Washington Post, compares this novel to Joyce's Dubliners. A bit of a stretch, this. All one has to do is to think of Joyce's stylistic masterpiece, "The Dead" to see how much of a stretch.
This is not a BAD novel. It's just not enthralling or particularly sweeping. Perhaps Winton intended the writing to mirror the hard-bitten lives of the working class Aussies depicted herein. That's the best I can really say for it.
But also, I couldn't help but be reminded, time and again, of Graham Swift's tour de force of a novel, Waterland. There are simply too many similarities between the two books for me to think that Winton wasn't influenced by it. ......So, my recommendation, read Waterland, one of the greatest stylistic masterpieces to come out of England since WWII.
Customer Rating:
Summary: I wish I hadn't read it . . .
Comment: just so I could discover it for the first time. It's generally pointless trying to capture the quality of this book and others have made a better effort of it than I might, but one has to be deeply heartened by the author's humanity and love of his characters, even those with considerable personality disorders. It's a thread that runs through all his fiction and I admire him greatly for it. Add to that a dynamic imagination, a respect for his native vernacular and a sense of hope, and we've seen the tip of the iceberg. Winton is a masterful writer.
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