Ratings4
Average rating3.4
From the acclaimed Booker Prize-winning author comes a dazzling novel of family, love and love's disappointments Anna's aged mother is dying. Condemned by her children's pity to living, subjected to increasingly desperate medical interventions, she turns her focus to her hospital window, through which she escapes into visions of horror and delight. When Anna's finger vanishes and a few months later her knee disappears, Anna too feels the pull of the window. She begins to see that all around her, others are similarly vanishing, yet no one else notices. All Anna can do is keep her mother alive. But the window keeps opening wider, taking Anna and the reader ever deeper into an eerily beautiful story of grief and possibility, of loss and love and orange-bellied parrots. Hailed on publication in Australia as Richard Flanagan's greatest novel yet, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is a rising ember storm illuminating what remains when the inferno beckons: one part elegy, one part dream, one part hope.
Reviews with the most likes.
Extremely disappointing. Maybe there's some comfort in the thought that a Man Booker prize winner can write terribly? Polemical, not fully thought out in terms of plot. No editing evident. Fumbling attempt to write female characters that just end up being unreal cold phantasms of an out-of-touch male mind that can't reach beyond its cishet male gaze. It's amazing how transparently male writers reveal all their complexes around women in their writing of female characters. I really tried to find something I liked about it & all I could think of was that the hardback cover (underneath the weird male gazey dustcover) is a close up of a green parrot's wings. So yeah.