The Aunt's Story by Patrick White
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"But on a morning the colour of zinc old Mrs Goodman died."

Patrick White's novel The Eye of the Storm which I read over 40 years ago is one of the books I love the most, one that touched me in the strongest way possible and made me realize that great literature is the apex of all arts, encompassing both beauty and truth. Of course I need to re-read it, but the 600-page volume intimidates me. So instead I decided for now to read shorter works by Mr. White, the Nobel Prize winner for literature in 1973. And I am ecstatic that I chose The Aunt's Story (1948), one of the earliest books by Mr. White. I am completely in awe of the magnificent prose and so very happy to assign the rare highest rating.

The novel, divided into three parts, relates the story of one woman's dissolution of identity and her descent into madness. We meet Theodora Goodman as a fiftyish spinster, an aunt to her sister's children. The first part recounts Theodora's childhood and youth. The story is so beautifully told that I was unable to put the book away. Theodora is a disappointment to her mother, the "old Mrs. Goodman" because she was an odd, sallow, and ugly child, and has not fulfilled the mother's hopes. Theo's pretty sister, Fanny, leads a comfortable and utterly conventional life. Theo takes care of Fanny's children and also of her aging mother. As she is socially awkward and unattractive, men are not interested in her; only one man courts her but he probably needs her only as yet another item on the long list of his material possessions. The closest she gets to love is when she has an epiphany of sorts during a concert of a Greek cellist - a sublimation of her needs to be close to another person.

The dreamlike, phantasmagoric second part of the novel takes place in Hôtel du Midí somewhere in Europe where Theo goes after her mother's death. She meets a number of strange and interesting characters in the Jardin Exotique at the hotel. Or does she? The hallucinatory atmosphere of unreality is so overwhelming that the reader will be right to ask whether all these people exist only within Theo's mind. Of course she herself may not know whether they are real. The boundary between her consciousness and the so-called real world has disappeared. The third part takes place somewhere in the United States, where Theodora is in the final stage of her journey into madness. Unable to adapt to any conventional norms of society she disposes of the last components of her external identity.

While the story is powerful and deeply affecting, it is the phenomenal prose that made a tremendous impression on me. Virtually on every page the reader will find a delicious nugget of truth packaged in a wrapping of stunningly original prose. In my long years I have never read a book so rich in fresh and vivid metaphors and metonyms. The following is one of the most extraordinary paragraphs of prose that I have ever read:

"All through the middle of America there was a trumpeting of corn. Its full, yellow, tremendous notes pressed close to the swelling sky. There were whole acres of time in which the yellow corn blared as if for judgement. It had taken up and swallowed all other themes, whether belting iron, or subtler, insinuating steel, or the frail human reed. Inside the movement of corn the train complained. The train complained of the frustration of distance, that resists, that resists. Distance trumpeted with corn."

(After the five-star rating I include three other fragments of Patrick White's breathtaking prose.) The novel is exactly 70 years old yet it does not feel dated at all. It could have been written last year. It reads completely fresh despite references to Hitler's annexations of countries in the 1930s or to Lenin and Kerensky from the times of the Soviet Revolution of 1917.

A magnificent novel!

Five stars.

"In Paris the metal hats just failed to tinkle. The great soprano in Dresden sang up her soul for love into a wooden cup. In England the beige women, stalking through the rain with long feet and dogs, had the monstrous eye of sewing machines."

"But Theodora did not reject the word. It flowed, violet and black, and momentarily oyster-bellied through the evening landscape, fingering the faces of the houses. Soon the sea would merge with the houses, and the almost empty asphalt promenade, and the dissolving lavender hills behind the town. So that there was no break in the continuity of being."

"She walked out through the passages, through the sleep of other people. She was thin as grey light, as if she had just died."

View all my reviews