The Solid Mandala by Patrick White
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Waldo was leading his brother Arthur, as how many times, out of the brown gloom of the kitchen. The cold light, the kitchen smells, had set almost solid in it. Yet, here they were, the two human creatures, depending on habit for substance, as they drifted through. If habit lent them substance, it was more than habit, Waldo conceded bitterly, which made them one."

If I am having difficulties with completing my Goodreads challenge to read 100 books in 2018 it may be Patrick White's fault. After the phenomenal The Aunt's Story comes another great book by the Australian author, The Solid Mandala (1966). No five stars this time as I am very stingy with that rating but it is another novel that shows a master of the English language at work. Another novel in which I savored so many sentences and fragments on so many pages. It took me the entire week to read the 300-page novel. Sometimes I spent almost five minutes to read one page - so delightful the prose is. What amazing writing! Maybe only Nabokov could write such an utterly magnificent passage as:

"As they lay in the vast bed time was swooping in waves of waves of yellow fluctuating light, or grass. The yellow friction finally revived their flesh. They seemed to flow together as they had, once or twice, in memory or sleep. They were promised a sticky morning, of yellow down, of old yellowed wormy quinces."

Waldo and Arthur are twin brothers who spend their entire life together. Waldo is the "clever twin," and "the one who takes the lead;" Arthur is "the backward one," simple and slow. But while Waldo is interested in words, Arthur is the twin more interested in people. They are so different yet they are one.

The pace of the novel is extremely slow: an impatient reader will be right to say that not much is going on. One does not read a book like this for the story; the depth of the psychological study, the richness of psychological detail, the amazing insights of the nature of Waldo and Arthur's "twinness" far outweigh the scarcity of plot events.

I love the structure of the novel: the longer first part that focuses on Waldo is followed by much shorter second part where Arthur is the primary focus. The two "halves" are bracketed by short chapters ostensibly written about other participants of the story; they serve as prologue and epilogue for the plot. I love the passages describing the brothers walking along the Barranugli Road, while the events from their past move by like on an old newsreel. One of the climaxes of the novel is the unforgettable, stunning scene of Arthur "dancing the mandala":

"He danced the sleep of people in a wooden house, groaning under the pressure of sleep, their secrets locked prudently up, safe, until their spoken thoughts, or farts, gave them away. He danced the moon, anaesthetized by bottled cestrum. He danced the disc of the orange sun above icebergs, which was in a sense his beginning, and should perhaps be his end."

Magnificent! There is one thing I do not like in the novel: the author seems to be explaining the meaning of the title, writing (in italics! rather a lame affectation)

"The Mandala is a symbol of totality. It is believed to be the 'dwelling of the god'. [...]"

A beautiful, desperately sad, and difficult book that reveals many truths about what it is to be human.

Four-and-a-half stars


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