Dream Stuff : Stories (Vintage International (Paperback))

Rating:
Summary: A "must" for all David Malouf fans.
Review: "It was another world up there, a place so hidden and old, so deeply mythologized by the games they played in the twists and turns of its branches, their invented world of tribes and wars and castles, that the moment you hauled yourself up into its big-leafed light and shade you shook loose of the actual, were freed of the ground rules and the habits of a life lived on floorboards and in room".

This could almost be a metaphor for this book, this tangled world of yellow flowering native hibiscus into which the boy, Jack, climbs to escape from reality. Another world does haunt these stories: a timeless, Australian world of peculiar light, of myth, and of the dark power of the land in which David Malouf's various characters live. It is so much part of them that they are hardly conscious of it, but it is this, as much as the ghosts, the strange events and fantasies, which is the dream stuff of the book's title.

Malouf, an Australian poet who has just been awarded the 2000 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, came late to prose writing. It took him a long time, he said in a recent BBC interview, to discover how to make voices work in prose. But the voices in these stories do work, and they work well. There are male and female voices, young and old, and time spans a period which extends from the Second World War to the present. The unifying element throughout the stories is Australia.

The first story is of Jack, an eleven-year-old boy whose father is missing-in-action in a world war which seems far distant from the lives of most Australians. Families spend the long, hot summer holidays in a home-away-from home, camping at the beach. American service men on leave come and go, filling in as escorts for the young, lonely women, and children grow from childhood to adolescence.

Jack's young mother comes to accept that her husband is dead long before Jack does, and her life, seen through Jack's eyes, moves on in ways he does not at first understand. Jack is poised between childhood and the beginning of adolescence. And Malouf is expert at suggesting Jack's childish need to keep his world safe and familiar, and the shock of sudden knowledge when he is confronted with things he already knows but has not been ready to accept.

For Jack, maturity begins during a fierce thunder storm when he runs for comfort to his mother's bedroom but finds himself, instead, confronting the reality of her relationship with an American friend, Mitch, and a ghostly vision of his father.

Nine-year-old Amy, in the next story, 'Closer', is very different to Jack. "We're Pentecostals", she tells us at the start of her narrative. And her language is full of biblical echoes and meanings, some of which she understands and some which the reader understands but she does not. This allows Malouf to tell a story which Amy does not fully comprehend although she is acutely aware of the emotional tensions which surround it.

Amy's Uncle Charles lives in Sodom (which she tells us is Sydney) and has committed abominations for which he has been banned from the family farm. In spite of the ban, each Easter and Christmas he turns up at the farm and gazes at the gathered family from the far side of the boundary fence before driving off again. Amy's picture of him, blond, tanned, driving a silver BMW with the number plate GAY 437 is one of the few false notes in the story, suggesting that Malouf is merely creating a rather obvious moral parable. But the subtle revelation, through Amy's naive voice, of the complex and distressing emotional tensions in the family is far from moralising and is very moving.

The hopeful dream ending of the story, too, suggests, as elsewhere in the book, that Malouf shares some of the faith that the Pentecostals have in a guiding spirit. This is never spelled out and is always open to other, realistic meanings - an offered hand, an image of "a new day coming" - but it is there, balancing the darkness and violence which surfaces in so many of the stories.

A second, more recent, war story concerns Sally, who works as a "widow" - a temporary wife for servicemen on rest and recreation leave in Sydney from the Vietnam War. Malouf explores the feelings this young woman has as she provides a substitute home for various young men, some of whom she becomes emotionally close to, some of whom plan for a future return, and others who are distant, distracted, boorish and unpleasant. After acting the part of a wife for so long and for so many needy men, a return to normal life when the war is over is difficult and uncertain for her. The story has no clichéd happy ending but realistically suggests a tentative hope of happiness when Sally meets a man who seems self-confident and self-sufficient.

'Dream stuff', the story which gives the book its title, is altogether more complex. A writer (who could well be Malouf, except that Malouf has said that there is no such thing as autobiographical fiction) returns to his home-town of Brisbane to give a book-reading. Childhood memories, violent and inexplicable events and a disturbing dream occur, and are presented in a fragmented sequence of passages which I found disconnected and puzzling on first reading. But the BBC interview with Malouf was enlightening. Speaking of what might have been, he said: "If you leave a place in your early twenties, you're always haunted by that other person you might have been. There are always corners where you stand at seventeen waiting for someone who didn't turn up". Memories, fiction, unfinished business and other-peoples' lives, this is the dream stuff of the story, just as surely as the marijuana grown and secretly harvested in the huge fabled plantations of local myth.

In all the stories in this book, the inexplicable violence, the seedy nightlife of Brisbane, the suggestion of some dark, ghostly inheritance which is barely held in check by a thin veneer of civilisation, all seep in from the land. It is an "underground", an ancient, dark, fecund, tropical greenery, "swarming with insects and rotting with a death that [will] soon once again be life. It is, like the last, threatened pocket of bush in 'Jacko's Reach', a place of legend and myth, of childhood exploration and adolescent experiment. And, as in 'Lone Pine', it is the vast, empty, unforgiving, barely explored expanse of Australia which is fleetingly traversed by tourists, retirees and adventurers.

For anyone unfamiliar with the Australian bush, all this may seem fanciful. Those who know it, will recognise it in these stories, just as they will recognise Malouf' s evocations of Australian life. His people live and speak, dream and die, in a land which they know, or learn, that they must accept and co-exist with (just as the Aborigines once did), rather than fight to control.

Dream Stuff, certainly, is the work of a fine story-teller, and Malouf's characters and their stories are as interesting and as strongly presented in this book as the land they inhabit.

Ann Skea Reviewer

Rating:
Summary: the poetry of prose
Review: David Malouf has written books that I return to and return to again for the language that is wonderful and the sense of place - Australia from its settlers' beginnings to modern time - that tells more about the uniqueness of that continent than a thousand pictures. One of the stories in this collection, Jacko's Reach is one of the most beautifully written evocations of the enduring quality of memory and wild places, full of mystery, that I have ever read. These are wonderful stories.

Rating:
Summary: Poetry becomes prose
Review: David Malouf is a brilliant writer, as those readers who have digested "Remebering Babylon", "Conversations at Curlew Creek", etc. can attest. Too often Malouf is classified as an Australian writer, a limiting category for a man who spends half his year in Australia ad the other half in Tuscany! But as far as the content of his works is concerned he references the immense, isolated Australia, a country very much in this century and yet still a part of the Last Frontier image. In his works he describes characters who somehow reflect that isolation, that pioneer spirit, that insular view of the world. In DREAM STUFF we are treated to hugely successful small stories that deal with man's tiny speck of space in a universe full of fear and trials. Malouf is able to completely inhabit the female narrator as in "Closer", a tale of Pentecostal dealing (or rather not dealing) with things sensual. "Sally's Story" is the agar plate for a larger novel - a woman who understands that the only way she will experience life outside her cramped environment is to serve as a "hostess" to GIs on leave from Vietnam. In "Lone Pine" a couple escapes the secure tenderings of the workaday life in the city only to face nature in all its evil forces: their Idyll becomes the stage for murder by seemingly "decent folk". And on it goes. Malouf's language is lush while straight forward, his plots are deceptively simple until he leaves us wondering how to finish the dialogue he has started. Another brilliant book from one of the best writers of our time. Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: A unique depth of perception
Review: David Malouf's winning of the first IMPAC Dublin award for Remembering Babylon conferred belated recognition of one of the finest figures in English writing. His string of works, both poetry and fiction, provide the reader with endless opportunities to view life from many sides. He has, as this book shows, a particular talent for presenting the world through children's eyes.

Dream Stuff is a collection of short stories mainly centred on how children perceive themselves. There are reviewers who claim Malouf paints a "dark" world. This is a false assessment. A child's outlook has to contend with a variety of needs, often conflicting ones. They have the desire to explore, to escape parental restraint, yet bear an underlying need for security and stability. Malouf is able to convey these contrary aims in subdued, but effective portrayals.

The stories in this collection point up those conflicts in carefully measured prose. Throughout these accounts of childhood, memories form a framework. A young man coming to grips with the fact that his missing father is unlikely to return. A religious clan in a midst of a family crisis. A cycle of life from earliest recollections that return to create a reprise of visions spurred by a bizarre assault and its resolution.

As others have indicated, it's the final tale in this set that stands out as a jewel among the collection. In this "Great Day" of Audrey Tyler's seventy-second birthday, Malouf demonstrates his matchless skill at presenting his characters. Moving lightly among them with accomplished dexterity, he conveys their persona with a admirable economy of words. Within but a few pages we are given the family history, the depth of feelings and various levels of personal interaction any writer must envy. The old man is the pivot of their existence, a circumstance they all ultimately realize, each in their own fashion.

It's amazing to read reviews of this work continually pointing out his Australian roots. None of these stories is fixed in place. Nothing in these stories condemns them to a particular national framework. It isn't necessary to know Australian conditions to absorb what these tales convey. They are timeless and represent environments any reader here might experience. His view of life is far too wide-ranging to try to limit him in a national framework. Malouf has an unmatched ability to transcend age, gender, space and time frames in presenting these narratives. His talent should be recognized for that skill. That ability is quite sufficient for any reader to enjoy this book.

Rating:
Summary: Great Talent With Short Stories
Review: I have read and commented upon seven of the nine novels that David Malouf has written. His novels are not lengthy but they all share the great talent this writer has. "Dream Stuff", is a collection of nine short stories that appear together for the first time. Just as he has done many times over with his novels, he presents a series of shorter works that are uniformly very good, and some that are excellent.

There are two stories that were of great interest as the Author chose children to narrate the tale. At the age of 9 in, "Closer", a young girl is the hostess for the story, and in, "Blacksoil Country", our young male guide is but twelve. The choice of youth for narrators was interesting as the stories they shared were those of adult situations, feelings and actions. The word precocious would not accurately measure the insight these children have.

All of the stories tend toward the darker spectrums of Human Nature. Even when the tale may just be deeply sad I believe it still shows the more negative aspects of people and Family. There is one story that stands out for its absolute brutality. It is particularly savage as it is unexpected, and random in its violence. Unfortunately it reflects what we too often read of in the news.

I highly recommend the work of this Author. I have never picked up one of his works and come away with anything less than great admiration for his skill.

Rating:
Summary: A collection of short stories by a major novelist
Review: My favorite Australian writer is David Malouf, and I recommend Remembering Babylon, which was shortlisted for the Booker, The Great World, which is his masterpiece, and Harland's Half-Acre, which is his sleeper. Dream Stuff is his second collection of short stories (not including Untold Tales, a tiny collection available from Craftsman House). I think Malouf is often best when he has room to be expansive; originally a poet, he is a master of capturing the intricacies of our emotional lives through mundane moments. In some of his short fiction, the dramatic moments can sometimes be predictable, but his small moments are all fresh, alive with insight into how human beings live inside themselves and with each other. Ironically, the most plotty story, the title story, turns out to contradict this generalization. Set in modern Brisbane, a land of concrete and disconnection, a moment of connections ends disastrously. Any admirer of Malouf's fiction will enjoy this book tremendously. If you haven't tried Malouf's work, start with The Great World, and you will soon end up reading this book as well.

Rating:
Summary: What can I say?
Review: This is perhaps one of the most phenomenal books I've read in the past year. Malouf's prose is intricate, flowing, and beautiful, and I found myself taking more time than usual after each story to ponder meanings and significances. Malouf is one of few writers to have completely mastered both style and content; his results are breathtaking. A must read.