Comments on: Cloudstreet by Tim Winton

By: In the Deep Midwinter by Robert Clark « Word Lily

In the Deep Midwinter by Robert Clark « Word Lily — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 09:07:33 +0000

[...] mid-January, and I’m still not entirely sure what I think of it. It’s reminding me of Cloudstreet in that respect. It also took me a long time to read — I started it right after [...]

By: wordlily

wordlily — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 12:52:04 +0000

Hi, Vicky! I’m glad to hear your perspective!

Have you tried reading other Winton? Dirt Music won awards, right?

By: V

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 10:28:11 +0000

Hey there, I’m Vicky! Thanks for reading and reviewing this, I’ve always been interested to see what other people think of Cloudstreet.

Like you, the setting of the novel drew me in; Perth is my hometown and I loved Winton’s portrayal of a place that I’m intimately familiar with. Therefore, the lingo made sense to me, the characters and what they went through were familiar people, and so on. ^^

When I first read this book, I hated it. The lack of speech marks irritated me, the crassness icked me, and most of all, I had to study it for my final year of high school. It was only after I left school and thought to re-read it that I appreciated the book a lot more- mostly for the location and a renewed appreciation of the sprawling story. I even took a better liking to the crassness, because, well… Australian culture and speech can be pretty crass. I guess I appreciated that things weren’t included to titilate or shock, but just there because that was part of life.

That said, I can’t stand reading anything else by Winton. =P

By: wordlily

wordlily — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 13:41:25 +0000

Good to know. Yeah, I’m certainly not ready to jump into all of Winton’s work right now, either.

By: Framed

Framed — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 04:36:50 +0000

Interesting review. I agree with so much of what you felt about this book. Just when I finally started to like the book (and it took quite a while to get to that point) it started to degenerate. And it hasn’t stayed with me. I probably won’t read another book by him.