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Loading... The Natural Way of Things (2015)by Charlotte Wood
  
Books Read in 2016 (492) Books Read in 2017 (232) » 19 more Top Five Books of 2015 (171) Best Dystopias (191) Books Read in 2018 (2,883) Best Feminist Literature (177) Female Author (816) Female Protagonist (908) Best Survival Stories (109) Read in 2016 (41) ScaredyKIT 2018 (16) No current Talk conversations about this book.   Vrouwenbibliotheek | Dec 30, 2024 |   ) simonpockley | Feb 25, 2024 | The novel starts with Verla and Yolande awakening from a drugged slumber to find that they have been captured. They and a group of other young women are taken off to detention in the outback somewhere. They are trapped inside an electric fence, shaven-headed, forced to wear filthy clothing and eat disgusting food, quartered in kennels like beasts and subject to the depredations of the violent Boncer and the nihilistic Teddy. The reasons for their capture and detention are never quite clear, but a common thread seems to have been that each was sexually profligate in some fashion. Perhaps this is some fierce backlash by a moralistic patriarchy determined to put them in their place. The women madly scramble to survive any way they can, and each gradually starts to occupy a place in their microcosm of society: cook, hunter, gatherer, fire-tenderer, concubine. As they combine forces, they find that they can push back against their captors, but can they ever actually escape? There are enough references to popular culture in this book to make it clear that Wood's dystopia is set in our near future, which leads the reader to contemplate the forces at work in our society that could realistically lead to this outcome: brutal detention, violence against women, a dominant religious patriarchy, government secrecy, imprisonment without trial, the deprivation of civil liberties - all of these elements exist in today's Australia, which just makes Wood's novel all the more real. (  ) gjky | Apr 9, 2023 |  ) Carmentalie | Jun 4, 2022 | In short, I didn't get into it and only listened to 1/8 parts. (  ) Okies | Apr 29, 2022 |
 Novelists have always put their heroines through awful ordeals. But over time, these tribulations change. Where the 19th Century was filled with fictional women trapped in punishing marriages — think of Middlemarch or The Portrait of a Lady — today's heroines face trials that are bigger, more political, and more physically demanding. They fight in hunger games. This fight takes a different form in The Natural Way of Things, a ferocious new novel by the Australian Charlotte Wood whose writing recalls the early Elena Ferrante — it's tough, direct, and makes no attempt to be ingratiating. Set in a dystopian backwater, her short, gripping book begins as an allegory of thuggish misogyny then evolves into a far stranger and more challenging feminist parable. The sly and devastating ending makes the point: Ladies, you have been warned. An engrossing novel set in the barren Australian Outback in which women are held captive, victims of a violently misogynist system. ;;; Surreal yet intensely vivid, the novel is disturbing and enthralling. It makes its point—that “it was men who started wars, who did the world’s killing and raping and maimingâ€â€”plainly, just short of perfervidly. Haunting, imaginative language brings the characters’ madness and suffering to life. An absorbing plot, lyrical prose, and discomfiting imagery make Wood's novel decidedly gripping. Wood, whose previous novel was the Miles Franklin shortlisted Animal People, carefully cultivates indelible images of the women, the compound and increasingly grotesque scenes — such as the creation of a Franken-doll from hair and rabbit furs, for instance. The Natural Way of Things is a novel to provoke thought, conversation, disgust, anger and concern, a work that will haunt the reader with its poetry and the stark truths buried within Wood’s brilliant exploration of a toxic culture in extremis.  Despite its overt message, the novel seldom feels programmatic because of Wood's gorgeous, elliptical style. AwardsNotable Lists
Fantasy.
Fiction.
Literature.
HTML:"A Handmaid's Tale for the 21st century" (Prism Magazine), Wood's dystopian tale about a group of young women held prisoner in the Australian desert is a prescient feminist fable for our times. As the Guardian writes, "contemporary feminism may have found its masterpiece of horror." Drugged, dressed in old-fashioned rags, and fiending for a cigarette, Yolanda wakes up in a barren room. Verla, a young woman who seems vaguely familiar, sits nearby. Down a hallway echoing loudly with the voices of mysterious men, in a stark compound deep in the Australian outback, other captive women are just coming to. Starved, sedated, the girls can't be sure of anything—except the painful episodes in their pasts that link them. Drawing strength from the animal instincts they're forced to rely on, the women go from hunted to hunters, along the way becoming unforgettable and boldly original literary heroines that readers will both relate to and root for. The Natural Way of Things is a lucid and illusory fable and a brilliantly plotted novel of ideas that reminds us of mankind's own vast contradictions—the capacity for savagery, selfishness, resilience, and redemption all contained by a single, vulnerable body. Winner 2016 Stella Prize 2016 Prime Minister's Literary Award in Fiction An Australian Indie Best Fiction Book & Overall Book of the Year Winner Finalist 2017 International Dublin Literary Award 2016 Voss Literary Prize 2016 Victorian Premier's Award 2016 The Miles Franklin Award. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.92Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction 1900- 2000-LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.76)
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