Extinctions
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3.8 • 15 Ratings
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- $29.99
Publisher Description
He hated the word 'retirement', but not as much as he hated the word 'village', as if ageing made you a peasant or a fool. Herein lives the village idiot.
Professor Frederick Lothian, retired engineer, world expert on concrete and connoisseur of modernist design, has quarantined himself from life by moving to a retirement village. His wife, Martha, is dead and his two adult children are lost to him in their own ways. Surrounded and obstructed by the debris of his life objects he has collected over many years and tells himself he is keeping for his daughter he is determined to be miserable, but is tired of his existence and of the life he has chosen.
When a series of unfortunate incidents forces him and his neighbour, Jan, together, he begins to realise the damage done by the accumulation of a lifetime's secrets and lies, and to comprehend his own shortcomings. Finally, Frederick Lothian has the opportunity to build something meaningful for the ones he loves.
Humorous, poignant, and galvanising by turns, Extinctions is a novel about all kinds of extinction natural, racial, national, and personal and what we can do to prevent them.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
The winner of the 2017 Miles Franklin award for literary fiction is an excellent novel that explores the construction of memory and how the past clings to us forever. We spend a great deal of time in the mind of Frederick Lothian, a former engineer now living in a retirement community. Frederick’s a crotchety old man with hard opinions, myriad regrets and frustratingly closed emotions. Extinctions defies expectations—Josephine Wilson’s characters explicitly state they won’t follow narrative clichés. It’s a beautifully flowing story about human connections.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wilson's American debut artfully portrays the nuances of death and extinction through its characters' reluctant self-examinations. Sixty-nine-year-old Frederick Lothian resents living in a retirement village near Melbourne, but his wife has died, and although his daughter, Caroline, lives nearby, she often travels to gather material for an exhibit of extinct animals. Frederick and Caroline are both submerged in regrets about their family's disconnections: Frederick ruing his past preoccupation with work; Caroline wondering about how she came to be adopted and the other family she has out there. Caroline is on a quest to shed light on the atrocities of human destruction on the animal kingdom (such as the American bison), while Frederick's own history as an engineer, professor, husband, and father provides grist for a disturbing journey of self-reflection, even as he tries to resist: "Why was he digging up what was done when he'd just have to go bury it again?" Frederick's introspection is shaken by Jan, another resident of St. Sylvan Village, who is as challenging as she is helpful. Unearthing the human need to feel connection to others, this contemplative novel skillfully delves into Frederick and Caroline's psyches, resulting in a potent depiction of loneliness and contact.)
Customer Reviews
Metaphysical
I too experienced angst at finding the format to be archaic. I took it as an eponymous metaphor, the file itself embodying a form of extinction. Doing so did not help my reading of the novel, the atrocious format nevertheless proved a test of my patience, a test I overcome only to receive the dubious reward of this novel’s well undercooked ending. I don’t need resolution so much as something to chew on, and this has neither. Maybe next year?
Extinctions Not a well behaved iBook
This book behaves more like a PDF file without the normal and much better iBook format.
It is almost impossible to read and does not allow dictionary lookup for example.
Do not buy if you are after a relaxing read.