Theory & Practice
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- USD 7.99
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- USD 7.99
Descripción editorial
WINNER OF THE STELLA PRIZE FOR FICTION 2025
'The most thrilling fiction of the year ... an absolute triumph' Financial Times
'I loved Theory & Practice ... raw, funny, truthful, youthful' Tessa Hadley
'One of the finest writers alive...a lightning strike of a book' Ali Smith
It's 1986, and 'beautiful, radical ideas' are in the air. A young woman arrives in Melbourne to research the novels of Virginia Woolf. In bohemian St Kilda, she meets artists, activists, students - and Kit. He claims to be in a 'deconstructed' relationship, and they become lovers. Meanwhile, a dismaying discovery throws her work on 'the Woolfmother' into disarray.
Theory & Practice is a mesmerising account of desire and jealousy, truth and shame. It makes and unmakes fiction as we read, expanding our notion of what a novel can contain. Michelle de Kretser, one of Australia's most celebrated writers, bends fiction, essay and memoir into exhilarating new shapes to uncover what happens when life smashes through the boundaries of art.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this sharp-witted and mesmerizing outing from de Kretser (The Life to Come), a Melbourne graduate student navigates the disconnect between her feminist ideals and her messy love life. The unnamed narrator, who's writing a thesis about the portrayal of gender in Virginia Woolf's novels, recounts her childhood in Sri Lanka, where she was sexually abused by a British man at 11. She went on to embrace feminism, and she struggles now with French post-structuralist theory, which is in vogue on the Melbourne campus, because of its indifference to feminist issues and her desire to upend the patriarchy ("One could not overthrow the Father, who was always already dead, although his phallus was everywhere in society and culture"). She also ruminates on contemporary Australian films, such as Gillian Leahy's Life Without Steve, which follows a woman over one year as she attempts to move on from an affair. The film resonates with the narrator because of her own tortured love affair with a fellow student who remains committed to his girlfriend ("I thought, I didn't know that this could be art. It was the first time I'd seen my everyday, unglamorous world in a film"). The narrator also vacillates between prizing intellectual theorizing or direct action, reflecting on the anticolonial resistance of Ceylonese activist E.W. Perera. Taken together, the narrator's clever political insights and beautiful depictions of art and literature offer readers a view into a captivating mind. De Kretser is at the top of her game.
