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Fiction

Extinctions by Josephine Wilson

by •
January–February 2017, no. 388

Extinctions by Josephine Wilson

UWA Publishing $29.99 pb, 286 pp, 9781742588988

Fiction

Extinctions by Josephine Wilson

by •
January–February 2017, no. 388

Extinctions takes its time giving up its secrets, and there are some we will never know. One of its most persistent enigmas is what kind of book it is. I wondered, during the first half, whether it was a powerful and perceptive example of the Bildungsroman for seniors: an elderly person (usually male) meets someone new who teaches him to be a better person, to pay attention to the important things in life, to treat those he loves properly, to reconcile himself to his past – in short, to grow up.

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Gillian Dooley

Gillian Dooley is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow in English at Flinders University, and a Visiting Fellow in the Music Department at Southampton University. Her publications include an edited book of interviews with Iris Murdoch (2003), V.S. Naipaul, Man and Writer (2006), J.M. Coetzee and the Power of Narrative (2010), and journal articles on a range of literary topics including music in the life and work of Jane Austen. In 2005 she co-edited Matthew Flinders’ Private Journal and in 2014 she published an edition of the correspondence between Iris Murdoch and the Australian radical philosopher Brian Medlin. She has been a regular reviewer for ABR since 2002. She is founding editor of the online journals Transnational Literature and Writers in Conversation.

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Comment (1)

  • Extinctions x Josephine Wilson
    I loved this very-unusual book
    -stream of consciousness writing
    -fallibility of characters
    -dry character building
    -unpredictible, sometimes farcical turns of events
    -magnificent descriptions eg p184 par c4…the walls…
    p192 par c3 …Beche de mer…
    p194-5 …Fred flushed…
    p197 par 2…his voice was…
    I loved it because it is about adoption (personal)
    “ perceptive (some similarities to the Housewife and the Professor?)
    “ because it is humane
    “ so many characters are weak people
    I got nothing from and could or would not engage with the photographs and thought them an expensive distraction (OCD author?)
    I would recommend the book and will hope to read it again. I have posted this on fb
    Posted by Sandra Beck
    02 February 2018

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