Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

The river of life

A subterranean novel
by
March 2025, no. 473

The Buried Life by Andrea Goldsmith

Transit Lounge $34.99 pb, 318 pp

Buy this book

ABR receives a commission on items purchased through this link. All ABR reviews are fully independent.

The river of life

A subterranean novel
by
March 2025, no. 473

Adrian is a professor at a top Australian university and his specialty is death. He lectures on it, writes books on it. Both his parents died when he was a child, one by suicide, but those are long-forgotten events that have nothing to do with his life’s work.

A pretty strong level of denial is going on here, you might think. It is what lies beneath denial that is Andrea Goldsmith’s theme. She takes the title of her novel from a Matthew Arnold poem of the same name that explores fundamental thoughts and emotions that we keep hidden away from others and from ourselves. Apt in the repressed world of nineteenth-century England – and, it would seem, no less apt in the post-Freudian, comparatively liberated world of twenty-first-century Australia.

The Buried Life

The Buried Life

by Andrea Goldsmith

Transit Lounge $34.99 pb, 318 pp

Buy this book

ABR receives a commission on items purchased through this link. All ABR reviews are fully independent.

From the New Issue

You May Also Like

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.