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The Vivisector

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The Vivisector

By: Patrick White
Narrated by: Humphrey Bower
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About this listen

Winner of the 1973 Nobel Prize, The Vivisector chronicles the life of egotistic painter Hurtle Duffield, exploring the relationship between art and the artist.

Hurtle Duffield, a painter, is incapable of loving anything except what he paints. The men and women who court him during his long life are, above all, the victims of his art. He is the vivisector, dissecting their weaknesses with cruel precision: his sister's deformity, a grocer's moonlight indiscretion and the passionate illusions of his mistress, Hero Pavloussi.

It is only when Hurtle meets an egocentric adolescent whom he sees as his spiritual child does he experience a deeper, more treacherous emotion in this tour de force of sexual and psychological menace that sheds brutally honest light on the creative experience.

©1970 Patrick White (P)2019 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction
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Outstanding performance of one of the great novels of the 20th Century by Nobel Prize winner, Patrick White.

I do hope Audible record more of White’s novels. He was a genius.

Excellent rendition of a masterpiece

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Amazingly easy to listen to considering the breadth of issues and characterization. Another PW down.

Hardly noticed the hours slip by

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This superb rendition of this granitic novel has brought alive what had previously been for me a rather forbidding masterpiece. Humphrey Bower brings a cast of characters superbly to life with all their variegated voices and class-, age- and gender- based variations on the Australian accent across the 20th Century. Two magicians meet!

A brilliant novel superbly read

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great characterisations by the reader(s). And And an insightful observation into class distinction in Australia in the first half of the 20 th century.

a wonderful study of a tortured fabulous life

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It’s a masterwork by Australia’s greatest writer. Despite the patented misogyny it is wonderful to be reacquainted with this great novel after 50 years and it is superbly read.

God, art, cats and an outdoor funny

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