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Absolutely Revolting

August 1981, no. 33

Welcome to the August 1981 issue of Australian Book Review!

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Stewart Edwards reviews Hunting the Wild Pineapple by Thea Astley
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Contents Category: Fiction
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There nine stories in this volume are rich in people, satire, compassion, and humour. And set like ambushes, unexpected and surprising, are several cameos. It is a captivating, ensnaring book, but to call it a book of short stories would be so inadequate as to be misleading. There is an uncommon coherence, slender but powerful enough to raise it above that easy classification.
Book 1 Title: Hunting the Wild Pineapple
Book Author: Thea Astley
Book 1 Biblio: Penguin, $3.95 pb, 173 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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There nine stories in this volume are rich in people, satire, compassion, and humour. And set like ambushes, unexpected and surprising, are several cameos.

It is a captivating, ensnaring book, but to call it a book of short stories would be so inadequate as to be misleading. There is an uncommon coherence, slender but powerful enough to raise it above that easy classification.

Read more: Stewart Edwards reviews 'Hunting the Wild Pineapple' by Thea Astley

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Veronica Brady reviews Moonlite by David Foster
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I’ve always had a terror of one day having to explain a joke. And now it’s happened. Moonlite is one of the jokiest books since Such Is Life which in its turn reminds us of the even jokier Tristram Shandy and behind that no less than Rabelais himself. The best way to talk about Moonlite, then, is perhaps to say that it is bouncing, bewildering, wilful and – very occasionally – boring, just as these books are.
Book 1 Title: Moonlite
Book Author: David Foster
Book 1 Biblio: Macmillan, $9.95 pb, 223 pp
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I’ve always had a terror of one day having to explain a joke. And now it’s happened. Moonlite is one of the jokiest books since Such Is Life which in its turn reminds us of the even jokier Tristram Shandy and behind that no less than Rabelais himself. The best way to talk about Moonlite, then, is perhaps to say that it is bouncing, bewildering, wilful and – very occasionally – boring, just as these books are. Foster’s hero, Finbar, is Shandean in his adventures – his father, too, has trouble getting him born – which range from the outermost island of the Hebrides, Hiphoray – ‘to call these islands exposed is an understatement: the winter gales here lift the heather by its roots’ – to the ancient University of Newbridge with its medieval colleges, their stone mostly blackened now, ‘though patches of the original stone­work can be seen where a cart has backed into a wall or a passing drunkard kicked it with his foot’; and finally to the New West Highlands where he performs prodigious feats, gold-digging, drinking, fighting, talking, to get his natural reward and become a member of Parliament.

Read more: Veronica Brady reviews 'Moonlite' by David Foster

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