The Ancestor Game by Alex Miller
The best-selling, 1993 Miles Franklin Award-winning novel
The Ancestor Game, which Robert Dessaix described as 'one of the most engrossing books I've read in a long time', is an enthralling journey into the ancestral dreams and present dilemmas of a rich cast of characters.
Steven Muir, August Spiess and his daughter Gertrude, and Lang Tzu all acknowledge a restless sense of cultural displacement, an ambivalence in their relations with the culture of European Australia. Steven left England for Australia as a young man and his one attempt at returning is unsuccessful. August Spiess, although he speaks frequently of returning to his native Hamburg, fails to make the journey, as does his daughter Gertrude. Lang Tzu's very name defines his fate: 'two characters which in Mandarin signify the son who goes away.'
The 'game', however, does have winners. For despite their yearnings for the home of their ancestral dreams, a desire to belong somewhere that is truly their own, none of Miller's characters leaves Australia, and each in their own way comes to see that to be at home in exile may be a defining paradox of the European Australian condition: the paradox of belonging and estrangement that perhaps lies uneasily at the heart of all European cultures.
Format: Paperback | 320 pages
Dimensions (cm): 19.8 x 13 x 19mm | 252g
Publication Date: 27 Aug 1992
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publication City/Country: Ringwood, VIC, Australia
Language: English
ISBN10: 0140159878
ISBN13: 9780140159875
Condition: Acceptable
A vintage book with obvious wear. Has some damage to the cover including a fair amount of thin creasing, scuff marks and scratches, but integrity still intact. There is minor creasing, minor blotches of faint discolouring scattered throughout the book, but most of the discolouring is along the edges of the page. There is a short note inscribed in black pen and signed on the top-right corner of the dedications page, but no other writing in margins. No underlining and highlighting of text, and no missing pages or anything that would compromise the legibility or understanding of the text. Still a clean, solid, readable copy.