Flaws in the Glass
  • Published: 1 July 2012
  • ISBN: 9781742759005
  • Imprint: Vintage Australia
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 288
  • RRP: $24.00

Flaws in the Glass

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A self-portrait that is as brilliant original as White's fiction and drama.

A self-portrait that is as brilliant original as White's fiction and drama.

In this remarkable self-portrait Patrick White explains how on the very rare occasions when he re-reads a passage from one of his books, he recognises very little of the self he knows. This 'unknown' is the man interviewers and visiting students expect to find, but 'unable to produce him', he prefers to remain private, or as private as anyone who has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature can ever be. In this book is the self Patrick White does recognise, the one he sees reflected in the glass.
  • Published: 1 July 2012
  • ISBN: 9781742759005
  • Imprint: Vintage Australia
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 288
  • RRP: $24.00
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About the author

Patrick White

Patrick White was born in England in 1912 and taken to Australia, where his father owned a sheep farm, when he was six months old. He was educated in England at Cheltenham college and King's College, Cambridge. He settled in London, where he wrote several unpublished novels, then served in the RAF during the war. He returned to Australia after the war.
He became the most considerable figure in modern Australian literature, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. The great poet of Australian landscape, he turned its vast empty spaces into great mythic landscapes of the soul. His position as a man of letters was controversial, provoked by his acerbic, unpredictable public statements and his belief that it is eccentric individuals who offer the only hope of salvation. He died in September 1990.

Also by Patrick White

The Vivisector
The Hanging Garden
Riders in the Chariot
The Eye Of The Storm (film tie-in)
Voss
Collected Short Stories
A Fringe Of Leaves
See all

Praise for Flaws in the Glass

A brilliantly original self-portrait by one of the great magicians of fiction. White's scope is vast and his invention endless.

Observer

Another work of art. Flaws in the Glass is austere and ornamental, ignoring conventional chronology, linking associated fragments to create Proustian deviations. A hybrid being emerges of rare perception and acid experience; family, friends, places are landscapes of hell, heaven and purgatory in this Nobel Prize winner's fertile imagination.

The Times

A singularly penetrating act of self-scrutiny, a cold uncompromising stare into the mirror of an artist's life. There are lyrical patches and there are wryly comic passages, but the overriding impression it leaves is of a man driven by his creative daemon.

David Lodge

As absorbing an autobiography as has been written by a novelist this century.

New York Times Book Review

He records magnificently, helped by a brilliant eye and an unforgiving nature. His descriptions of Egypt, Greece and Australia are immediately evocative reading.

London Evening Standard