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Questions of Travel: A Novel
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Little, Brown and Company 2013
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Laura Fraser grows up in Sydney, motherless, with a cold, professional father and an artistic bent. Ravi Mendis lives on the other side of the globe — exploring the seductive new world of the Internet, his father dead, his mother struggling to get by.Their stories alternate throughout Michelle de Kretser's ravishing novel, culminating in unlikely fates for them both, destinies influenced by travel — voluntary in her case, enforced in his.
With money from an inheritance, Laura sets off to see the world, eventually returning to Sydney to work for a publisher of travel guides. There she meets Ravi, now a Sri Lankan political exile who wants only to see a bit of Australia and make a living. Where do these two disparate characters, and an enthralling array of others, truly belong? With her trademark subtlety, wit, and dazzling prose, Michelle de Kretser shows us that, in the 21st century, they belong wherever they want to and can be — home or away. "It is not really possible to describe, in a short space, the originality and depth of this long and beautifully crafted book." — A.S. Byatt, The Guardian

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Format:
Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read
Street Date:
05/14/2013
Language:
English
ISBN:
9780316219242, 9780316248877
ASIN:
B008TUAIGE

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Citations

APA Citation (style guide)

Michelle de Kretser. (2013). Questions of Travel: A Novel. Little, Brown and Company.

Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)

Michelle de Kretser. 2013. Questions of Travel: A Novel. Little, Brown and Company.

Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)

Michelle de Kretser, Questions of Travel: A Novel. Little, Brown and Company, 2013.

MLA Citation (style guide)

Michelle de Kretser. Questions of Travel: A Novel. Little, Brown and Company, 2013.

Note! Citation formats are based on standards as of July 2022. Citations contain only title, author, edition, publisher, and year published. Citations should be used as a guideline and should be double checked for accuracy.

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Date Added:
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Date Updated:
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      • bioText: Michelle de Kretser is a Sri Lankan who has lived in Australia for several years. She is the author of the novels The Rose Grower, The Hamilton Case, and The Lost Dog, and she is currently an associate of the English Department at the University of Sydney.
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Questions of Travel
fullDescription
Laura Fraser grows up in Sydney, motherless, with a cold, professional father and an artistic bent. Ravi Mendis lives on the other side of the globe — exploring the seductive new world of the Internet, his father dead, his mother struggling to get by.Their stories alternate throughout Michelle de Kretser's ravishing novel, culminating in unlikely fates for them both, destinies influenced by travel — voluntary in her case, enforced in his.
With money from an inheritance, Laura sets off to see the world, eventually returning to Sydney to work for a publisher of travel guides. There she meets Ravi, now a Sri Lankan political exile who wants only to see a bit of Australia and make a living. Where do these two disparate characters, and an enthralling array of others, truly belong? With her trademark subtlety, wit, and dazzling prose, Michelle de Kretser shows us that, in the 21st century, they belong wherever they want to and can be — home or away. "It is not really possible to describe, in a short space, the originality and depth of this long and beautifully crafted book." — A.S. Byatt, The Guardian
reviews
      • premium: False
      • source: William Boyd, New York Times Book Review
      • content: Multi-layered and beguiling.
      • premium: False
      • source: Laura Miller, Salon
      • content: De Kretser has pulled off something remarkable
      • premium: False
      • source: Boyd Tonkin, The Independent (UK)
      • content: An utterly captivating blend of intellectual muscle and story-telling magic.
      • premium: False
      • source: Lev Grossman, Time
      • content: De Kretser's prose is stunning.
      • premium: False
      • source: Hilary Mantel
      • content: Subtle and mysterious, both comic and eerie, and brilliantly evocative of time and place.
      • premium: False
      • source: A.S. Byatt, Financial Times (UK)
      • content: A gripping story. . .elegant and subtle. . . .This is the best novel I have read in a long time.
      • premium: False
      • source: Clare Press, Vogue
      • content: Rich, beautiful, shocking, affecting.
      • premium: False
      • source: Dara Horn, Washington Post
      • content: Uncannily compelling . . . .De Kretser's daring willingness to let suspense accrue without promising resolution is a worthy echo of Henry James's brilliance.
      • premium: False
      • source: Alison McCulloch, The New York Times Book Review
      • content: More often than not, de Kretser nails some situation or foible in 20 words or less. . .There is much here that dazzles. . . .De Kretser's writing is as boldly beautiful as ever.
      • premium: True
      • source: Publisher's Weekly
      • content:

        April 1, 2013
        While her earlier books The Lost Dog and The Hamilton Case were meditations on the nature of art and mystery, de Kretser’s brilliantly observed new novel explores the meaning of travel. Borrowing a title from the poet Elizabeth Bishop, de Kretser evokes and subverts the tradition of the literary travelogue—the chronicle of the leisured, intercontinental quest for self-improvement. The book moves back and forth between the lives of two very different characters, Australian Laura and Sri Lankan Ravi. Laura’s early travels, like Bishop’s, are funded by a surprise inheritance; she trades art school for guidebooks as she sets out to see the world. The death of one of her twin brothers when Laura is a teenager creates a vague menace that later follows her from continent to continent, reinforced by a silent caller with an unknown agenda who wakes her in the middle of the night a few times each year. For Ravi, childhood is filled with the anxiety of limited opportunity, while the violence of the Sri Lankan civil war rages in the background. In his early life, he travels in his mind, whether to Japan or Silicon Valley; later, travel becomes necessary, a way to find safety in a brutal world. De Kretser creates the anticipation that Laura and Ravi’s paths will eventually cross, but an epigraph from E.M. Forster signals not to expect an epiphany when they do meet. While “Only connect!” is the message at the heart of Forster’s Howards End, de Kretser’s book severs strong ties and dissolves weaker ones, making the broken more broken. Coming together, Ravi and Laura plan a new journey that begins in guidebook banality and ends in disaster. While de Kretser doesn’t provide the expected satisfactions, she offers deadly darts of observation that puncture clichés and deflate false enthusiasm. In the end she leaves you flat on the ground, possessed of harder truths. Agent: Sarah Lutyens, Lutyens & Rubinstein.

      • premium: True
      • source: Kirkus
      • content:

        March 15, 2013
        Two travelers--a man from Sri Lanka and a woman from Australia--ultimately meet up as both their lives and their narratives intertwine. The story begins in the 1960s with Laura Fraser growing up in Sydney amid a gloomy family situation, for her mother has died and her father is emotionally remote. The only saving grace in her early life is her beloved Aunt Hester. When her aunt dies, she leaves enough money for Laura to spend some time seeing the world, and Laura's travels take her from India to London and points in between. Concurrently, Ravi Mendes is growing up in Sri Lanka. He has Roman Catholic schooling and a technological bent, and he gets involved with an equally tech-savvy friend in the early days of the Internet. Although Laura has numerous affairs but no serious relationships, Ravi gets married to Malini and has a child. Malini has strong political convictions that lead her to expose corruption in Sri Lanka, but this passion eventuates in her being brutally killed and dismembered. Ravi is distraught but also endangered, so he immigrates to Australia. Not so coincidentally, Laura has recently resettled there, eventually getting a job--appropriately enough--as a travel editor for European guidebooks. Ravi spends his time getting accustomed to a new and alien culture, anchoring himself in websites familiar from his previous life in Sri Lanka, and Laura continues to fritter away her time with meaningless affairs, fulfilling the definition of "modern love: traceless, chilling." Eventually, of course, and after an agonizingly long time, Ravi and Laura meet. De Kretser negotiates the fragmentation of her major characters with aplomb as well as with an aggressive but rhapsodic prose style.

        COPYRIGHT(2013) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

      • premium: True
      • source: Library Journal
      • content:

        Starred review from April 1, 2013

        Awkward and diffident, Laura Fraser grows up in Sydney, Australia, feeling alienated from her family, her country, and her future prospects. But when she receives an unexpected inheritance and travels abroad, she slowly pieces together an independent life and self-identity during a transformative expatriate decade. Meanwhile, bookish Ravi Mendes comes of age in Sri Lanka as a witness to the horrors of the country's civil war. Wrenched away from home after escalating political violence destroys his family, Ravi arrives in Sydney as a refugee at the same time as Laura, who is finally returning from abroad. Their paths eventually cross at the apex of this exquisite, haunting novel. VERDICT Award-winning Australian/Sri Lankan writer de Kretser (The Lost Dog) is in wondrous form with this epic, savage tale of two lost souls. As she traces Laura's and Ravi's lives over four decades, de Kretser's style is poetic, indelible, and often breathtaking in its beauty. This novel of memory, transformation, and loss is not to be missed by readers who enjoy literary, multicultural fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 11/26/12.]--Kelsy Peterson, Johnson Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Overland Park, KS

        Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

      • premium: True
      • source: Booklist
      • content:

        April 15, 2013
        After his human-rights activist wife is slaughtered with her little son in Sri Lanka, Ravi flees to Sydney, Australia, where he faces prejudice as he applies for asylum and gets a job in computers with a big travel company. Laura works for the company as a tourism writer, having returned home from London, where Australia, with stars, aborigines, and cities so secondhand they need the outback, is regarded as exotic. More than all the multiple personal intricacies in Ravi's and Laura's alternating narratives, the contemporary work scene will grab readersthe corporate drivel (Moral indignation is not managerial), the office politics with the daily e-mails, the technician who installs new software and cannot explain how to use it. Best of all is the wry take on tourists. As a travel writer, Laura knows they do not want ordinary life: That is what they were on holiday from. Forget the unwilling travelers like Ravi, the soldiers, and the millions made homeless. This ironic, contemporary view of finding home makes for heartfelt drama.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)

      • premium: True
      • source: Books+Publishing
      • content:

        August 16, 2012
        Questions of Travel is the fourth novel from Michelle de Kretser, who, I think it’s safe to say, is no longer a rising star but one of Australia’s finest literary authors, and a previous winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize. The size of the author’s name on the cover suggests the publisher thinks so too.

        The novel’s dual narrative follows two characters, Laura and Ravi, over the course of several decades, from the late 20th century to the early 21st. In Sydney, Laura grows up in a wealthy but unhappy family, briefly studying art at university before heading off to travel the world. She waits tables in London, teaches English in Naples, and finally returns to Sydney to work
        in publishing.

        In a beachside suburb of Sri Lanka, Ravi dreams of overseas travel, but the possibility seems unlikely. He settles in Colombo with his wife and young son, where he works as a maths teacher and dabbles in IT and web design, while his wife becomes increasingly active in Sri Lankan politics. Tragedy forces him to flee his country and seek asylum in Australia, where he waits for his visa and makes modest attempts to build a new life.

        Essentially this is a story about two common, but very different, experiences of modern travel—an Australian backpacker exploring the world and a Sri Lankan refugee adjusting to Australia—and de Kretser unpicks her characters’ experiences, motivations and emotions with great insight and skill. While Laura and Ravi grow up dreaming of travel, as adults they soon realise that the experience can be deeply lonely. One of Laura’s first revelations about travel is the ‘sheer tedium of being a tourist’. ‘Seeing how local people lived was a myth’, she also soon discovers.

        The modern office environment also comes under scrutiny. When she returns to Sydney, Laura works for a trendy travel publisher, and de Kretser’s descriptions of laid-back managers and petty office politics had me nodding my head and laughing out loud. (De Kretser worked for Lonely Planet at one time—she must have been taking notes.) The humour is important, as it prevents the story from becoming too bleak (and there are some very bleak moments). However, what stood out the most was de Kretser’s beautiful language. ‘Self-invention was poetry written to an energetic beat with rhyme’s confidence in endings; in that sense, it resembled love.’ Sentences like that demand re-reading.

        Questions of Travel combines the ambitious themes of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom with the poetic details of Gail Jones’ Five Bells. And the prose will knock your socks off.

        Andrea Hanke is the editor of Bookseller+Publisher

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Laura Fraser grows up in Sydney, motherless, with a cold, professional father and an artistic bent. Ravi Mendis lives on the other side of the globe — exploring the seductive new world of the Internet, his father dead, his mother struggling to get by.Their stories alternate throughout Michelle de Kretser's ravishing novel, culminating in unlikely fates for them both, destinies influenced by travel — voluntary in her case, enforced in his.
With money from an inheritance, Laura sets off to see the world, eventually returning to Sydney to work for a publisher of travel guides. There she meets Ravi, now a Sri Lankan political exile who wants only to see a bit of Australia and make a living. Where do these two disparate characters, and an enthralling array of others, truly belong? With her trademark subtlety, wit, and dazzling prose, Michelle de Kretser shows us that, in the 21st century, they belong wherever they want to and can be — home or away. "It is not really possible to...
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