The Cockatoos: Text Classics
Patrick White
Introduction by Gail Jones
These six short novels and stories achieve the majesty and power of the best of Patrick White’s great novels. They probe beneath the surface of events – a sexual lapse, the unaccustomed climate of a foreign country, interruptions in a cherished routine, a death, a toothache – to expose a deeper, truer reality.
andThe Cockatoos
‘The Cockatoos…is superb. It is a slow, beautiful dance of love and death.’
‘[White’s] style in this collection of stories is taut and his language knowing, almost savage, in its ironies. Never does he swerve from a tone of complete authority, nor are his portrayals of human frailty ever less than bitingly perceptive.’
‘To read Patrick White…is to touch a source of power, to move through areas made new and fresh, to see men and women with a sharpened gaze.’
‘White is a shifty, complex artist with the ability to hit and run at any point in his narrative – maintaining a distance from emotional involvement while inexorably tightening those screws.’
‘White’s work is a towering achievement’
