questions of travel michelle de kretser review

She's drawn to stray and lost objects she explains, things discarded but with a history, ghosts of a half-imagined past. There are motifs that recur in De Kretser's stories the prevalence of trees, a preoccupation with dogs, her characters' tendency to cling to objects of no intrinsic value but of great symbolic importance. 'Chekhov's the grand figure, Penelope Fitzgerald does it brilliantly.' 'I've always been attracted to books that, to use a cliché, can be described as tragi-comic, and writers who convey terrible things but do it with quiet humour,' she explains. There's a tension, especially in her latest, of balancing horrifying events with satire. There is Laura, a restless Australian explorer who ends up working for a travel publisher not unlike Lonely Planet, the company De Kretser worked for before embarking on a writing career, and there is Ravi, growing up in Sri Lanka, De Kretser's birth place, who dreams of becoming an IT professional but whose life is undone by the horrors of ethnic violence.Īll her novels, she says, are about people 'to whom history happens.' Two main stories are told over a 40 year period, both of which weave in elements from De Kretser's own history. She also, she says, wanted to represent the view of the 'travellees' – those who are travelled upon by the leisured tourist and the independent (though in reality guide-book dependent) traveller in their quest for cultural 'authenticity'. The novelist wanted to show that not all can travel for pleasure that there are the global rich and the local poor. 'Who travels? Who doesn't? Why do they go away? Why do they come back? What is home?' 'I just wanted to ask some questions,' De Kretser says. In a world where millions of people are constantly on the move, Questions of Travel explores, through the tales of individuals, the myriad reasons why we uproot ourselves. In her review of Questions of Travel for the Guardian, Byatt praised its depth and originality a novel 'unlike any other I have read.' I was terrified but she was so generous,' she enthuses. Along with the Hay on Wye Book Festival and Worlds Literature Festival in Norwich, the highlight of her trip has been a forum with AS Byatt.ĭe Kretser, usually cool and restrained, is brimming with excitement at this encounter.

We're talking as the writer comes to the end of a three-week UK tour to promote her fourth novel, Questions of Travel.

Questions of travel michelle de kretser review