The Voyage - Tapa dura

PRAISE FOR "EUCALYPTUS"

"It's a masterpiece." --Michael Hulse, "Spectator"

"You won't have read anything like it." --Francis Spufford, "Evening Standard"

"An elegant, humane, funny and wise journey to the interior of the human heart." --"Daily Telegraph"

""The Voyage" is oblique, idiosyncratic and original. To read it is to breathe the rarefied air of an artistic consciousness, nostalgic for literary modernism." "Stella Clarke, "The Australian"""

""The Voyage" is a beautiful book, sumptuously executed for all the apparent slenderness of its narrative line... We won't see a finer piece of fiction in the longest while." "Peter Craven, "The Age"""

""The Voyage" is also about love--or rather how dislocation, memory, work, loneliness, and love whirl around in our daily experience. The surface of the novel might seem as smooth as the deck of the Romance, but that it because of its brilliant execution. Underneath, the complexities of Downunder roll." ""Metro" (NZ)""

"The Voyage is oblique, idiosyncratic and original. To read it is to breathe the rarefied air of an artistic consciousness, nostalgic for literary modernism."--Stella Clarke, The Australian

"A radical account of displacement, both mental and physical. Murray Bail goes from strength to strength."--Anita Brookner, author of Hotel du Lac

"The novel reads like a series of pratfalls and recoveries... the comedy, and the pathos, is squirrelled away in gestures and situations, and in emblematic moments."--Ivor Indyk, The Sydney Review of Books

"The Voyage is a beautiful book, sumptuously executed for all the apparent slenderness of its narrative line... We won't see a finer piece of fiction in the longest while."--Peter Craven, The Age

"The Voyage is also about love--or rather how dislocation, memory, work, loneliness, and love whirl around in our daily experience. The surface of the novel might seem as smooth as the deck of the Romance, but that it because of its brilliant execution. Underneath, the complexities of Downunder roll."--Metro (NZ)

"Bail produces a novel only every decade, which perhaps explains why he is not as well known as he should be. This novel about an Australian piano-maker in Vienna is sexy and hugely enjoyable."--Sunday Telegraph

Murray Bail is best known for his internationally best-selling novel Eucalyptus, a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year and winner of the 1999 Miles Franklin Award. The New York Times Book Review wrote that Bail's writing "exhibit(s) a surfeit of imagination, skill and style... (they contain) stories within stories, of enigmatic characters and sly questions with many possible answers."

In The Voyage, Piano manufacturer and salesman Frank Delage travels to Vienna from Sydney, hoping to introduce a new design to replace the respected old pianos of Europe. He walks the great musical city, offering an impassioned defense of his piano's technical superiority to any who will hear it. When his ambitions are ignored by the city's staid musical elite, Delage's finds his situation suddenly transformed by a chance meeting with Amalia von Schalla, an elegant grande dame of Viennese society.

Now sailing home to Australia aboard the container ship Romance with his new bride, Amalia's daughter Elisabeth von Schalla, Delage and his story begin to come to light in a hypnotic sequence of memories, voices, and snatches of conversations.

Bail's prose sidewinds like a slipstream as Delage's story moves between the glittering society of the von Schalla's Vienna and the rough landscape of Australia. The Voyage is delightfully Joycean--conveying a sensuous physicality and the immediacy emotion, as well as revealing a great basin of interior life.

The Voyage was a finalist for the NSW Premier's Literary Awards Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, WA Premier's Book Awards, and the Queensland Literary Awards.