The Cats Of Venice
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Fair
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Tanning and foxing
Markings: Previous owner
From the labyrinthine streets of Venice to the suburban quietude of mid-century Australia, The Cats of Venice is a masterful short story collection that captures the full spectrum of human folly, longing, and self-deception. Hal Porter's razor-sharp prose dissects his characters with surgical precision, rendering each portrait — whether a world-weary expatriate or a provincial Australian navigating foreign soil — with devastating clarity and darkly comic wit. Porter, one of Australia's most gifted and criminally underappreciated literary stylists, brings to this collection the same ornate, baroque sensibility that defined his celebrated memoir The Watcher on the Cast-Iron Balcony. His sentences are dense, jewelled constructions, at once beautiful and unsparing, demanding a reader who savours language as much as narrative. The Cats of Venice stands as a testament to Porter's extraordinary range and his unflinching eye for the absurdities that lie just beneath the surface of civilised life — leaving the reader to wonder who, ultimately, is observing whom.
Author: Hal Porter
Format: Hardback
Published: 1965, Angus & Robertson
Genre: Anthology
Condition remarks:
Book: Fair
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Tanning and foxing
Markings: Previous owner
From the labyrinthine streets of Venice to the suburban quietude of mid-century Australia, The Cats of Venice is a masterful short story collection that captures the full spectrum of human folly, longing, and self-deception. Hal Porter's razor-sharp prose dissects his characters with surgical precision, rendering each portrait — whether a world-weary expatriate or a provincial Australian navigating foreign soil — with devastating clarity and darkly comic wit. Porter, one of Australia's most gifted and criminally underappreciated literary stylists, brings to this collection the same ornate, baroque sensibility that defined his celebrated memoir The Watcher on the Cast-Iron Balcony. His sentences are dense, jewelled constructions, at once beautiful and unsparing, demanding a reader who savours language as much as narrative. The Cats of Venice stands as a testament to Porter's extraordinary range and his unflinching eye for the absurdities that lie just beneath the surface of civilised life — leaving the reader to wonder who, ultimately, is observing whom.