The Vivisector
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: Good
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Tanning and foxing
To create is to wound — and no novel captures this brutal truth more ferociously than Patrick White's The Vivisector, a towering work of Australian literature that chronicles the tortured life of Hurtle Duffield, a painter of savage genius who treats human relationships with the same cold dissection he applies to his art. Born into poverty and sold to a wealthy Sydney family, Duffield tears through life — through lovers, patrons, and muses — consuming and discarding them in his relentless, almost pathological pursuit of artistic truth. White presents a portrait of the artist not as a romantic hero, but as a predator, a vivisector of souls, whose canvases blaze with the suffering of those who dared to love him. Published in 1970, The Vivisector stands as one of White's most ambitious and uncompromising novels, a work that cemented his status as the dominant force in 20th-century Australian fiction and contributed to his Nobel Prize in Literature awarded in 1973. His prose style — dense, lyrical, and at times deliberately brutal — mirrors the visceral energy of Duffield's paintings, blurring the boundary between the act of writing and the act of creation itself. Beneath its unflinching surface lies a profound meditation on the relationship between beauty and cruelty, sacrifice and selfishness, leaving the reader to ask: is great art ever truly worth the cost?
Author: Patrick White
Format: Hardback
Genre: Modern fiction
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Tanning and foxing
To create is to wound — and no novel captures this brutal truth more ferociously than Patrick White's The Vivisector, a towering work of Australian literature that chronicles the tortured life of Hurtle Duffield, a painter of savage genius who treats human relationships with the same cold dissection he applies to his art. Born into poverty and sold to a wealthy Sydney family, Duffield tears through life — through lovers, patrons, and muses — consuming and discarding them in his relentless, almost pathological pursuit of artistic truth. White presents a portrait of the artist not as a romantic hero, but as a predator, a vivisector of souls, whose canvases blaze with the suffering of those who dared to love him. Published in 1970, The Vivisector stands as one of White's most ambitious and uncompromising novels, a work that cemented his status as the dominant force in 20th-century Australian fiction and contributed to his Nobel Prize in Literature awarded in 1973. His prose style — dense, lyrical, and at times deliberately brutal — mirrors the visceral energy of Duffield's paintings, blurring the boundary between the act of writing and the act of creation itself. Beneath its unflinching surface lies a profound meditation on the relationship between beauty and cruelty, sacrifice and selfishness, leaving the reader to ask: is great art ever truly worth the cost?