{"product_id":"2026200016366-secondhand-the-vivisector","title":"The Vivisector","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eCondition remarks:\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBook: Good\u003cbr\u003eJacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage\u003cbr\u003ePages: Tanning and foxing\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTo 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.\n\nPublished 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?\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Secondhand Stock","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49336821350619,"sku":"2026200016366-SECONDHAND","price":20.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0523\/7646\/9701\/files\/bb31e4e5-6a2f-4566-bc15-e9adb6568504.png?v=1789958963","url":"https:\/\/bookgrocer.com\/products\/2026200016366-secondhand-the-vivisector","provider":"Book Grocer","version":"1.0","type":"link"}