Such Is Life
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: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
Set amid the sun-scorched plains and vast pastoral runs of colonial New South Wales in the 1880s, Such Is Life is the quintessential Australian novel — a sprawling, irreverent, and brilliantly digressive chronicle of bush life as seen through the eyes of Tom Collins, a government official whose rambling diary entries capture a world of bullock drivers, squatters, swagmen, and the untameable Australian landscape. Written under the pen name Tom Collins by Joseph Furphy, this landmark work presents a richly layered narrative that subverts the conventions of the 19th-century novel, weaving together tall tales, philosophical musings, and sardonic wit into a tapestry of colonial life that is both intensely local and universally human. Furphy's prose is dense, allusive, and deliberately unreliable — the narrator Collins is a pompous yet endearing comic creation whose self-satisfied accounts constantly betray ironies he himself cannot see, making Such Is Life a sophisticated study in narrative voice and the nature of truth. The novel argues, with great subtlety and humour, that fate is capricious and human understanding is always partial, a theme crystallised in its famous, fatalistic title. Celebrated as one of the founding texts of Australian literature, it remains an essential and gloriously rewarding read — one that rewards patience with some of the most vivid and idiosyncratic writing the continent has ever produced.
Author: Tom Collins
Format: Paperback
Genre: Australian history
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
Set amid the sun-scorched plains and vast pastoral runs of colonial New South Wales in the 1880s, Such Is Life is the quintessential Australian novel — a sprawling, irreverent, and brilliantly digressive chronicle of bush life as seen through the eyes of Tom Collins, a government official whose rambling diary entries capture a world of bullock drivers, squatters, swagmen, and the untameable Australian landscape. Written under the pen name Tom Collins by Joseph Furphy, this landmark work presents a richly layered narrative that subverts the conventions of the 19th-century novel, weaving together tall tales, philosophical musings, and sardonic wit into a tapestry of colonial life that is both intensely local and universally human. Furphy's prose is dense, allusive, and deliberately unreliable — the narrator Collins is a pompous yet endearing comic creation whose self-satisfied accounts constantly betray ironies he himself cannot see, making Such Is Life a sophisticated study in narrative voice and the nature of truth. The novel argues, with great subtlety and humour, that fate is capricious and human understanding is always partial, a theme crystallised in its famous, fatalistic title. Celebrated as one of the founding texts of Australian literature, it remains an essential and gloriously rewarding read — one that rewards patience with some of the most vivid and idiosyncratic writing the continent has ever produced.