I liked this okay as I was reading it, and I like it a lot more for reading all the negative reviews. Bail does the now standard modernist version of is-this-now-or-is-this-a-memory-and-what's-the-difference-really, and does it fairly well. For the record, "now" is on a boat from Vienna to Australia. The memories are of Vienna. It's pretty easy to get once that's clear.

The story is similarly simple: a man goes to Vienna, music capitol of the Western world, to sell his newly invented piano. He pretty much fails to sell it, but does succeed in picking up the daughter of a Viennese socialite and music aficionado.

The book becomes worthwhile once it's read as the sum of its influences, to wit, Thomas Bernhard (and other cranky Austrians writing about how shit Austria is) Henry James (New World naif is taken in by/clashes with old world sophisticates) Virginia Woolf (see above re: now standard modernist form). Bail seems to be wrestling with his own debts to the European modernist and whatever you call Bernhard's time period writers, which can easily be read as a case study in the broader question of Australia's relationship to its European heritage. The answer, in good Jamesian style, is ambivalence.

Bail uses many obviously Bernhardian tics (long paragraphs, complex syntax, Vienna, music, slightly cracked protagonist), but at the same time asserts himself. Our heroic piano inventor goes to Europe, sells one piano to an avant-garde composer who 'writes' a piece that requires the destruction of said piano, then comes back to Australia, where he finds himself inevitably changed, but not changed into a Viennese. Just changed.

I have no idea how anyone would read this who hasn't read, at the very least, Bernhard's "Loser" and James's "The American." It might make no sense at all. For fans of those books, though, this is a nice addition to the corpus. ( )

I wanted to like this one. I found it too repetitive and arbitrary: a chore to read. ( )

An Australian inventor takes a voyage home after unsuccessfully trying to garner support for his invention in Vienna. The voyage allows him partially to process what happened in Vienna and his life in Australia.

In the book, there is one actual voyage so there is one chapter. Don't forget the inventor's voyage through his life and his voyage through experiences in Vienna - the paragraphs seamlessly meld these three voyages into each other (one paragraph = 9 pages). The reading rhythm is affected by this - the reader is caught on the ship of words and thus experiences a voyage too. I found I embarked with excitement and interest (What will I find with this new experience?). I settled into inescapable forward motion through the pages once I settled into the rhythm of The Voyage. Towards the end I was racing to step out of the book and land back in my own life again. ( )

Gave me a headache ( )