Unlike Carey's novel, Malouf's short stories gave me a smorgasbord of Australia. I was able to have a quick taste of urban Australia, rural, mid-century, contemporary, adult, child, dark, lyrical...I am very much looking forward to reading more of Malouf, and if you haven't checked him out, it's worth it.

Very good collection of short stories with one that was outstanding

David Malouf is one of the finest writers I have come across and these stories are breath taking in their beauty and the emotional impact they convey. I am not Australian, have never been there, never wanted to go there - in fact have always rather found the whole Australian 'thing' as expounded by so many as rather tiresome and trite. But there is none of that in Malouf - though I read him as totally Australian in voice and setting - and doing it beautifully. There are plenty of details of the stories on goodreads and amazon - I won't go into further details - all I will add is that if haven't read anything by him then start here. If you have read him then I am sure you will not need any encouragement from me to read this book.

Read Closer

This author was recommended to me by more than one teacher-friend, so I sought out whatever I could find by him. Malouf's books turned out to be surprisingly elusive, at least locally.

I have been reading a lot of short stories lately, so I was excited to start this, given the high praise it came with. It was a quick read, and I won't say that I didn't like it - there are some beautiful passages that I actually saved to reread later - but I admit that the book as a whole fell a bit flat for me. The stories are more about characterization than plot, and while that's fine, it wasn't really what I was looking for. It annoyed me that most of the stories didn't really end, but rather left the characters dangling in some dark place (these are not particularly happy stories). I suppose there is something to be said for not laying all of your cards out on the table, and allowing the reader some room to use his/her imagination, but sometimes I don't feel like filling in the blanks myself.

I would give Malouf's work another try - it intrigued me that he has opera librettos included on his resume - but I'm not sure that I'd reread this one.

This collection of short stories came to life inside me. I was easily able to inhabit all these stories because of the author's adroitness at description and ability to flesh out his characters. Malouf writes gorgeously ornate sentences that, nevertheless, never feel like overkill. These long, twisty sentences, laden with clauses, the reader soon comes to appreciate, are born from an urgency to understand human nature, to inhabit a variousness of bodies. Malouf is indeed a shape-shifter. I generally believe his characters, the many people he inhabits in these stories, and wants us to inhabit alongside him. (This is starting to sound very Being John Malkovich.) And that's saying quite a lot when we're talking about a story like the closing one, "Great Day," in which more than half a dozen individuals are given the sort of character development you expect to be accorded one or two or possibly three characters in a work of short fiction.

This is Australian lit. Malouf has lived an international existence since early adulthood, but his native country is the focus here. I said above I "generally" believe his characters, because I had one quibble with two of the stories in this collection. Malouf has a ten-year-old narrate one story and a twelve-year-old narrate another. In both instances, the words which come out of the mouths of babes occasionally strain credulity to the breaking point. For example, in "Blacksoil Country," a story about the fraught engagement between Australian aboriginals and settlers, he has a twelve-year-old speak like this: "I never once heard him put it down to anything he had done himself, to the trouble he had knuckling under or settling. It was always someone else was to blame. Or some power of bad luck or malice against him, going right back, and which he saw in the many forms it took to bring him low." And I don't believe the ten-year-old narrator of "Closer," a story about the ostracizing of a family member because of his sexual orientation, would say something quite like this: "Insects, tiny grasshoppers, sprang up and went leaping, and glassy snails no bigger than your little fingernail hung on the grass stems, quietly feeding." Not quite that way. Malouf tries to heed his narrator's age and keep the sentences shorter, more clipped, but slips up occasionally and it ends up sounding more like himself observing the scene than his child-narrator.

But these are quibbles. Overall, I didn't think a single one of the stories was bad. I think I was most impressed with "Sally's Story," which is about a young Australian who worked as a "comfort woman" to soldiers during the Vietnam war. Malouf's writing on the subtleties of male sexuality and female sexuality in this piece was really astonishingly good. The story later picks up with the titular character after this strange form of "war service" is over, as she embarks on a new relationship with most of this past submerged like the nine-tenths of an iceberg. There is an unnerving undercurrent in this story which made me wonder whether her last dalliance was going to end in a romance or her murder. Malouf is good at giving you mixed signals in some of these stories and leaving questions wide open. It's fiction like life.

"Jacko's Reach" is qualitatively different from the other stories in the collection. It's a meditation on what locality means, how ground shapes character. It might be read alongside a darker version of this sort of writing, Peter Straub's classic "A Short Guide to the City": http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fic... While Malouf's story is much shorter and not dark in tone at all, it's a similar reflection on how a place can come to acquire a sort of character which shapes its denizens. Another example of literature like this is the sui generis Wisconsin Death Trip.

I saw that other reviewers on here found the long final story, a novella, I suppose, tedious. I did not. It had so many interesting characters, so many eddies of interest, and such imaginative turns, that it held my interest. En bref, imagine the saga of the Kennedy family being told with a great deal of subtlety as an Australian tale. A few of the stories were dark or had very dark elements. I found myself being reminded of Salinger a few times in reading this collection. I'm not sure if the fact that this book contains nine stories (like Salinger's collection with that title) was a coincidence or not.

The only reason I finished this book was because if I didn't, I wouldn't be able to pass my literature class.

Boring. I dislike Malouf's pseudo intellectual/surrealist style with a passion.

Really enjoyed these stories . . . although paging through the book just now to write this note, I realized that almost all of them were actually pretty dark.
"Great Day" should be a novel - such gripping characters in a (long) short story . . .

Taking a break from this while reading some others!

I am still reading this... It is a book of short stories which are basically about searching for your true self. Some of the stories are very good, while others are actually boring. The good ones are worth it though - they make you think about your own life in depth and what you would do in particular situations.

This book Dream Stuff has nine incredible, short stories. All nine stories are different, and each character is shaped, much by “the mysterious rhythms of nature as by the ghost of their own past” David Malouf. This book has a mysterious, poetic, and yet confusing writing style. In one of the stories, Lone Pine, there is this part where I think was poetic, “Darkness was trembling away from the metal, which was hot and down from the metal.” While I was reading that part, it felt very dark and evil, because the word, “Darkness”, is a strong word making me feel like the darkness is trembling away. The writing style is also confusing for me, for instant, in the story, Great Day, one of sentence stood out to me; “Wearing look, behind the startled eye, of practised stoicism.” This part I thought was confusing because, well I just don’t understand that part, which makes it confusing. Dream Stuff has a mysterious feeling to it. When I read the stories, I felt like I’m trying to solve a mysterious and some give goose bumps while reading it, but overall the book is a recommended short story for adults.

In the collection, Dream Stuff, which gives the book it’s title, this story is about a writer who returns to his home town in Brisbane, Australia to give a book reading. This writer comes back to read his book that he wrote, reading about his childhood memories, the violent experience he faced as a kid, the disturbing dream and inexplicable events. While he in back in Brisbane he goes back to London to puzzle up something. As this story comes with mysterious vibes, poetic sentences and yet confusing writing style, Dream Stuff relate to an unpredictability of human experience.

Dream Stuff a book with nine incredible, short stories by David Malouf. This book is recommended for readers age seventeen plus or adults. These stories contain some profanity and mature content. I think an overall rating would be a four out of five. For viewer reading this review, this book is a book that you just need to pick up and read it.

(1) Always write your dreams so you remember your dream stuff.
(2) Read this book and learn how lucid fiction is.