tThis 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 practiced 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.

t 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.

tDream 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.

While walking in Centennial Parklands in Sydney, thinking how to approach a review of Malouf’s short story collection dream stuff, pondering the lovely references to dreams, the obvious place to start, Audley’s words in the final story Great Day came into my mind: I think best with my kneecaps (p.154). That was where I’d start.

‘Kneecap’ thinking produces a leap. The rhythm of walking subdues rationality with all its familiar linkages and opens new possibilities. Not that the new possibility comes out of nowhere. Its existence depends on the very rational thinking which has to be left behind.

Malouf has made the story his medium for a thinking which cannot be told or understood in a purely rational manner. It is dreams which provide the means of writing in just this way.

All the short stories in this collection touch on dreams and the way dreaming and waking intertwine. The first story At Schindler’s tells Jack’s nightmare where dark water rushed and foamed out of sight below, the flimsy structure shuddered and creaked (p. 19)marking his unconscious awareness that his father will not return from the war, and making possible its discovery in his waking life. The story Dream Stuff ends with a dream which remembers for Colin, a writer returning, famous, to his hometown, Brisbane, the ending of a childhood experience of being with his dog as it was dying in the shadows under his home. In the dream he knows he stayed with his dog until it died and only then took the hand which leads him back to the upper world of sunshine. This dream with its awareness of death and the promise of support will be, we know, the support the adult Colin needs to face again a world where he had come so close to another’s anguish so intense that the only escape from it was self-extinction (p. 54).

Despite the power of the relation between dreaming and waking, it is other aspects of dreaming which seem most powerfully at work in Malouf’s ability to tell philosophy in stories. Malouf draws on the awareness of the ephemerality of all things exemplified by dreams. The title of this collection after all calls up Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Prospero’s thoughts:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep

Malouf displays the ephemerality of all life through the dream structure of his story telling. Dreams tell stories, not according to a linear logic of time, the traditional story-telling structure; but with a logic of meaning connection. It is this structure that Malouf so powerfully and skilfully employs in his short stories. It is I think best exemplified by Great Day, the last, and for me, the best of the stories.

The story Great Day wonderfully weaves together one day in the life of a family clan as it gathers at their seaside home to celebrate Audley’s birthday while also assiduously ignoring the celebrations throughout Australia on that day (most probably the 200th anniversary of Australia’s ‘founding’).

Fireworks over Sydney Harbour for the Bicentennial celebrations
http://caroleriley.id.au/wordpress/wp...

Bicentennial celebrations and a response from Aboriginal people:
http://museumvictoria.com.au/collecti...

Such a setting opens for Malouf the chance to explore the contradictions between our ‘white’ settlement and Aboriginal ownership; between our primal longing to be without possessions and our desire for them; between our desires to live as a nomad and to be settled; our desires for being an individual and our longing for togetherness; the uncertainty of our lives’ paths and yet their fatedness as well. The story can support such thinking because of the dream-like structure of the story and the dream-like nature of the events.

The Great Day begins in the morning ,on the headland, in an expanding stillness in which clocks, voices and every form of consciousness had still to come into existence and the day as yet, like the sea, had no mark upon it and follows the family as it gathers at their seaside home for their celebration in the evening to the following morning as the party drifts away and into sleep with just two there to witness the movement towards dawn as the sea breeze picks up stirring the faded chintz at the windows and touching with freshness the stale air in the room.

Throughout the story shifts from person to person, from space to space, from time to time, just as a dream does. The shifting scenes merge imperceptibly with each other acquiring meanings from the shift itself, displaying, indeed, being the very ephemerality of dreams. The meanings become dense, able to carry the thinking about what it is to be human.

Malouf explores the thoughts about human existence without in any way diminishing story-telling. There is much to appeal in the stories as stories, even without considering the larger issues that Malouf so loves. The stories are engaging, often unusual, and always harking back to an earlier era. They invite us in and carry us along. We share Jack’s Christmas holiday in the tent city at Scarborough outside of Brisbane (At Schindler’s); Amy’s intrigued desire to bring her Uncle back into the family after his exclusion for moving to ‘sodom’/Sydney (Closer); Colin’s return to a childhood town after success overseas (Dream Stuff); Greg’s bizarre night training while in the University Air Squadron (Night Training); the story Jacko’s Reach, a place for inventiveness outside the tidiness of the town; the murder of Harry and his wife in Lone Pine; Jordan’s love of the land (Blacksoil); and the family celebration (Great Day).

In the end, against all the bizarreness of life with its connections and disconnections, fate and chance, and the presence of death, Malouf finds a point of acceptance. It comes from a virtue that is little recognised: attention. Audley says People never mention it [attention] among the virtues, but it might be the greatest of them all. It’s the beginning of everything. Malebranche, you know, called it the natural prayer of the soul.

The short stories in this collection draw on Malouf’s own ability to attend to life in all its forms and to celebrate it. It is the miracle that life continues each day (but will end one day) that is his cause for celebration. Again Audley carries Malouf’s thoughts with lines from an Inuit song (I’ve placed the whole song here):
I think over again
My small adventures, my fears.
The small ones that seemed so big,
For all the vital things I had to get and to reach.
And yet there is only one great thing, the only thing:
To live to see the great day that dawns,
And the light that fills the world.

I’ll end with a short vivid almost lucid dream I had the night after finishing dream stuff for it seems to me these qualities in my dream (leaps in space and time and the wonder at it all even though it can be disconcerting) is just what I see in Malouf’s stories: I am in a vast silver grey space ship (like an AI space ship in one of Bank's novels). It hyper-jumps from Brisbane (my home town) to Portland (USA). There, the captain is showing off: “See the ship can stand on its head and twist around on its tale”. I didn’t like it – so disoriented by the shifts in orientation. Then we are flying down an English narrow lane. I wonder how such a vast ship can travel along such a narrow space, but it can, that’s all there is to it. I see purple alyssum growing and move my hand out (surprised it could exist in two such different places at once) and pick some. I gather other purple flowers until I have a small bunch in my hand .

And I'll just add a tiny note: it is a delight to see literature so full of Australia.