Reviews for The Eye of the Storm

The average rating for The Eye of the Storm based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-04-19 00:00:00 Sven H�bner Patrick White was a psychologically bottomless writer and in his merciless analysis of the family relationships in The Eye of the Storm he is gloomily and colourfully sarcastic. �When I spoke of my mother�s �deathbed� I was exaggerating � I think. I don�t believe she�ll die till she wants to. And I suspect she doesn�t want to. What makes any strong-willed old person decide to die is something I�ve never worked out.� He looked round at the other faces, none of which, with the possible exception of Janie�s, was giving attention to what he had to say. �I haven�t had much experience of the old and senile; in fact I�ve always gone out of my way to avoid that sort of thing.� Dreaming to inherit big money a son and a daughter return to their terminally ill mother but even on her deathbed she remains a tyrant and keeps ruling with an iron fist. She also knew she had no desire to die however stagnant her life became: she only hoped she would be allowed to experience again that state of pure, living bliss she was now and then allowed to enter. Strong willpower always makes the weak obey and cringe.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-03-04 00:00:00 Marygrace Amador More like 4.5. Eye isn't quite what I expected. My favorite White novels are plutonium-dense, deeply flawed in some way (i.e., there are totally gratuitous events, or the characters never seem to interact in any meaningful way--either on the realistic plane of, you know, dialogue, or on the intellectual plane of "what does this holocaust survivor have to do with this indigenous Australian aside from the obvious, and the obvious really doesn't take 500 pages to point out?"), but so singularly odd that I can't imagine doing without them for the rest of my life. Eye, on the other hand, is only moderately dense (reading it's kind of like sipping a Burgundy when you're expecting an Australian Shiraz), involves lots of character interaction on both planes, and has only one very slightly gratuitous event. So it's 'better' in that way. It's just not as interesting. But 'not as interesting' as, say, Riders in the Chariot is still plenty interesting. White's ability to hold black comedy, cynicism, and mysticism together in a novel centering around three of the most horrific human beings to ever "grace" the house of fiction is amazing (for the record: a mother who intentionally undermines her children, a daughter who can't decide if she's a French aristocrat or an ocker ozzie, and a son who's a famous, aging actor). The people in the book talk to each other, and they don't go on huge mystic travels, and they don't get crucified. They're just people. In that way, this is much more humane than his other work, and that fits nicely with the conclusion, which should be trite, but somehow works. As Mrs Hunter very slowly dies, we read: "Now surely, at the end of your* life, you can expect to be shown the inconceivable something you have always, it seems, been looking for. Though why you should expect it through the person of a steamy, devoted, often tiresome Jewess standing on one leg the other side of a veil of water (which is all the human vision amounts to) you could not have explained. Unless because you are both human, and consequently, flawed." [526] That might come off a bit silly out of context, but after 500 odd pages of the horror, it's rather uplifting. Not to say the horror doesn't have its moments, too: "Alone, Dorothy was already quailing for the kind of sentimental weaknesses a raking of the past might uncover. At the Judgement, too, you stand alone: not only Basil [her brother], all other sinners will contrive to be late. Your only hope in the present lies in indignation for whatever disgusts most: from faecal whiffs, breath filtered through mucus, the sickly scent of baby powder." [355]. *: nerdy literary technique point: White's use of the second person is really, really fascinating. Not quite stream of consciousness, not quite direct address to the character, not quite the character addressing herself.