Snake

by KateJennings (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2000

  $3.29

  Snake is a book that will come to be regarded as a classic account of the realities of Australian rural life. People Irene is clever, ambitious, easily seduced, and tempted by everything-everything beyond the confines of her life on a remote Australian farm and her marriage to a man she might once, briefly, have loved. Rex, her quiet, adoring, responsible husband, bears mostly silent witness as Irene wrestles with her duties as wife and mother, tends her garden, and imaginatively resists her fate, as their marriage unravels inexorably, bitterly, spectacularly. The brief scenes, often seemingly random and catching the absolute rub of the quotidian, possess what feels like a holographic shimmer...Snake is clearly the work of a powerful imagination. Carol Shields, New York Times Book Review

• Used

  Paperback
  2001

  $3.29

  'Stunning - the work of a powerful imagination' Carol Shields. Snake is Kate Jennings first novel, she has written poetry and an award-winning collection of short stories. My life is about to begin. This is the only thought in Irene's head the day she marries a handsome second-world war veteran. But irritation, frustration and disappointment follow as the couple start their life together on a remote Australian farm. Rex, hard-working, reliable, agonised by love not returned and 'imprisoned in loneliness', bears mostly silent inarticulate witness to Irene's flailing attempts to escape their claustrophobic existence. So do Girlie and Boy, their children, who to Rex seem like 'the blurred faces on...a passing train. Faces that never gained definition no matter how hard they stared.' Stark yet strangely comic snapshots document the inexorable disintegration of the family. Kate Jennings' black humour and muscular prose, both pared down and rich in startling imagery, distils time and place in a work of literature that carves its exquisitely painful mark deep into the mind.