The Living Sea of Waking Dreams

A challenging, deeply confronting but endlessly astonishing book. Extraordinarily visual, beautiful writing. A book about death - and life. Moving and disturbingly thought-provoking. Also very beautifully narrated. Thank you, Essie.

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4 people found this helpful

Brilliant

Thank you once again Mr. Flanagan. A superb piece of work. A book I know will always be there gently steering me.

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Simply Outstanding

Australian to the core, storytelling at it's best, narrated with absolute mastery. Thank you for this sad but brilliant gift.

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2 people found this helpful

Wow, just fantastic

Incredible story, fantastically written. Such amazing depth of description and beautifully read by the wonderful Essie Davis. I throughly enjoyed listening.

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8 people found this helpful

Strange but beautifully written

Intense, moving, depressing and uplifting, fantastic language and fantastical as well as very relatable and real.

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Breath taking

It was hard to find the rhythm at first- and then it swept me away.

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narrator too much

terrible narrator.. sorry. too much interpretation and unable to listen to this one.. read it instead

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Brutal and angry

I found this not so subtle allegory of disappearing nature and people having body parts too overstated, and the characters extremely stereotyped.
This was a very angry book, but the dying mothers plight was rendered reverently .. like a dying Mother Earth .
I continued listening because I wanted to hear Richard Flanagan’s outpouring of grief and frustration

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Reading

Hi the reader volume changes so often to very sift then very loud, it made listening ti it uncomfortable and detracted from the book. I couldn’t finish it. I only got a few chapters in

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The novel of our times

Mortality is bad enough but what comes after mortality?

The living sea of waking dreams is a riddle of sorts.

A novel beautifully layered like sedimentary rock cut open like cake and sprinkled with the careless graffiti of anthropocentric footprints. The ribbons of stories create vertigo and the sense of falling (and disappearing) creates a raw stability and clarity to the anxiety inducing clamour of white noise that shatters our ability as humans to stop, think and reflect. Rather we fly, sink and dip like a kite without a string carried in eddies and zephyrs to nowhere.

An apocalyptic novel with hope. Set in Australia. About families and love and our dwindling connection to the natural worls behind our screens (like me now).
A disturbing question is what if our demise as a species is natural and we are happy to see it happen that way? The only way to save ourselves is by dying and being reborn. I wonder if Flanagan is a Buddhist at heart.

Be prepared to be angry, smiling, smug, guilty and reminded that great books are those that tell us that we are not alone in how we think or feel. A great writer has the ability to communicate and see what we can only do in fragments of dreams or broken musings. Words are inadequate. The sea is alive in us as the most primal connection we have to the earth, life and each other. Perhaps we need to go backwards to go forwards. Or be still to feel anything at all.

The inside cover of the book with its closeup of luminous green parrot feathers is beautiful enough to captivate one for a few moments at least. But the novel will do and linger long after the book has closed like the lid of a small bird-sized coffin.

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3 people found this helpful