Patrick White is a rare and colossal talent of world stature, and the only Australian writer to have won the Nobel Prize. Thomas Keneally, who owed him no favours, justly said: `On his day, White is better than Faulkner.' White is the recipient of the only fan letter Salman Rushdie admits to having written to another author. He towers over ... Read morethe Australian literary landscape as does Goethe over German literature: lonely, vast, unique. He is not particularly difficult or tricksy, like his peers Nabokov or Beckett. His fiction is rooted in, and nourished by, the epic dramas of the great nineteenth-century/early twentieth-century authors like Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence. He is both exciting and moving, understands women as few male novelists do, and addresses universal themes in a prose that is entirely and compellingly his own. Show Less