The Bone People

Rating:
Summary: heart-breaking and volatile
Review: I cried so often and laughed at Simon as often, he to me is the exact nature of Spirit- daunting, compassionate, unconditional, and unpredicatable. Thank God for this book from one writer of fiction to another, it changed the way I view people in general and also removed many obstacles in my own- 'Kerewin like heart.'

Rating:
Summary: rich and wonderful writing
Review: I laughed at the reviewer (below) who said this was written by someone who had read too much Tolkien. I didn't like Tolkien, but I loved this novel and so did my whole book group (all women). We all loved the first part of the book and felt as if the author had phoned in the ending, which was disappointing, but I wouldn't not recommend it because of the ending. We started to compare our images of her wonderful house (all of us wanted to live there) and our images were totally different. I wouldn't go to court to support the author for her plot, but the relationships between the characters held me glued to the book anyway. This is a book in which the author rose above her own flaws. Well above ordinary writing.

Rating:
Summary: A wonderfully haunting story.
Review: This book affected me so much that two days after I had read it, I had to read it again. Hulme's characters are so real that I found myself smiling for them, as well as feeling a real sense of sadness. Her writing's both lyrical and blunt. I enjoyed the way she wrote from each charcter's voice. It really gave depth and insight to the story.

Rating:
Summary: A tough but overwhelmingly rewarding novel.
Review: Keri Hulme's The Bone People is a tough read - you must spend real time with this novel. But the language that makes it initially obtuse is the novel's greatest strength. Hulme says she spent more than a decade working, and the prose reflects this. The words literally spiral off the page through your skull and into everything else you approach. Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood, for all of their greatness, have produced nothing that reaches the writing of The Bone People.

Rating:
Summary: an adventure in literature
Review: I had trouble with the prose at first and found myself re-reading many passages, testament to the fact that Ms. Hulme made me WANT to understand each phrase and try to get inside the mind of her heroine. As other reviewers, I found myself crying and cringing and laughing and so totally into the characters that she so richly developed that I just can't wait for her to write another book. This was incredible. Thank you, Keri Hulme.

Rating:
Summary: less than one
Review: I'd like to add a p.s. to the note I sent off earlier this evening.

To the puzzled reader in Australia: The money that goes with the Booker prize is welcome to authors, but the award itself is meaningless. The winners of some prizes like the NBA are determined by taking a poll of other experienced writers or critics. I've been told that the winner of the annual Booker prize is determined by one man with a great deal of money and no apparent literary qualifications. If we were rich enough, we could establish our own Booker Prizes. The prize has been given to some outstanding books--and to some incredibly awful ones.

Rating:
Summary: Another -1 vote for the worst novel I've read in years
Review: I wouldn't have trashed this book except that I think the customers' reviews might deceive a sophisticated reading group. Mine selected this book, and I was homicidal(!).

The author was young when she wrote it, and since I wrote some pretty appalling things when I was young, my criticism is not of the author as she exists today.

The youthful author had no ear for language and no awareness of the properties of matter--so her metaphors got not only mixed but bizarrely mangled. I have seen writing this bad only in the annual Bulwar-Lytton contest. Examples: "'go down at night--down to Sheol or some other gibbering dark or ride the restless tumbril of dreams." "His mind weaves it into a spiral fretted with stars." "...an engraved spiral, one of the kind that wound your eyes round and round to the center..." "the secrets that crept and chilled and chuckled in the marrow of her bones." "'How touching,' says Kerwin's innermost being, squirming through a gamut of connotations..." etc. etc.

The novel feels as if it were written by an 18-year-old, still infatuated with Tolkien and still suffering from the illusion that grown-up sophistication and character consist of being a sarcastic loner and having lots of "interesting" tchatkes around the house. The initial descriptions of Kerwin and her home were so obviously adolescent that they made me blush to recall my own similiar silliness at 17.

The author's romantic fairy tale metaphors are wielded with the subtlety of bludgeons. She thinks that feyness is enchanting, so that she introduces mystery unwarranted by the plot--as if she were spraying Car-so-new into the air.

It's impossible to believe that Kerwin is an artist because nothing seen through her eyes is seen with an artist's eye. Physical description is minimal-and what little there is, is cliched or nearly unintelligible.

The characters have little physical reality and the author's notion of what happens during conversation is expressed almost entirely in terms of meeting or not meeting one another's gazes, grinning, blushing, or hiding emotions behind a "blank face." Kerwin, when alone, spends a lot of time staring at the fire or listening to the rain or the "omnipresent sea."

The adult characters act as a romantic (and somehwat depressed) young person imagines that adults act. Kerwin's supposed sophisticated prickliness is cartoonlike. I could no more believe in this novel than in an old-fashioned stage melodrama.

I can handle horrible prose or unconvincing characters or shallowness of insight--but not all three in the same novel. If you have any regard for your book group at all, do NOT suggest this novel.

Rating:
Summary: "kerewin at heart"
Review: while reading the story of kerewin, joe and simon, i became the "VIRTUAL" kerewin. her inexperience in being loved, her sensitivity to the young simon, her ability to understand his fear.. well she's my hero...also she's a great fisherwoman! (and i am too). i was found sobbing upon my daybed... my husband said, "what the hell's wrong with you now?" , and of course i couldn't explain...how could you explain it to a man. just a wonderful, emotionally moving book. thank you keri, (are you kerewin?)

Rating:
Summary: aue, e hoa ka pai
Review: a grieving thankyou to Keri Hulme... bitter heart, you heal my heart. one night i'd had too mush caffeine and i stayed up reading the bone people, the images all distorted in my mind, they were too real, i ended up crying. this is an amazing book, it will change your life. the moari language is so beautiful i find myself using the phrases to express my most intense emotions. aue, e hoa, ka pai.

Rating:
Summary: This is one of the most powerful and moving books.
Review: The bone people is the type of book that you sit and become so involved with the characters that you become a participant. This book brings you to the highest peaks of joy and drags you to the pits of dispair, pity, and sorrow. This is truely one of my favorite books and I've read it numerous times, discovering new details that add to the theme of human emotions and relationships.