The Solid Mandala

Description

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. In The Solid Mandala Patrick White draws a telling and touching portrait of twin brothers. Waldo is the competent man of reason, he sees himself as the superior intellect. Arthur, accepted as a half-wit is the innocent, God's fool, loving and outgoing in a blundering way. As they compete with and care for each other through half a century, their lives are inextricably intertwined - the two sides of a man's nature forming a totality.

Patrick White was born in England in 1912 and taken to Australia, where his father owned a sheep farm, when he was six months old. He was educated in England at Cheltenham college and King's College, Cambridge. He settled in London, where he wrote several unpublished novels, then served in the RAF during the war. He returned to Australia after the war. He became the most considerable figure in modern Australian literature, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. The great poet of Australian landscape, he turned its vast empty spaces into great mythic landscapes of the soul. His position as a man of letters was controversial, provoked by his acerbic, unpredictable public statements and his belief that it is eccentric individuals who offer the only hope of salvation. He died in September 1990.