The Vivisector.

WHITE, Patrick.

$250.00

Item Number: 146095

London: Jonathan Cape, 1970.

First edition of this work by “one of the great magicians of fiction . . . White’s scope is vast and his invention endless” (The Observer). Octavo, original cloth. Fine in a near fine dust jacket. Jacket art by Tom Adams. An exceptional example.

Hurtle Duffield, a painter, coldly dissects the weaknesses of any and all who enter his circle. His sister's deformity, a grocer's moonlight indiscretion, the passionate illusions of the women who love him-all are used as fodder for his art. It is only when Hurtle meets an egocentric adolescent whom he sees as his spiritual child does he experience a deeper, more treacherous emotion in this tour de force of sexual and psychological menace that sheds brutally honest light on the creative experience. Upon his death, The Times wrote, “Patrick White did more than any other writer to put Australian literature on the international map.… His tormented oeuvre is that of a great and essentially modern writer.”