Family Madness

by Thomas Keneally

Overview

The fatal and desperate politics of Eastern Europe collide with the comparative innocence and complacency of suburban Australian life in this powerful and disturbing love story about two families and the madness that invades their lives.

Terry Delaney's comfortable life is upset when he falls in love with Danielle Kabbel, daughter of charismatic emigre Rudi Kabbel, and succumbs to Rudi's obsessive visions of approaching doom.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780671885120
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	10/01/1993
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Thomas Keneally began his writing career in 1964 and has published thirty-three novels since, most recently Crimes of the Father, Napoleon’s Last Island, Shame and the Captives, and the New York Times bestselling The Daughters of Mars. He is also the author of Schindler’s List, which won the Booker Prize in 1982, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Gossip from the Forest, and Confederates, all of which were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He has also written several works of nonfiction, including his boyhood memoir Homebush Boy, The Commonwealth of Thieves, and Searching for Schindler. He is married with two daughters and lives in Sydney, Australia.

Editorial Reviews

The documentary interest of ''A Family Madness'' is considerable. Its achievement as a work of literary fiction is much less secure. Mr. Keneally's characters are curiously lacking in inwardness, in the suggestion of psychological depth. . . . I finished ''A Family Madness'' glad that I had read it but feeling that Mr. Keneally's often admirable fluency and dispatch had, in the long run, let him down. -- New York Times

Robert Towers

Keneally, who won England's Booker Prize for Schindler's List, here offers an intricately constructed, labyrinthine tale that unfolds on three levels. A traditional third-person narration chronicles events taking place in Penrith, Australia, in the early 1980s. Terry Delaney, a professional rugby player who takes a part-time job as a security guard, meets Rudi Kabbel, an emigre who runs his own security business. Their lives intersect in various ways, especially after the married Terry becomes involved with Rudi's daughter. Rudi is an eccentric, deeply scarred personality as a result of his tragic past in war-torn Europe, which is recounted in trenchant chapters entitled ``Radislaw Kabbel's History of the Kabbeleski Family.'' A more informed and shocking perspective on the horrors of the war is found in excerpts from Rudi's father Stansislaw's journal. Along with Rudi's history, they set the stage for the present-day demonstration of what is indeed a family madnessa madness that Terry must contend with in the novel's stunning conclusion. Keneally brilliantly combines three diverse narrative techniques, and while the book is not light or easy reading, it is enormously rewarding. (March)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Terry Delaney, a rugby player in Pernith, Australia, takes a job with a security firm run by Belorussian emigre Rudi Kabbel, a man ``marred by history.'' When Delaney falls in love with Rudi's daughter, he is drawn into the family's madness as they prepare to survive an apocalyptic annihilation and establish ``a true Belorussia of the spirit.'' In his ``History of the Kabbelski Family,'' Rudi recounts his harrowing experiences as a child in World War II when the Nazis occupied his homeland; and the journal of Rudi's father, Stanislaw Kabbelski, reveals the evil done in the name of patriotism by the Belorussians fighting for their independence. These three separate narratives are skillfully combined in a complex and powerful novel by one of Australia's leading writers. Kenealy's last book was the critically acclaimed Schindler's List ( LJ 10/82). Janet Wiehe, P.L. of Cincinnati & Hamilton County

Library Journal