The Bone People: Booker Prize Winner (A Novel) Paperback – October 7, 1986

This was one of the best books I've ever read, and I've read a lot. Of the books I love, my relationship to those books are intellectual. My experience with The Bone People was purely emotional. From the first page I was hooked and I never looked back. This is a gut-wrenching read and not for everyone. It is not an easy read. It is a book that will never leave you, with characters you will never forget. This is one of the most unique books I have ever read. It is a book that requires a careful read. It is a timeless story. It is a love story, but not at all in the traditional sense. It is a story of three very damamaged people (one is a child) who come together and with all people that love each other, they have the power to heal each other, and destroy each other and over the course of this novel they do all this and more. It's a story of redemption and second chances. It's a harrowing yet fascinating look at the Maori culture. If you're considering reading this book - do so. If you can't get into it right off the bat, stick with it. This book is like no other. It won the Booker back in the 80s. Very highly recommended.

If you had problems with Joyce's Ulysses or Finnegan, this book will present a similar challenge, though more readable once you get used to the flow. Hulme is a brilliant, creative writer with a strong sense of narrative and the importance of detail presented with the sensibility and craftsmanship of a poet. Once you catch the drift of each character having an inner and an outer voice, as well as the usual good and bad selves at war within each of us, it becomes easier. Hulme is a spontaneous writer, but mostly careful in her use of punctuation to give you guidance to these voices. It will take reading the whole book to even begin to see the way Keri Hulme gathers, merges, and presents Maori and Celtic spirituality as simply another expression of all human condition. As a reader, I found myself questioning what was real, what was dream, what was afterlife, and how these various states are part of everything we do every day. It was interesting, beautiful, thought and debate provoking, a classic in my sense of the word, which means it is one of the books I intend to reread at least two more times before I depart this world --- if I ever do based on my reading of The Bone People.

It's a story that grabs your attention. Parts of it are quite graphic, and there is a substantial amount of language. A good read, if you're ready for heavy, but I would have liked a filtered version.

I chose to read this novel because it received international awards when published in 1984, because it rated a 4.06 in goodreads.com--a very high score--and because I'd never read a work of fiction about New Zealand's aboriginal people. The story is narrated in first person by a woman who appears white but has some aboriginal blood, an artist who deeply associates with native traditions, and we first meet her living alone in a tower she designed and built herself with friends in a spiral form sacred to aborigines: the chambered nautilus so fascinating for all of us, and so often repeated throughout nature.She lives alone; something in her has broken, and she finds herself unable to paint or draw at all. She's been disconnected from her family as a deliberate point of will for some time, but the point has proven a psychic hara-kiri from which she suffers daily.One day she sees a boy in her window, a window higher than any boy should be. Gradually she comes to know him, even though she fairly despises children. This boy cannot talk. His complexion is fair and his hair, white blond, falls below his shoulders. He appears to be about seven years old physically but has the bearing or spirit, the indescribable something, of an old man.Eventually, she meets the man this boy knows as father, a full aborigine--so he can't be the boy's natural father. Like many disaffected peoples who suffer diaspora and discrimination, the man is struggling in life, financially and spiritually. He yearns for ancient traditions even while deliberately estranging himself from them. He drinks too much beer. But the artist and the man share a connection through the boy. Over time, they begin to act essentially as a family, although the artist is clear from the beginning they can never have a sexual relationship. She doesn't need or want sex.Catastrophe forces her to face visceral horrors that break them up in every conceivable way.Then reality and science begin to interweave with an alternate, mystic reality. The future and the past begin to coalesce, rising separately then intermingling, like smoke from different, nearby fires. Life progresses from one home to another as the characters and their story grow, leaving one home for the next, and the one after that, as the entire tale begins to form the familiar construct of a chambered nautilus, in which the animal inside accretes section by section as it grows and expands.I loved this story first for its tough, sophisticated, and modern intellectual assessments. I loved it for its grittiness. Then I hated its grittiness but was intrigued by the shift into mysticism. Finally, I was inspired.Where the spoken language is aboriginal, please be sure to refer to the glossary at the back of the book for the translation. I didn't realize there was a page-by-page translation until quite late, and I found it worthwhile to go back and read again with better understanding. Perhaps for this reason there is no Kindle version of the book.This novel is for folks who understand that all who wander are not lost. It is for seasoned readers eager to leap into a willing suspension of disbelief. For well-reasoned people capable of feeling their souls expand when they give up the need to decipher.

I recently recommended this book to an old friend, knowing he would love it...and he did. He loved it so much, and hearing him talk about it made me want to read it again...for the 4th time! It takes place in New Zealand and the 3 central characters are people you have never met before: Kerewin, an eccentric, brilliant, curmudgeonly recluse who is half Maori and lives in a stone tower on the beach, Simon,a mute wild child, seemingly of European descent, that shows up in her house one day, and the boy's Maori step father, Joe. The relationship that forms between this unlikely trio is unique, difficult, and poignant. The writing is also unique, brilliant, poetical. I could go on and on. I'll just finish by saying, it became my favorite book when I first discovered it in 1989 and I am happy to discover that it still is.