It's rather hard to summarize the content of this collection as a whole, since most stories are written from the perspectives of character very different from one another (i.e. social background, personality, or simply the circumstance one's situated in). Readers who look for variety in content and themes would enjoy as they go along and explore - be ready to be unsettled. I personally prefer the portrayals of seemingly insignificant individuals - the slides of a life and the vision of the world - quite subtly done, in an almost absurd but triumphant manner. Each of the story also has a fairly different form, which makes this collection a good example for students of creative writing. The writing itself, needless to say, is precise and sometimes poetic. A good choice for those who look for surprises in short fiction.

Rampant postmodernism, yet highly unusual, inspiring and deeply intelligent. Murray Bail is weird! He must be! He has taken Australian cultural theory and run away with it. His irreverence towards the whole herd of Australian sacred cows is hilarious and yet written from a well informed historical standpoint. Through humour, he deconstructs the Menzies era and indeed the whole Americanisation of the country from the second World War into the sixtees. Bail also sees the effect that town planning has on its citizens. His description of Canberra is highly informative, downright cynical and yet a real scream. He sees through the sterility of the concentric circles and dead ends of Canberra and associates this strongly with the political mentality of our leaders, who of course, lead us around in circles and up blind alleys! I would recommend this novel to anyone interested in cultural theory, or indeed, anyone interested in an unusually honest and very funny deconstruction of the Menzies era. My only reservation is that the novel is perhaps a little lengthy, given the subject material. Nevertheless, it is well worth a read. John Magee

The book certainly had a magical quality about it, with the isolated setting of a private ranch, all the eucalyptus trees, the stories told by the mysterious stranger. I actually enjoyed all the botanical information about eucalyptus trees, as I have never considered them before.

However, I didn't fully understand where the story went. The father seemed a likeable enough character, but why did he impose such an impossible task to secure the marriage of his daughter-it seemed a draconian measure for someone who obviously loved her and would have wanted to see her happy. I wasn't sure what kind of person the daughter was and didn't have much personal feeling for her. I'm not sure how sympathetic I felt towards her- could she not have done more to avoid the fate imposed upon her by her father?

All in all, I enjoyed some of the fantasy-like qualities of the book, but felt it was unfocused in the message it was trying to put across.

Mainly a book of stories that wind around a plot, but for some reason, it works. It is about a girl named Ellen whose father is obsessed with his eucalyptus trees on a paddock in Australia. To find a husband for his daughter, he holds a contest: anyone who can name ALL of the species of eucalyptus on the property can have Ellen's hand. Many fail, but one who is kind and charming, but slightly arrogant, makes his first obligation naming the trees with her father; he barely pays Ellen any mind. The other man tries to win Ellen herself - the trees are secondary. He courts her by giving each tree a story, which makes up the better part of the book.

There is an airy feel to the story that makes it have a fairytale quality. I almost set it down halfway through because of its lack of substance. At points, it feels almost forced - like the author has to try very hard to get the tone he wants and only just makes it. The last half, howver, makes up for the beginning, though with facinating stories about imperfect people. It is a good attempt at a good idea, and that makes it worth the read.

...but that's not to say I didn't thoroughly enjoy this book at least 90% of the time. Eucalyptus feels more like a painting or a poem than a novel; there's a misty, surreal, magical tone to the crafting of the story, and sometimes I got a little lost, wondering what Australian path the author was leading me along.
The setup is that Holland planted on his land at least one each of all the hundreds of different varieties of eucalyptus and then declared that only a man who could name every tree correctly would be worthy to marry Ellen, his daughter. A fairy tale? Yes, sort of, and therein lies both the charm and the problem with this small book full of beautiful, if elusive, language.
Give it a try, though. It's worth it.

A novel, and fresh approach to explaining the wants, wishes, desires, expectations and behaviour of fictional AUstralian tourists in various parts of the world. Its as much about travel, as the human condition. A wonderful book, and explains alot about the tourist mentality.

Homesickness is the second novel I've read by Bail. It reads well though not as well as 'Eucalyptus'. From my own limited experience in traveling, 'Homesickness' does an excellent job of capturing the stereotypical tourist comparing every country to their own, usually in a less than flattering manner, sending home postcards with generic statements, and trying to go native. The museums the characters of the novel visit are strange, bordering on plain weird. From the (literal) Institution of Marriage to a corrugated metal museum, Bail leads us through each one with subtle humor. His sketch of each destination is done well, especially New York City and Russia. While this is an interesting novel, though the average reader might get lost by references to various aspects of Australia culture, I liked his more recent novel, 'Eucalyptus'. I think readers who travel a lot will find much of this novel amusing and dead on. A few of the sentence structures are strange such as missing commas or the syntax in unusual order that I had to reread a second time to understand. Just before Bail dumps the Australian tourists on their last trip to Russia, he provides his own experiences in Russia, which seemed like he wanted to include this extra material for the heck of it.

There are few literary movements as appealing to me as surrealism. Kafka, of course, was quite the master, and others have tried (mostly unsuccessfully) to follow his example. Then along comes Murray Bail, with this linguistically dazzlingly novel, who, in his own way, goes Kafka one better. Where Kafka described the bizarre with a serene, well-modulated prose, Bail describes the bizarre in a strangely halting, off-kilter syntax that so effectively puts us in the same plane as the strangeness he describes that it begins to take on a logic of its own.

Thus, when our group of 13 world travelers find themselves in New York, at a hotel that's in the process of being demolished, we barely blink at the description of the desk clerks wearing hard hats or the convention of rock climbers who are already making their way through the rubble. We don't blink, but we do smile.

And what can one say about any novel that features Roy G. Biv, with his "orange hair" and "blue nose" (complementary colors!) as a character who works at a cartographers in London? Or is his establishment merely an repository of words, nonce and otherwise?

Yet for all of the generous comedy that Bail provides, there is a creeping sense of darkness; not so much that nothing is what it seems (though it certainly is not!) but that the lives of the characters themselves, so "usual," so "settled," also seem so unbearably empty.

Make no mistake about it, this is not a "comic" novel. It's dark, haunting and, more often than not, devastatingly insightful. Murray Bail has created a masterpiece of the surreal. Anyone who warms to the profound disturbances of George Tooker or the often suffocating loneliness of Edward Hopper (one really must rely on painters as one's closest point of reference) will respond to this book.

And if it's any indication of my response, I've never reviewed a book for Amazon before. What a place to start!