Publishers Weekly
★ 07/08/2024
Booker Prize winner Flanagan (Toxic) weaves strands about his parents, Australian history, and the atomic bomb into a mesmerizing narrative tapestry in this dazzling, one-of-a-kind memoir. Flanagan begins with a meditation on how his father was interned in a Japanese POW camp near Hiroshima when the U.S. dropped the atomic bomb. He considers how the experience shaped his father into a man who saw life as a “great tragicomedy.” He contrasts his father with his more passionate mother, and reflects on the ways their combined “life force” saw them through poverty and pain. His examination of their relationship leads him to the affair between British writers H.G. Wells and Rebecca West, and then to Wells’s writings on the atom bomb. Further digressions delve into Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard’s warnings against nuclear energy, Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, and Tasmania’s colonial history; recurring themes of mortality culminate in a recollection of Flanagan’s near-drowning at the age of 21. Lyrical prose (“He would smile wanly, his face turning inside out, a concertina of wrinkles compressing his eyes into wry sunken currants”) complements the book’s oblique structure, aiding Flanagan in his construction of a bracing dreamscape that blends fiction, family, and history to illuminate his captivating consciousness. This is masterful. (Sept.)
From the Publisher
A haunting, jagged, sparkling narrative puzzle. . . . Fascinating work.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred)
“A dazzling, one-of-a-kind memoir. . . . A mesmerizing narrative tapestry. . . . A bracing dreamscape that blends fiction, family, and history to illuminate his captivating consciousness. This is masterful.” —Publishers Weekly (starred)
“Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 is a book itching to be quoted and underlined. A high-reaching philosophical enquiry that is also fully personal, it contains indelible, morally piercing moments about atrocity, inheritance, nature and the colonial experience. . . . I thought it was outstanding.” ―Anne Enright, author of The Wren, The Wren
“Extraordinary. . . . This is a work of non-fiction [but] it has all the complexity and emotional heft of a great novel. . . . It is not often that a book forces you to put it down repeatedly because you feel shaky. Question 7 did that to me. It is that good. . . . Memoir is fashionable just now. Question 7 sets the high-water mark for what the genre can be.” —James McConnachie, The Sunday Times
“Exquisite. . . . Masterful. . . . Flanagan is unfailingly good company.” —Clement Knox, Daily Telegraph
“Deeply affecting . . . [Flanagan is] a writer full of dazzling talents.” —Nick Duerden, i news
“Mesmerising. . . . Accompanying him on his literary quest is a transformative experience.” —Dani Garavelli, Big Issue
“Thoughtful and often beautiful, moving without effort between the very big and the apparently very small. Flanagan is a riveting writer.” —Rosa Lyster, Literary Review
“We believe we make choices in our lives, yet what explodes in these pages is the way in which the fiercest and strongest response we can make to the forces that threaten to destroy us is to surrender to love.” —Julia Samuel, author of Grief Works
“A beautiful, unclassifiable novel-cum-memoir. . . . Extraordinary. . . . That it is a masterpiece is without question. Sebald himself would have been proud of the subtlety, the depth, the intensity of thought and feeling.” —Alex Preston, The Observer
“Question 7 is written with a spectacular mixture of fierce energy and then control, care. It is a kind of reckoning, Richard Flanagan with his father and his mother, Tasmania with its past, Japan with its past, the author with himself. It seems to me a book that will have an overwhelming effect on readers. It certainly did on me.” —Colm Tóibín, author of Brooklyn
“A small masterpiece . . . It’s a memoir about his parents, interwoven with meditations on Tasmania, genocide, colonialism, the atomic bomb, H.G. Wells and Rebecca West. That sounds hard going but it is fiercely alive and genuinely hard to put down. Also: that cover. Phwoar.” —Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
“It is the greatest memoir of parents and place I have read—and this is hardly to touch on its originality. I was amazed by its intense moral and emotional rigour, its power of compassion, the strength and beauty of the prose. I would take it up, read a page, sometimes just a paragraph, and find I had to set it down, dazed, to think about every word and idea before I could even begin to go on. Devastating and beautiful, mighty in its rage and tenderness: his most momentous book yet.” —Laura Cumming, author of Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life and Sudden Death
“I was fascinated, troubled and enchanted by this strange and extraordinary work: part memoir, part love-letter to the place and people of Tasmania, and part philosophical inquiry into the nature of cause and effect . . . I can think of nothing else quite like it.” —Sarah Perry, author of The Essex Serpent
“Question 7 is a brilliant, brilliant book.” —James Rebanks, author of The Shepherd’s Life
“Question 7 is a profoundly moving love song for the writer’s parents, a forensic excavation, a lament, a confession, a jigsaw puzzle in which Hiroshima connects to H.G. Wells and the Martians colonise Tasmania. We are all competitive, of course, so this is not an easy thing to say: but Question 7 may just be the most significant work of Australian art in the last 100 years.” —Peter Carey, Sydney Morning Herald (Books of the Year)
“Question 7 is the strangest and most beautiful memoir I’ve ever read. Magnificent.” —Tim Winton, Sydney Morning Herald (Books of the Year)
“Sometimes a book is an experience felt almost in the body. Question 7 is such a book. It holds a life between its covers and while you read, it holds you too. A celebration of all life, it is also a reckoning with the twentieth century and what it revealed about us to ourselves. It is intimate, beautiful, unsparing and profound. It nudges at eternity, and then comes back home, to decency and love.” —Sydney Morning Herald (Books of the Year)
“It’s a big call to make for a Booker winner, but Question 7 could be Richard Flanagan’s greatest yet . . . So very personal and so very universal that it’s hard to shake.” —The Guardian (Best Australian Books of 2023)
“This deeply moving book is his finest work . . . Blending memoir and history and auto-fiction, this brilliantly unique book by the Booker winner is a treatise on the immeasurability of life . . . [It has] the psychological and philosophical sweep of Tolstoy, enmeshed in a personal essay that is tuned as finely as W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn . . . Replete with nuance . . . So astute . . . While reading I found myself abruptly shutting the book again and again and steadying my own heart with a hand at my throat. Only the best writing is so affecting that a reader has a physical reaction.” —The Guardian Australia
“How should we think about the radical experiment that is Richard Flanagan’s new book? Imagine the Tasmanian author’s body of work to date as a many-coloured coat, a shimmering patchwork of story. With Question 7 that coat is turned inside out so that the old, familiar patterns are reversed . . . Flanagan furnishes readers with an autobiographical key to his oeuvre. But he also argues, using these same means, for fiction’s equal standing in the creation of that shared consensual hallucination we call reality.” —The Australian
“Is Question 7 Flanagan’s best book to date? I think it may be. It is his most intellectually complex and personally emotional work.” —Stephen Romei, The Saturday Paper
“Beautiful and suffused with love . . . A slim volume of big ideas . . . As moving as it is arresting . . . Flanagan is in total command . . . He’s at his best here: this is a thrilling read, a simultaneously expansive and precise stream of consciousness . . . One of the real achievements of this book is how lightly it wears that complex interplay of the geopolitical, the historical and the personal. Because as tangled and varied as the allusions within these pages are, this is an intimate and personal work . . . What’s more, it ends with laughter.” —The Monthly
“Flanagan is a literary magician . . . In answer to the question, ‘can fiction change the world,’ Flanagan’s answer is ‘yes’ —for good and ill. Read this book and revel in the many ‘aha’ moments elicited by the masterful prose.” —ABC News Australia
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2024-06-15
The noted Australian author spirals through personal and collective history searching for connections between past and present, but often distrusting those that appear.
Flanagan, author ofThe Narrow Road to the Deep North, finds the struggle to create a credible memoir troubling, since most autobiographical work must be constructed from “the lies we call time, history, reality, detail, facts.” In this distinctly nonlinear example of the form, the author pulls at threads connected to key, often traumatic events. One of these nodes is the years his father spent in a Japanese internment camp during World War II. Flanagan notes that he almost certainly would have died of starvation were it not for the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima, leaving the author conflicted about the devastating loss suffered in Japan combined with the fact that he would never have existed without the catastrophe. He reaches back to tie the bomb to the life and work of H.G. Wells, who first conceived it in one of his lesser-known novels, and to Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, who was captivated by Wells' novels and who first conceived of the idea of a nuclear chain reaction. Another node is Flanagan’s shards of memory of his parents, including his mother's last words before her death at 95: “Thank you all for coming. I have had a lovely time.” A third key element of this fascinating work is Flanagan's prolonged near-death by drowning as a river guide when he was 21, to which he refers frequently throughout the book—and then at horrifying length in the final section. “Everything ever since,” he writes, “has been an astonishing dream….Perhaps this is a ghost story and the ghost me.”
A haunting, jagged, sparkling narrative puzzle in which the pieces deliberately refuse to fit.
