Voss

A German explorer attempts to cross the Australian continent. He will not make it. The journey is the point.

Why Start Here

Johann Ulrich Voss leads an expedition into the Australian interior in the 1840s while simultaneously conducting a strange, intense relationship with Laura Trevelyan, a young woman in Sydney who has never left the city. Their connection, conducted largely through letters and, as the novel progresses, something that feels like telepathy, is one of literature’s great examinations of ego, spiritual pride, and the will to dominate nature itself.

White based the novel on the real explorer Ludwig Leichhardt and used it to ask questions about Australia’s relationship with its own landscape: a continent that refuses to be domesticated, that kills those who approach it with arrogance rather than humility. The prose is dense and sometimes difficult, but it contains passages of extraordinary beauty.

What to Expect

A long, immersive novel that demands patience and close attention. Dense, sometimes baroque prose that rewards re-reading. Parallel narratives that gradually converge. A protagonist who is neither sympathetic nor entirely unsympathetic, a study in the pathology of the will. One of the great novels in English, and largely unread outside Australia.