'A self-portrait that is as brilliant original as White's fiction and drama.
'In this remarkable self-portrait Patrick White explains how on the very rare occasions when he re-reads a passage from one of his books, he recognises very little of the self he knows. This 'unknown' is the man interviewers and visiting students expect to find, but 'unable to produce him', he prefers to remain private, or as private as anyone who has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature can ever be. In this book is the self Patrick White does recognise, the one he sees reflected in the glass.'
Source: Publisher's blurb (Vintage ed.).
'This chapter will build on recent work by Elizabeth McMahon and Christos Tsiolkas to situate Australia’s first Nobel Prize winner as a queer modernist with his own distinct political valence. Written by the foremost Chinese scholar of Australian literature, Chen Hong, this chapter explores Whites epochal career. It covers White’s novelistic oeuvre from The Aunt’s Story (1948) through to his late queer masterpiece, The Twyborn Affair (1979).' (Publication abstract)
'Flaws in the Glass, by Australian Nobel laureate Patrick White, ostensibly an autobiography, is offered to the reading public as a self-portrait. In my paper I do not intend to go deep into the matter of technical distinctions between different forms of autobiography, but a few remarks need to be made on the subtitle of this autobiographical narrative accompanying its metaphorical title as a tell-tale definition of the author holding up the mirror to himself and to the teacher.' (p. 75)
