Resumo de Praise - Andrew McGahan

Andrew McGahan is one of Australia?s best contemporary writers, recently winning the 2005 Miles Franklin Award, Australia?s most prestigious literary prize, for his 2004 novel White Earth. Praise is the book that began it all for McGahan, a farmer?s son from a grazing property in the northern Australian state of Queensland.

Set in the early 1990s, Praise follows the misadventures of Gordon, a university drop-out ambling through life on the cheap in the seamy inner-city suburbs of Brisbane, Queensland?s capital city. Meandering from one day to the next through a booze-addled haze of dead-end jobs, low-rent digs and welfare cheques, Gordon lives a listless, passionless life. A chronic asthmatic, he fumbles his way into a relationship with Cynthia, a recovering junkie with severe eczema and a voracious sexual appetite.

Semi-autobiographical, Praise traces Gordon and Cynthia?s relationship as it flatlines through the day-to-day meaninglessness of two lives lived without purpose or ambition. The couple stumble, drink and wheeze their way through a series of crises ? abortion, drug abuse, impotence, and, inevitably, break-up. Framed against the backdrop of an economic recession which plagued Australia at the start of the 90s, the book is sardonic and darkly comic in tone, a gritty and uncompromising portrait of two everyday anti-heroes sharing intoxication and illness.

Gordon?s sheer lack of aspiration, though miserable, is paradoxically liberating. He rejects the mantle of little Aussie battler striving to make good in a climate of downsizing, joblessness and crushing interest rates, and opts instead for an unencumbered existence sustained by dole payments and cheap wine.

Winner of the 1991 Australian/Vogel Award for best unpublished manuscript, Praise is both depressing and enlightening. Like the characters it depicts, the novel is compellingly aimless, gripping without going anywhere ? a frank account of apathy, anxiety and dysfunction among the unemployed and unemployable living in the Lucky Country.

McGahan also won an AFI award for his screenplay for the film version of Praise, released in 1998. Praise stars Peter Fenton, Sacha Horler and Joel Edgerton, and was directed by John Curran.

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