Customer Reviews
Terminal boredom - By: A. J. Deighton, 08 Oct 2008 
The dog didn't get lost he just couldn't stand any more of the tripe.
I have never experienced a book that bored me more. I struggled to page 34 & then decided that life was too short to waste any more time reading it.
An example of the tedium:
"Tom turned his head & saw a woman in a loose, dark dress that fell to mid-calf. Red beads about her neck, her twisted hair secured with a scarlet crayon".
What is this book - a fashion magazine?
How do these books get on the Man Booker long list?
Lost Me - By: Airly_2904, 25 Aug 2008 
Why do some authors think that writing about art is what makes life interesting... shouldn't it be the other way around?
There are some marvellous uses of language throughout but the characters & their relationships fell flat for me. Nelly was such a self-absorbed artist she bored me from early on. The others were similar. Why does someone have to "suffer for their art" to be supposedly interesting? And if they're not an artist struggling with the Meaning of it alll, they are a hardened lawyer or a likeable foul mouthed neighbour. No thanks. My favourite part was the Tom visitng his aunt.
"The lost dog unleashing in him a kind of grace, a kind of beastliness." - By: Michael Leonard, 06 Jun 2008 
A richly imagined exploration of the myriad connections between art & life, The Lost Dog is part mystery & also part character study of one man, an immigrant in one country & an isolated, misunderstood child in another. Tom Loxley is haunted by his childhood in India, a glamorous, doting mother & a father who although extravagant & a drunk, is able to bring his family to make a new life for themselves in 1970's Australia.
It is these sights, sounds & smells of his ancestral home which shape Tom's attitides to his new country. Even in his mid-thirties, working as a semi-successful literary professor, while also working on a book about Henry James, Tom criticallly examines those around him, still emotionallly attached to his octogenarian mother Iris whose arthritic knees are steadily diminishing her quality of life, & later, his ex-wife, who over the years after their divorce has treated Tom with a mixture of disdain & condescending authority.
Only when Tom suddenly loses his dog in the Australian bush while working on his book, the last vision he sees is of the animal lean & white, rust-spotched, springing up a bank, does his story spring back to seven months earlier, beginning with a painting he sees st an art galllery he hadn't entered in the four years since his wife left. It is here at a group show of four young artists that Tom meets the Chinese-Australian artist & photographer, Nelly Zhang who instantly attracts him with her mysteriousness & ambiguities.
Soon enough he's visiting Nelly at The Preserve, a ramshackle warehouse which serves as her home & studio, which also she shares with her son teenage son, Rory & the beautiful fellow artist Yelena, who "men circle like moons." But it is Nelly that Tom is most emotionallly attracted too, even as she stages elaborate scenarios that mimic the solidarity of truth. Tom is a man who seems to exist in a remote world, his days carefully constructed, his concerns about Iris's failing health threatening to consume him, & then there's the problem of what to do about his lost dog.
Certainly, the days he spends at The Preserve, make him realise how acute his loneliness has been, this tightly knit collection of people offering companionship & conversation & reflecting Tom's increasing need for Nelly & for the world that she had created & the sense of being caught up in her wide spate of imaginative work. But in the end Nelly's indistinct world seems to offer more questions than answers: even as she steadily endears herself to Tom, there are ambiguities eddying her surface, the sweetness that ran in her depths, a detailing of good fortune, precluding a failed relationship, a famous husband who went missing, & rumours of an unhappy marriage where there were always arguments about money.
As Tom tries to piece together alll these bit & pieces, the little unconnected facts about Nelly's life, while also longing to know more about Nelly's short-lived marriage, he also continues to search for his dog, the missing animal a powerful metaphor for Tom's own life in Australia, where his past childhood in India keeps glimmering to the surface: a declining family of dowager ladies, servants, of a tin-roofed out-bungalow on a tea garden in the Nilgris & a coarse grandfather who had continues to believe in the supremacy of the English race until his death, & a neurotic procession in the form of gurus & lovers winding back to Tom's childhood. Now the estimable Nelly has her own place in Tom's "diaphanous parade."
This novel swirls with kaleidoscopic images of contemporary Australia, de Krester's prose coming across like a churning & whirling abstract painting: the cattle raising their heavy heads, magpies driving their beaks into damp earth, a stand of eucalypts in a park & graffiti on an overpass. The descriptions of urban mallls & the outskirts of the city are juxtaposed with a past that constantly waits Tom, as he remembers the aromatic streets of his childhood: the feces animal & human lingering on display, "his youth odorous, unhygienic & refusing to be disposed of with decent haste."
An exhilarating concoction of the past & the present, the author combines the elements of the mystery into a type of intellectual exploration on the nature of art & its place in contemporary society, with Tom - & Nelly - acting as ciphers & symbols for the way we see & view the world. Ultimately history sinks beneath of the imperatives of the present in this novel, a story of one man trying to find his place in a chaotic & senseless world & an artist whose vision is symptomatic of a more profound desire: to drag moments of perception from "the gray ooze of oblivion" into a bright new world. Mike Leonard June 08.
