conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a book titled The Salt of Broken Tears about Australian, walkabout, Australia with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The vast, sparsely settled wilderness of the Australian outback is the setting and true protagonist of this manifestly heavy-handed and obscure (in both language and theme) debut "walkabout" novel, which was published in 1999 to high praise in Australia. A sensual, free-spirited young woman, hardly more than a teenager and offering few clues to her past, stumbles half-naked into the mundane existence of a family farming the margins of the desolate Australian salt flats. Accustomed to being the focus of male attention, the wife is jealous and resentful. Aroused by the young woman's sexuality, the farmer's postpubertal son indulges his voyeuristic obsession, spying on her clandestine late-night trysts with a loutish farmhand. She suddenly vanishes the morning after the boy sees the handyman strike her in anger, and the only clue is a bloody dress neatly laid out across the straw in the stable and a smashed cardboard suitcase spilling her possessions. Convinced she has gone off to join Cabel Singh, a charismatic, nomadic Indian peddler, the boy takes his horse and dog and sets out across the wasteland to find them. Repetitive, tedious, overly detailed descriptions (an exhaustive inventory of the contents of a minor character's car stretches over several pages) of featureless landscape and gratuitous characters mar this convoluted, disjointed narrative as the dispirited odyssey moves back and forth in time. Bright spots are a scattering of strongly crafted musings by the central characters. In the end, however, there is little resolution and virtually no sense of redemption. </P><P>Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.</P>
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the first sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A sensual, free-spirited young woman, hardly more than a teenager and offering few clues to her past, stumbles half-naked into the mundane existence of a family farming the margins of the desolate Australian salt flats. Accustomed to being the focus of male attention, the wife is jealous and resentful. Aroused by the young woman's sexuality, the farmer's postpubertal son indulges his voyeuristic obsession, spying on her clandestine late-night trysts with a loutish farmhand. She suddenly vanishes the morning after the boy sees the handyman strike her in anger, and the only clue is a bloody dress neatly laid out across the straw in the stable and a smashed cardboard suitcase spilling her possessions. Convinced she has gone off to join Cabel Singh, a charismatic, nomadic Indian peddler, the boy takes his horse and dog and sets out across the wasteland to find them. Repetitive, tedious, overly detailed descriptions (an exhaustive inventory of the contents of a minor character's car stretches over several pages) of featureless landscape and gratuitous characters mar this convoluted, disjointed narrative as the dispirited odyssey moves back and forth in time. Bright spots are a scattering of strongly crafted musings by the central characters. In the end, however, there is little resolution and virtually no sense of redemption. </P><P>Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.</P>
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first three paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Salt of Broken Tears
  Well I remember how she blew in off the track that windy day more than a year ago, borne in like a thistle seed on the hot winds that beat in from the north, clothed in nothing but the green cotton dress that flicked and chopped about her, a patched and faded relic of some other person's life, and she carrying nothing, bringing nothing of her own but her taut bare freckled body and sandwhipped hair in auburn streaks that ran before her in the wind, a smile of impertinent white teeth and an improbable tale about a wagon on the road and a farmer gone suddenly unhelpful, a ragged tear in her dress at the waist and a broken wheel and a recommendation—no paper, mind, just her own account, such as didn't make much sense in the telling anyway—from a Lutheran pastor over at Rainbow who might for all that we knew never have existed at all.
  Well I remember how she landed in on us that day and the whole place ablow at the time, the screen doors crashing and no-one ready then to push her back out onto the track again in that kind of wind, no-one going into town that week and she offering as soon as she could walk again to stay on and help with the children or down at the shed or just about anything we could want, and we—both my husband and I—feeling that it was our duty before God at least to feed her and put some decent clothing upon her back before setting her off back down the track towards the no thing from which she had come, no family she could speak of and her only past the fading voice of some unknown pastor of another creed.
  Well I remember, too, how she made her way slowly up the track towards the house with the children calling me wethanded from the copper to watch a thing unlike we had ever seen before, a bareheaded and barefoot girl making her way up along the track alone, with the nearest town twenty miles distant and not to be walked by man or beast in the heat and wind and the sand toiling hot between her bare toes and the sandflies piping and teasing at the flapping hem of her skirt, with the farm dogs bounding and snapping in play about her and the men whistling as she limped hatless past the sheds, the ragged dress blowing up over her legs and half up around her woman's waist and she part blushing and part seeming to be loving it, half crazed and half excited by fatigue.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me four more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The boy didn't, and there was no red berry or a spot of colour anywhere that he could see, other than in the pale blue eyes that swam about him, but he nodded thoughtfully, because he felt that it might one day have a meaning for him.
  The rider said that he was a bagsewer, on his way to sew a stack of seed on a farm off to the east and south of the river. The boy asked him how he felt about spending his time sewing bags out in the open in this kind of heat, and the man told him that he couldn't see very much—that something bad had got in his eyes when he was in the war—but that he could still sew bags because bags were a matter of feeling your way and not seeing, and that because he could see nothing much, he could think about just about anything he chose while he worked along the open stacks.
  The boy began to feel as the bagsewer spoke about the sky and to the scrub that here was someone who might understand if he told him something about Eileen and the fires that led the way to the sustenance camp and the fleeing surveyor and his family and the Debt Adjuster staring out into the dead forest. But the bagsewer seemed to have got into a way of talking and wasn't about to stop. He had decided, he said, that it was important that he should tell the boy a story, and he could make of it what he would. So the boy just took another drink from the waterbag and sat back and listened.
  I looked for work in Paris. There wasn't much that I could do. I couldn't see a lot and didn't have much of the language and was just one among thousands of the living dead at that time, moving hungry through the streets. Eventually, after nearly starving, I managed to pull together enough of the language to be able to get work of sorts, sometimes loading boxes, sometimes building and after a time, in a bar.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Reverse the sentences.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Eventually, after nearly starving, I managed to pull together enough of the language to be able to get work of sorts, sometimes loading boxes, sometimes building and after a time, in a bar.. I couldn't see a lot and didn't have much of the language and was just one among thousands of the living dead at that time, moving hungry through the streets. There wasn't much that I could do.
  I looked for work in Paris. So the boy just took another drink from the waterbag and sat back and listened. He had decided, he said, that it was important that he should tell the boy a story, and he could make of it what he would. But the bagsewer seemed to have got into a way of talking and wasn't about to stop.
  The boy began to feel as the bagsewer spoke about the sky and to the scrub that here was someone who might understand if he told him something about Eileen and the fires that led the way to the sustenance camp and the fleeing surveyor and his family and the Debt Adjuster staring out into the dead forest. The boy asked him how he felt about spending his time sewing bags out in the open in this kind of heat, and the man told him that he couldn't see very much—that something bad had got in his eyes when he was in the war—but that he could still sew bags because bags were a matter of feeling your way and not seeing, and that because he could see nothing much, he could think about just about anything he chose while he worked along the open stacks.
  The rider said that he was a bagsewer, on his way to sew a stack of seed on a farm off to the east and south of the river.The boy didn't, and there was no red berry or a spot of colour anywhere that he could see, other than in the pale blue eyes that swam about him, but he nodded thoughtfully, because he felt that it might one day have a meaning for him
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: It was towards the middle of the day, with the high heat rising all about her and her straw hat shading her amid the sprays of mallee that fanned the route, her arms and legs bare in the cotton sundress. Again she felt the sweet sting of gumnuts and burrs and broken sticks upon her skin as she sat crosslegged in the sand, with the sun climbing and the sandflies piping and the sweat running in streams inside her dress. She had wondered in the reckless daze of midday heat if she might leave her bag and hat and all she had been given, and move off one more time towards the drifts and wild country, move off again like the wild goats and live upon the soaks and roots and wild honey, or try her gentle death amid the drifts.
  Then he passed and saw her with no surprise as though he knew that she would one day be sitting in the sand beside his track, and he held out his hand to her. Upon that road, amid the slow padding of his dog and the twitching of the horses' tails, against the flies and the creak and clatter of the slow wagon with its hobbles swinging and its clashing pans, they began to talk, speaking just a little and soon as she had spoken to no-one, of the life that was before, and then more strongly to the strengths of Cabel's silence, of casual kindness and of causeless cruelty, of a child making no sense of the kindness or the cruelty but living yet in the mute hope of the healing body that remakes itself in the running of sweat and the flowing of blood, and thinking always and against all betrayals of perhaps the next day and perhaps the next place with its green shaded places and singing windmill as the place she might call home.
  He told her tales, and this time of a man called Cabel Singh, and as he spoke she held his arm and ran her fingers along his skin and touched the hand that held the reins, and he talked to her not as before his fire in the nights but this time of a knowledge of pain and of broken walls and youthful bodies taken, and of bodies torn apart. She also spoke, and this time in words that she had never used or never put together in such ways, or perhaps she did not speak at all, for he seemed to know her thoughts as she knew his. They talked together of the heat and distance, and the track ahead and the dry lands that lay behind, and they took their joy in the sun gleaming on the sand drifts to the north, and in the light breeze that sprang up behind them and ran their dust about them as they moved. They saw a living in the motion of the winds and moving clouds of dust, a wisdom in the trackless seas of bushland that ran off to the north, saw that the past was just another country among a thousand countries they might cross, and that they had no need of this fragment that people called Eileen or of this broken shard called Cabel Singh, which was not today what it was yesterday and which will not be known tomorrow, that their own story was just one among a thousand stories they might not choose to tell Time beyond time, she told how she would come with Cabel Singh along that track like a thistle seed on the hot winds from the north, and out again from time and anger and beyond the wire and iron and harried earth and scars of trees and tethered dreams and all the tracks and fencelines of constrained desire, and for the strength and knowledge that it gave each time would ride again into blue seas of untracked and untenantable forest and out across the silver flood of moving waters that part and circle in the floating air. They would run north by Pheeny's Tank and Monkeytail and laughing through the forests of the dead, along Nowingi's broken dreamlands and down by Carwarp to the waters of Kulkyne. Together they would ride with no thought between them beyond the thought that lifts the bark from trees or tears the lignum from the earth or echoes in the sounds of birds, and they would blow like rolling lignum past the still and unseen waters of Timboram and Wahpool and on beyond the floating earth of Tyrrell Downs, through the winds that break about Nandaly and the tall stacks of Pier Millan, eastward to the ocean kingdom, where they would walk upon the silver parting waters, and all the land about them would rise and fade and float apart and with it all their names and all their doing. And one day there would be no Eileen and Cabel Singh, but only travellers in stories, nothing left of them but tales of wanderers that move always and have no end but only a beginning; and Cabel Singh and she would meet always in stories that began before ever they began, and would not end at that time when they met their ending.
  He left his hat behind him on the salt, and strode on across the crumbling surface towards the low banks and pinkgrey cliffs that lay beyond the mirage waters, and as he moved closer towards the shore, the tops of the cliffs began to appear through the shifting haze. As he walked he threw away his canvas haversack and unbuttoned his heavy coat, which was soaked and dripping still with the blood of the horse or perhaps it was the blood of Cabel Singh, and he let it fall, a dark and tangled blemish on the salt. He then pulled off his shirt which stank in the sweat that had coursed about his body under the heat of the coat, which dragged like hooks upon the scabs of the sores that had broken out upon his body, and he threw it away so that it too lay as a dark blot on the salt behind them. As he moved closer towards the cliffs the airy waters trembled and parted and ran off behind him to the south, and through the parting haze he could see upon the cliffs and amid the windtorn trees the shape of moving figures, the outline of trucks and carts moving about, the black stickfigure shapes of people walking about the cliffs and making their way down towards the beaches, but with most just waiting above and upon the heights, for they would now be able to see him, moving beyond the seas of floating light. They would now see him walking towards them, and far behind him now the clouds of black smoke that drifted upwards and out across the lake, amid the brightness of the vacant air.
  He saw people collecting there, more people now than he had seen for weeks, from Daytrap itself and Chinkapook and from up at Nandaly and down the Chillingollah road, people who had perhaps already heard the story of the boy and his pursuit of Cabel Singh. They watched but did not move from the shade of the straggling trees that clung to the edge of the cliffs. As he came closer he loosened the twine that held his castoff trousers with their baggy cuffs. He let them drop and kicked them off across the salt, and then at last the heavy boots that he had now worn for weeks with their torn seams and dragging rope and the flapping sole that had mocked at him for days. He walked onwards towards the watchers on the cliffs, the teacher perhaps from the little school that he had passed, and no doubt the policeman and perhaps his wife from Berriwillock and perhaps even Joe Spencer and his mates now sober and in deep remorse, and perhaps even someone who might know something, he thought for just one moment as he walked without his boots and in a full nakedness, a nakedness which despite the sores and sweat and flow of blood drew all the brightness of the salt to the whiteness of his body, his body blazing in the white shock of reflected sun. He felt the crumbling crystal of the saltcrust upon his feet and the uneasy softness as the black mud forced its way up between his toes, and his dog still hopped alongside him and the old pony to the rear, and all the three were clad only in the blood of the horse or with the blood of Cabel Singh; and he wondered in his last moments upon the lake, before he crossed over the saltbush beaches and strode fast and tall towards those waiting on the cliffs, if there might not be someone among the watchers who would know something, who might have heard the still voice of Eileen.