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book is based, and paintings of a face painted by his mother. He realizes he's seen and drawn this face before and has been haunted by it. Jasper also realizes that he will not become his father - his greatest fear - because his mother is part of him as well. He sets off to Europe in search of his mother's past, and bought a plane ticket to Czech
Republic, with financial assistance from Anouk who has become the richest woman in Australia because her husband and her father-in-law had died in a jet crash.
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pregnancy, Astrid becomes crazy, repeatedly painting a violent and horrific face and trying to converse with God. She becomes angry when God does not respond, so Martin starts pretending to be him, answering her questions while hiding in the bathroom. He learns a great deal about her, and realizes that she is becoming suicidal. After giving birth to Jasper, Astrid commits suicide.
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Jasper's first girlfriend, but everything ends in shambles when Jasper discovers that she is having an affair with her ex-boyfriend, Brian the newscaster. Finally, with the assistance of Anouk ( they begin to sleep with each other), Martin finds his purpose in life: to tell his ideas. Jasper left home after find out about Martin and Anouk and rented an empty studio.
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telling his brother that the two criminal kids, whom Terry would later join, are cheating. These kids had been beating Martin up, and he knows that telling Terry this lie would make him go after them. Terry does go after the bullies, and they stab him in the leg. This injury cripples Terry for life and renders him incapable of playing sports.
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all. He has not been killed in the fire, but instead has just run away and employed Eddie to give money to the Deans and take photographs. Terry has become very fat, and is the head of an entire criminal group. He has also forgotten about love, but instead has three prostitutes as friends whom he hires almost every night.
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that the local population are happy with their existing doctor and his apprentice. He poisons them and upon discovery the village turn on Eddie and all of the Deans. Eddie and
Caroline are killed. With Martin nearly dead from his cancer, he says he wants to die in Australia and Jasper decides to go with him.
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Terry arranges it for Jasper and Martin to be smuggled back to
Australia on a smuggling boat. On their return Jasper and Martin bond for the very first time. They enjoy each other's company and understand each other better. Just when Australia comes in sight, Martin dies smiling, and his dead body is
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Out of the few randomly selected winners, Caroline, his true love from his childhood, is picked. Right before the ceremony, they get engaged, as do Anouk and the son of the wealthy man who had helped them. While presenting the first millionaires, Martin declares that he is running for prime minister.
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Martin comes up with a way to make everyone in
Australia a millionaire, using a system similar to a lottery. He proposes the idea to Anouk, who helps get it approved by the most wealthy man in Australia and his son, both of whom are in charge of the nation's network of tabloids and paparazzi artists.
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When Martin is released, he buys a rotting, broken-down house in the middle of nowhere. With Eddie's money, Martin builds a house and labyrinth on the property to have maximum privacy. Jasper, in high school, meets the
Towering Inferno (real name unknown) and starts a physical affair with her. She is
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Eddie continues to help the Dean family financially. The Deans meet another central character, Anouk. Although they meet on undesirable grounds (Anouk vandalizes Martin's car), they become close family friends, as Martin hires Anouk to clean for them. Martin is deemed mentally unstable and is sent to
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Martin's mother is diagnosed with Cancer, and Martin vows that he won't leave her, effectively trapping himself in the town he hates. Once the town burns down, killing his mother and stepfather, and burning down the prison, he leaves town for good, having wanted to for so many years. Before he leaves
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Martin gives Jasper a highly detailed account of his own childhood. He has dealt with many problems in his life, from Terry's criminal behavior, to Martin's own depression, to his four-year coma, to his mother poisoning him while she went mad from fear of her terminal cancer. Martin clearly remembers
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Jasper Dean is Martin Dean's illegitimate son and Terry Dean's nephew. He narrates most of the novel, save some sections which are narrated instead by Martin. Jasper's difficult relationship with his father is the central subject of the book, and he leads a confused childhood due to Martin's constant
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Eventually Jasper reveals who he is and he is released after a series of inquiries about his father and confirm his death. The authorities take him to a storage room where Martin's belongings have been stored. Jasper is convinced it is mostly junk but discovers Martin's diaries, on which some of the
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Soon afterwards it is revealed that
Caroline is having an affair with Terry. Martin is dying of cancer, Eddie has gone completely crazy and Jasper tries to get the family back together. Eddie, desperate to make his dead parents proud, tries to resume his pre-Dean career of being a doctor, but finds
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After escaping to
Thailand, with Eddie leading the way, Jasper, Caroline and Martin have no idea where they are going. They had never suspected that someone had been paying Eddie to be friendly to Jasper and Martin, yet he has hated them the entire time. It turns out that Terry has been alive after
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Soon after Martin's victory, he, Jasper and
Caroline are living happily. It is discovered that Eddie has committed fraud; he has fixed the whole idea, setting it up so Caroline and all of Eddie's friends would win. When the story gets out, ( Jasper revealed that to Towering Inferno and she revealed
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Martin leaves his hometown in
Australia for Paris. He has picked Paris because he figures that he may as well start where he believes Caroline Potts to be. He has traced the postcard he has received from her to the original address. Upon arrival, he learns that she has recently moved, and no one is
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Never named in the book. Martin and Terry's mother is a Jewish immigrant who arrived in
Australia by way of Shanghai after Martin's father is shot. Their mother is devoted to both sons. Terry's father is an alcoholic who took his wife to a small town in New South Wales when he found work building a
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Martin decides to live in Paris, where he meets two important people. Eddie comes off as a very friendly Thai who loves to take pictures and constantly takes Martin's photograph. Eddie is not the type of person Martin likes and he decides never to see him again but unfortunately for Martin, Eddie
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A hardened criminal residing in the prison that overlooks Martin and Terry's hometown. Harry is hired by Martin to act as a mentor for Terry's fledgling criminal operation. As Harry's sanity deteriorates, Martin becomes his only confidante, and Harry asks him for help in publishing his vision, a
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Martin also meets Astrid (real name or origin unknown) in a café. He finds her extremely attractive and assumes that his affair with her will be a one-night stand, but in fact it becomes the exact opposite. Astrid and Martin move in together, and Astrid unexpectedly becomes pregnant. During her
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uses a multi-perspective narrative, often going back in time to show Martin's perspective on events before returning to Jasper's story in the present. The framing narrative of the novel is written from the perspective of Jasper, writing secretly from the prison cell he is incarcerated in for an
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A beautiful woman whom Martin hires as a housekeeper after catching her keying his car. Her attempts to point out Martin's flaws lead to his psychological breakdown, but she becomes a voice of sanity who stays on to help the Dean family. She is constantly in the middle of a nasty breakup and is
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Martin comes up with the idea of a suggestion box, where everyone in town is welcome to enter recommendations for town life. It starts off well, but soon everyone in town is criticized by someone else. Each slip is anonymous, making it impossible for anyone to get mad, except at the person who
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Martin Dean, the father of Jasper Dean, is paranoid, philosophical, and intelligent. As a child, he spent four years and four months in a coma; upon waking up, the resulting unfamiliarity with the world led to his later misanthropy. Martin is transfixed by his inevitable death and will stop at
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A longtime friend of Martin's who met him in Paris. Jasper is suspicious of Eddie, as he takes long, unexplained vacations, constantly lends Martin money, and is always taking pictures of them. Eddie is trained as a doctor and dreams of returning to his home in Thailand to start a practice.
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A childhood love of both Martin and Terry and the daughter of the richest man in the town where they grew up. She leaves to travel the world, returning for her father when he is blinded in an explosion caused by Terry but eventually reappears, marrying Martin when they are both middle-aged.
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Terry Dean is Martin's younger half-brother. He is described as blond and handsome. He grew up as a natural athlete who loved sports with a religious fervor, hating all cheaters. When Terry is injured and can no longer take part in any sport, he turns to a life of crime, going from juvenile
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Anouk eventually marries Oscar, the son. They put him on the covers of all the newspapers. Martin becomes the most beloved person in the country, except for Terry. People often refer to Martin in terms of being Terry's brother. This annoys Martin, but he is happy to know he is famous now.
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Being beloved so much despite his foul speech, he is elected by a landslide so he continues his weird proposals make true in the country. With Eddie at his side helping with the lottery, it seems that nothing can go wrong, but eventually everything does.
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Jasper's mother, accidentally impregnated by Martin after a chance meeting on New Year's. Though Martin initially loves her, he becomes more and more exasperated with her as she sinks into depression during pregnancy. Jasper has never met her.
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The story jumps back to when Jasper was five, and was pulled out of school by his father, Martin. Rather than using a typical school curriculum, Martin teaches his son his beliefs about how life is, how it should be, and how to survive it.
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review by John Freeman was more negative, saying that while "there are a few nice moments", the novel "tries to create friction between Martin’s and Jasper’s different renditions of events, but this fails because they sound the same."
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invented the suggestion box. No one ever finds out that it was Martin. Finally, there is the loss of Martin's true love, Caroline, to Terry. After Terry is imprisoned, she leaves the town and visits every now and then.
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thrown overboard, just as he had requested. Jasper is arrested on the boat's arrival by immigration and Jasper ends up in a detention center, ( as shown from first chapter) grieving for his father.
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nothing to leave his mark on the world; this leads to a series of "immortality projects" which inevitably end up backfiring. He is also determined to indoctrinate his son Jasper with his beliefs.
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bizarre lessons and diatribes. His central conflict is a fear of turning into his father, and he often works to distance himself from Martin, though their bond is strangely loving in its own way.
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delinquency to a vigilante crusade against every cheating athlete in Australia. He is eventually captured, and later presumed dead when a brushfire burns down his prison.
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gave the novel a grade of "B", saying that "sometimes Jasper is laugh-out-loud funny. But just as often, his recollections are too dense and long-winded to penetrate."
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s Lon Bram said that "every sentence is a quotable aphorism clothed in light-hearted observations about human behaviour", and called it "a 700-page modern classic."
464:"a riotously funny first novel by Australian Steve Toltz that is harder to ignore than a crate of puppies, twice as playful and just about as messy."
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that to Brian, who made the story as his great career comeback) Martin becomes the most hated man in Australia, and is forced to leave the country.
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becomes his dearest and longest friend. Eddie is always there for Martin, giving him jobs and money when he needs it.
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prison. He blames Martin for sending Terry down the wrong path in life, and has an uneasy relationship with Martin.
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he collects what he believes to be his brother's ashes from the prison, and scatters them in a puddle.
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mental institution. Jasper (Martin's child with Astrid) is sent to a foster home against his will.
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explain the fiction more clearly and provide non-fictional perspective
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593:"Steve Toltz pens a modern classic A Fraction of the Whole"
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for Crime Writing, Best First Novel, 2008: shortlisted
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describes a work or element of fiction in a primarily
521:, 2009: Winner of People's Choice Award for Fiction
722:"Miles Franklin Literary Award, The 2009 Longlist"
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697:"The Man Booker Prize 2008 | The Booker Prizes"
447:The novel received generally positive reviews.
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777:A Fraction of the Whole's official website
675:"Austlit — A Fraction of a Whole – Awards"
519:New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards
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83:Learn how and when to remove this message
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619:"Book Review: A Fraction of the Whole"
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567:"An Over the Top, Down Under Tale"
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617:Jordan, Tina (8 February 2008).
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565:Smith, Kyle (9 February 2008).
546:. National Library of Australia
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96:A Fraction of the Whole
21:Not to be confused with
817:Australian crime novels
571:The Wall Street Journal
542:A Fraction of the Whole
509:(UK), 2008: shortlisted
462:A Fraction of the Whole
457:The Wall Street Journal
327:A Fraction of the Whole
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225:A Fraction of the Whole
812:2008 Australian novels
495:Awards and nominations
425:Boat trip to Australia
300:versed in meditation.
31:The Part and The Whole
827:Hamish Hamilton books
797:On ABC Radio National
623:Entertainment Weekly
479:Entertainment Weekly
787:On Reviews of Books
701:thebookerprizes.com
228:is a 2008 novel by
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822:Family saga novels
792:On Readings.com.au
732:on 4 November 2014
654:The New York Times
515:, 2009: longlisted
487:The New York Times
365:quite sure where.
343:Martin's childhood
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726:The Trust Company
412:Deans in Thailand
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201:978-0-241-01529-2
161:Publication place
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241:Jasper Dean
230:Steve Toltz
146:, Australia
114:Steve Toltz
53:in-universe
806:Categories
526:References
452:Kyle Smith
304:Harry West
259:Terry Dean
236:Characters
203:(hardback)
677:. Austlit
443:Reception
216:192043157
180:Paperback
165:Australia
140:Publisher
73:July 2010
176:Hardback
120:Language
460:called
174:Print (
124:English
59:Please
758:29 May
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681:29 May
659:1 June
633:1 June
602:1 June
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550:29 May
377:Middle
277:Astrid
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110:Author
403:Fraud
295:Anouk
286:Eddie
190:711pp
187:Pages
134:Novel
130:Genre
55:style
29:, or
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708:2024
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322:Plot
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156:2008
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