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| Gerald Murnane | |
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| Topic Started: Jul 5 2010, 08:29 AM (2,401 Views) | |
| Tatzelwurm | Jul 5 2010, 08:29 AM Post #1 |
Gran madrugador y amigo de la caza
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Repeatedly mentioned by our friend Funhouse. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Murnane |
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| Funhouse | Jul 5 2010, 08:40 AM Post #2 |
Perpetually Lost
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Huh, I never quite got around to starting a thread on him, so thanks for doing it for me, Tatz. I've still only read The Plains at this point, but I'll definitely read more soon, as it totally blew me away. |
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| Tatzelwurm | Jul 5 2010, 09:17 AM Post #3 |
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Gran madrugador y amigo de la caza
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I stumbled on him in the discussion of difficult books on The Millions, and then a bit of search revealed that he'd already been mentioned hereabouts. A very interesting character, who seems to have never left his native Australia. |
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| oneofmurphysbiscuits | Jul 5 2010, 01:07 PM Post #4 |
marmalade modernist
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Not "difficult" books again! i suppose it's relative to what people are used to but...I bought one of his books on Funhouse's recommendation, still to be read but very interesting from the looks of |
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| Tatzelwurm | Jul 5 2010, 01:22 PM Post #5 |
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Gran madrugador y amigo de la caza
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At The Millions they have a fixed rubric on difficult books. 
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| oneofmurphysbiscuits | Jul 5 2010, 02:39 PM Post #6 |
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marmalade modernist
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they'd love me then, sweets I know i'm a grumpy old bat and i shouldn't pick up on things like that where they're not doing any harm, i mean like Marjorie  anyway, {{{{{{{{{{{{Tatz}}}}}}}}}}
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| Funhouse | Nov 8 2010, 05:24 AM Post #7 |
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Perpetually Lost
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So I finished Inland a few days back, and it confirmed my suspicion that Murnane may be Australia's greatest living writer. It's very much like The Plains, at least initially, in the way Murnane creates his own skewed version of the world where people have these esoteric intellectual concerns, primarily with grasslands and plains, that seem to be accepted. So here there is an Institute of Prairie Studies, located in the town of Ideal, South Dakota in a soaring skyscraper that looks out over the plains, and within this building there is a number of women who are all desperately jostling to gain the position of editor of the Institute's journal, Hinterland. The narrator appears to be an Eastern European aristocrat who is writing from a place he refers to as Szolnok County and addressing the pages we read to one of these women, Anne Kristaly Gunnarsen. There's something about the worlds that Murnane creates that reminds me of Borges, like being in the Library of Babel, in a self-contained world where the words all make sense but it's just different. The Plains is exactly like that, but half way through Inland things start changing. There had been a couple of references to 'Melbourne County' and the district between the Moonee Ponds and the Merri (which, incidentally, is exactly where I live in Melbourne), and then all of a sudden our narrator is not Eastern European at all but Australian (although I don't know that Australia is ever mentioned) and Murnane appears to be recounting his experiences of growing up in several different areas of Melbourne and the surrounding countryside. The novel has somehow changed into a different book that still has traces of the former story (such as it is) within it but has somewhat different concerns. Very strange and very wonderful. Murnane is utterly unique. There's no-one else in Australia writing novels like he does, and I've yet to encounter anything from anywhere else in the world like this either. |
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| Jacek | Nov 8 2010, 07:40 AM Post #8 |
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Deathwalker
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That sounds great! Thank you for sharing your impressions, and do keep us updated on the titles of whatever further books of his you recommend (as you read them, of course). I love that Nobel speculation has had this effect round 'here: in addition to our Vargas Llosa groupread, obviously, there's been quite a bit of McCarthy, Murnane, and at least one Thiong'o going down. |
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| Funhouse | May 25 2011, 05:19 AM Post #9 |
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Perpetually Lost
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Finished his second novel, A Lifetime on Clouds, and it's certainly the funniest of the three I've read. An exploration of the fantasy world of a 15-year-old chronic masturbator consumed with Catholic guilt. Set in 1950s Melbourne, it has touches of what would come later but it's a very different beast to The Plains and Inland. One thing it does share is that it's a testament to the boundless scope of the imagination. Our conflicted teenage hero spanks the monkey as he imagines cavorting with Hollywood actresses in various landscapes across America that are suggested by a map he lays his model train set over. He imagines the masturbatory urges of young men in different societies throughout history and eventually, in his quest for a purer life, he imagines an entire married life to an upstanding Catholic girl. These naive fantasies are neatly set off against his mundane suburban reality. |
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| Deleted User | Jul 6 2011, 06:52 PM Post #10 |
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Deleted User
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Ah, how very true. He is one of only a handful of modern masters whom I revere,  .His short stories are superb, too: I would recommend When the Mice Failed to Arrive, which was, until recently, freely available on the Internet. It's strange how something so simple can have such a gripping effect on one's imagination. Has anybody read his latest, Barley Patch? I ordered it from Australia, but it's currently sitting unread on my shelf: I really don't want to start reading it in haste, and now simply isn't the best time for me. |
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| Funhouse | Jul 6 2011, 07:39 PM Post #11 |
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Perpetually Lost
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It's sitting on my shelf as well. I'll get to it within the next month, probably. |
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| Deleted User | Jul 6 2011, 07:49 PM Post #12 |
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Deleted User
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He also has an essay collection with the absolutely sublime title Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs (lifted from Proust?), .
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| johnnywalkitoff | Oct 25 2011, 07:57 PM Post #13 |
making bets on kentucky derby day
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I found this, Liam: when the mice failed to arrive Never saw this thread before. His work sounds great. |
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| Deleted User | Oct 25 2011, 08:42 PM Post #14 |
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Deleted User
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Yes, that story needs to be read a few times before all its subtle nuances become apparent. The last paragraph is my favorite part--quite devastating in its own little way. |
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| nnyhav | Oct 25 2011, 10:23 PM Post #15 |
itinerant kibitzer
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Actually a bit overtelegraphed, but only thanks to something I read last but one ...Saint-Arnaud was the colonel who french-fried / fumigated hundreds of Arabs holed up in caves in Algeria 1845 (and kept quiet about it since the precedent two months prior hadn't played too well back home) |
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| nnyhav | Nov 5 2011, 07:30 PM Post #16 |
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itinerant kibitzer
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Nicholas Birns Reading Gerald Murnane (via 3%'s overview of Context's return) |
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| Funhouse | Nov 6 2011, 05:22 AM Post #17 |
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Perpetually Lost
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That's a great piece, Dave. Thanks for finding and linking. He describes really well what's so appealing and important about Murnane's work. Much better than I could. We need more people on the bandwagon... |
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| oneofmurphysbiscuits | Nov 6 2011, 01:08 PM Post #18 |
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marmalade modernist
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yes thankyou Dave I'm hoping that he leans toward Bernhard rather than Laxness (this in light of your earlier post) but either way, we owe Dalkey
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| Funhouse | Nov 9 2011, 06:39 AM Post #19 |
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Perpetually Lost
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So Barley Patch. It's metafiction, but it's not like any other metafictional work that I've read. It's an extended meditation on why Murnane gave up writing fiction for fourteen years that begins with the question "Must I write?" This involves delving into his life story (while recognising that this is a fictional representation of his life). The life we glimpse is a prosaic one: attending Catholic school, feeling repressed, living in the suburbs of Melbourne and other towns around Victoria, reading books and eventually writing them. Murnane has never left Australia and has barely left Victoria, and physically this book doesn't leave those locations, but it feels expansive. It's built on repetitions, both within the novel and within Murnane's body of work as a whole, as he returns to the plains and his timidity and the mental landscapes he constructs. Those mental landscapes that he finds lurking behind the words on the page of the books that he reads and writes are the key to answering the questions that he poses about the function of literature. You almost inevitably find yourself drawn into his fictional world in the way he describes being drawn into others. This is about what it's like to lose yourself in a book. Late in the book he talks about reading about the notion of the memory palace and recognising that he had stumbled upon something like that inadvertently in his own work, and it's true, he has:
I had quite an emotional reaction to this book. It feels like Murnane is laying himself bare, exposing his personal inner world to us in an honest and generous way. I was moved. |
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| nnyhav | Nov 9 2011, 12:16 PM Post #20 |
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itinerant kibitzer
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Well put, better than I could've. There's something a little strange in his meditation on forgoing writing seeming at the same time the culmination of all that went before it (even if it isn't -- I'll have to read more of him to find out, and since it sounds like Inland covers much the same territory if not metaterritory, I'm gonna hafta be patient ...). Also for all the comparisons it is truly sui generis (and generous). |
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