Liam

Nov 26 2011, 07:00 PM

Steven, in case you are curious, all of those short quotes came from Murnane's short story collection Landscape with Landscape,

Liam

Jan 1 2012, 01:16 PM

If Blair et al have any other piece of information they can add, I would much appreciate it!

johnnywalkitoff

Jan 2 2012, 03:21 PM

Thanks for setting me looking, Great video, Blair. Found this http://emmettstinson.blogspot.com/2012/01/gerald-murnanes-new-novel.html at emmett stinson's blog as you can tell by the web address. I really thought Barely Patch would be his last piece of writing so this is great news.

Quote:

 

A History of Books is in many ways a continuation of the musings of Murnane’s 2009 book Barley Patch. It’s a safe prediction that A History of Books will be unlike any other book published in Australia this year. It consists of a long series of anecdotes about a man and the books he has read and how they relate to his life and his memories. The work ranges back and forward in time and plays with subtle repetitions that might seem tedious to the casual reader but build to a very satisfying conclusion. It embodies the literary life, describing a man who “preferred to the visible world a space enclosed by words denoting a world more real by far.”

The book also includes three shorter works of fiction that develop further the depiction of someone who “would seek in books what most others sought among living persons”. Murnane has an utterly unique vision and approach to writing fiction, but it’s not a vision that everyone will appreciate with its absence of plot and character development. To my mind there is no greater living Australian writer, however it’s likely that his audience will remain a small one.

Star Rating: ***** (5)

Quote:

 

I must thank Jeremy Davies of the Dalkey Archive for introducing me to Barley Patch by Australian writer Gerald Murnane. I met Jeremy over Dalkey’s impressive spread of titles at the most recent AWP conference and asked him to recommend me the best book he could. Barley Patch was the book he told me to buy.

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The book definitely does offer a “network of images” approach, but its much more laid back than recent examples of the genre have been. Barley Patch is much more Proustian in its rhythms than with authors like Enrique Vila-Matas or Victor Pelevin, whose networks of images can at times verge on hall-of-mirrors territory. In the latter two authors, the enigma in their work tends to come from images whose relationships feel overdetermined—it gives you an over-caffeinated, jittery feeling, where you just know something is happening, but can’t quite finger it. In Barley Patch the interactions feel much more incidental, having the quality of connections one might make in a dream.

Quote:

 

If a writer like Peter Carey, with his inventiveness, verve, and prescience, is the outward face of Australian literature, Murnane is its inward face: contemplative, deeply humane, dedicated above all to craft.

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The Plains is superbly successful on its own terms. What is interesting, though, is that Murnane’s subsequent works do not stay at this level of abstraction, but turn back inward to reality, much as Cézanne turns back to the object after Impressionism. This does not mean resuming the realism of the first two novels, but chronicling lived circumstances amid imaginary tableau. Inland (1988), perhaps Murnane’s greatest work, is filled with both displacement and pathos, of lost loves re-sought but never secured, of mirror-image collaborations as perilous as they are audacious, and of repeated geographical mantras that achieve both a Whitmanesque breadth and enjoy a modernist irony.

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Murnane is a writer to be experienced individually, as each reader embarks on their own journey in quest of, as the narrator of “Sipping the Essence” (Landscape With Landscape) put it, “something richly colored like Queensland that was not quite within my grasp.”