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Inland
Gerald Murnane
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R376
Discovery Miles 3 760
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Inland is a work which gathers in emotional power as it moves
across the grasslands of its narrator's imagination--from Szolnok
County on the great plains of Hungary where a man writes in the
library of his manor house, to the Institute of Prairie Studies in
Tripp County, South Dakota, where the editor of the journal
Hinterland receives his writing, to the narrator's own native
district in Melbourne County, between Moonee Ponds and the Merri,
where he recalls the constant displacements of his childhood. "No
thing in the world is one thing," he declares; "some places are
many more than one place." These overlapping worlds are bound by
recurring motifs--fish pond, fig-tree, child-woman, the colours
white, red and green--and by deep feelings of intimacy and
betrayal, which are brought to full expression as the book moves to
its close.
A man moves from a capital city to a remote town in the border
country, where he intends to spend the last years of his life. It
is time, he thinks, to review the spoils of a lifetime of seeing, a
lifetime of reading. Which sights, people, books, fictional
characters, turns of phrase and lines of verse will survive into
the twilight? Feeling an increasing urgency to put his mental
landscape in order, the man sets to work cataloguing his memories,
little knowing what secrets they will yield and where his `report'
will lead.Border Districts is a jewel of a farewell from one of the
greatest living writers of English prose. Winner of the Australian
2018 Prime Minister's Literary Award and shortlisted for the 2018
Miles Franklin Award, this is Murnane's first work to be published
in the UK in thirty years.
In the first days of spring in his eighty-second year, Gerald
Murnane--perhaps the greatest living writer of English prose--began
a project that would round off his strange career as a novelist. He
would read all of his books in turn and prepare a report on each.
His original intention was to lodge the reports in two of his
legendary filing cabinets: in the Chronological Archive, which
documents his life as a whole, and the Literary Archive, which is
devoted to everything he has written. As the reports grew, however,
they themselves took on the form of a book, a book as beguiling and
hallucinatory, in its way, as the works on which they were meant to
report. These miniature memoirs or stories lead the reader through
the capacious territory Murnane refers to as his mind: they dwell
on the circumstances that gave rise to his writing, on images and
associations, on Murnane's own theories of fiction, and then
memories of a deeply personal kind. The final essay is, of course,
on Last Letter to a Reader itself: it considers the elation and
exhilaration that accompany the act of writing, and offers a moving
finale to what must surely be Murnane's last work, as death
approaches. "Help me, dear one," he writes, "to endure patiently my
going back to my own sort of heaven."
Clement Killeaton transforms his father's gambling, his mother's
piety, his fellow pupils' cruelty and the mysterious but forbidden
attractions of sex into an imagined world centred on horse-racing
and played out in the dusty backyard of his home, across the
landscapes of the district, and the continent of Australia. An
unsparing evocation of a Catholic childhood in a country town in
the late 1940s, Tamarisk Row's lyrical prose is charged with the
yearning, boredom, fear and fascination of boyhood. First published
in Australia in 1974, and previously unpublished in the UK,
Tamarisk Row is Gerald Murnane's debut novel, and in many respects
his masterpiece.
Originally published between 1985 and 2012, these stories offer an
enthralling introduction to the work of one of contemporary
fiction's greatest magicians, and a map of Gerald Murnane's
evolution as a writer. Spare, transparent and profane, This
career-spanning volume ranges from 'Finger Web', a fractal tale of
the scars of war and the roots of misogyny, to 'Land Deal', which
imagines Australia's colonisation and the ultimate vengeance of its
indigenous people as a series of nested dreams, to 'The Interior of
Gaaldine', a story which finds its anxious protagonist stranded
beyond the limits of fiction itself, and which points the way
toward Murnane's later works, from Barley Patch to Border
Districts. With potent style and determined vision, Murnane creates
sensitive portraits of intimate relationships - with parents,
uncles and aunts, and particularly children - and probes each
situation for anxiety and embarrassment, shame or delight. Murnane
treats emotions and thoughts as he does minor objects: he shines
light through them and makes them new, remaking the vessel of
literature as he goes.
'Someone has written that all art aspires to the condition of
music. My experience is that all art, including all music, aspires
to the condition of horse-racing.' This collection of essays leads
the reader into the searching and wildly fertile imagination of
Gerald Murnane, one of the masters of contemporary Australian
writing, author of the classics Border Districts and Tamarisk Row,
and winner of the Patrick White Literary Award. He writes of
himself: as a boy making racehorses of his marbles, an obsession
shared with Jack Kerouac; as a writer, working his first ten years
in secret; as a reader, trying to understand the mystery of the
right sentence by way of Virginia Woolf and Robert Frost; as a
teacher, exploring the endless ways in which words can express the
contours of our thoughts. From these vantage points Murnane sees
the worlds of significance that lie within, or just beyond, the
everyday details of Australian life. Carrying the reader with him
across the valleys, plains and grasslands of his mind, this
singular author creates an immersive landscape in which every word
has its own space, shape and weight.
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The Plains (Paperback)
Gerald Murnane
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R276
R225
Discovery Miles 2 250
Save R51 (18%)
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Fiction. Born in Melbourne, Austrailia, in 1939, Gerald Murnane
recently retired as the senior lecturer in fiction writing at
Deakin University with a reputation as one of the finest writers in
his country. He is the author of seven highly praised books of
fiction, most of which are still widely unknown and
underappreciated by American readers. "The Plains is parable,
fable, allegory, analogue, mythology, and vision. It is also subtly
satirical and often ingeniously funny . . . Gerald Murnane is
unquestionably one of the most original writers working in
Australia today and THE PLAINS is a fascinating and rewarding
book"--The Australian. Foreword by Andrew Zawacki, editor of VERSE
magazine. The Plains was first published in Austrailia in 1982.
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