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Landscape with Landscape
A man resolves to tell the truth about himself to an audience of women, but the more he struggles the more he becomes trapped behind the layers of his own dreams.
Another man searches in the hills around Melbourne for twenty years for a landscape and a woman that no artist can paint.
These stories and four others make up Landscape with Landscape. Read together they make up an elaborate and unforgettable pattern of dreams and reality.
'Landscape with Landscape is a work of extraordinary power and vision, one which will surely be an outstanding novel of the decade.' Helen Daniel, Age
Another man searches in the hills around Melbourne for twenty years for a landscape and a woman that no artist can paint.
These stories and four others make up Landscape with Landscape. Read together they make up an elaborate and unforgettable pattern of dreams and reality.
'Landscape with Landscape is a work of extraordinary power and vision, one which will surely be an outstanding novel of the decade.' Helen Daniel, Age
267 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1987
11 people are currently reading
368 people want to read
About the author
Gerald Murnane
31 books388 followersMurnane's first two books, Tamarisk Row (1974) and A Lifetime on Clouds (1976), seem to be semi-autobiographical accounts of his childhood and adolescence. Both are composed largely of very long but grammatical sentences.
In 1982, he attained his mature style with The Plains, a short novel about a young filmmaker who travels to a fictive country far within Australia, where his failure to make a film is perhaps his most profound achievement. The novel is both a metaphysical parable about appearance and reality, and a parodic examination of traditions and cultural horizons. The novel depicts an abstracted Australia, akin to something out of mythology or fable. The novel was followed by: Landscape With Landscape (1985), Inland (1988), Velvet Waters (1990), and Emerald Blue (1995). A book of essays, Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, appeared in 2005, and a new work of fiction, Barley Patch, was released in 2009. All of these books are concerned with the relation between memory, image, and landscape, and frequently with the relation between fiction and non-fiction.
Murnane is mainly known within Australia. A seminar was held on his work at the University of Newcastle in 2001. Murnane does, however, also have a following in other countries, especially Sweden and the United States, where The Plains was published in 1985 and reprinted in 2004 (New Issues Poetry & Prose), and where Dalkey Archive Press has recently issued Barley Patch and will be reprinting Inland in 2012. In 2011, The Plains' was translated into French and published in France by P.O.L, and in 2012 will be published in Hungarian. In July/August 2017, The Plains was the number 1 book recommendation of South West German Radio (SWR2). His works have been translated into Italian (Velvet Waters as Una Melodia), German (The Plains as Die Ebenen, Border Districts as Grenzbezirke, Landscape With Landscape as Landschaft mit Landschaft, all publ. Suhrkamp Verlag), Spanish (The Plains as Las llanuras, and Something for the Pain as Una vida en las carreras, all published by Editorial Minúscula), Catalan (The Plains as Les planes, also published by Editorial Minúscula), Swedish (Inland as Inlandet, The Plains as Slätterna, Velvet Waters as Sammetsvatten and Barley Patch as Korntäppa) and Serbian (The Plains as Ravnice; Inland as Unutrašnjost, both published by Blum izdavaštvo 2025).
In 1982, he attained his mature style with The Plains, a short novel about a young filmmaker who travels to a fictive country far within Australia, where his failure to make a film is perhaps his most profound achievement. The novel is both a metaphysical parable about appearance and reality, and a parodic examination of traditions and cultural horizons. The novel depicts an abstracted Australia, akin to something out of mythology or fable. The novel was followed by: Landscape With Landscape (1985), Inland (1988), Velvet Waters (1990), and Emerald Blue (1995). A book of essays, Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, appeared in 2005, and a new work of fiction, Barley Patch, was released in 2009. All of these books are concerned with the relation between memory, image, and landscape, and frequently with the relation between fiction and non-fiction.
Murnane is mainly known within Australia. A seminar was held on his work at the University of Newcastle in 2001. Murnane does, however, also have a following in other countries, especially Sweden and the United States, where The Plains was published in 1985 and reprinted in 2004 (New Issues Poetry & Prose), and where Dalkey Archive Press has recently issued Barley Patch and will be reprinting Inland in 2012. In 2011, The Plains' was translated into French and published in France by P.O.L, and in 2012 will be published in Hungarian. In July/August 2017, The Plains was the number 1 book recommendation of South West German Radio (SWR2). His works have been translated into Italian (Velvet Waters as Una Melodia), German (The Plains as Die Ebenen, Border Districts as Grenzbezirke, Landscape With Landscape as Landschaft mit Landschaft, all publ. Suhrkamp Verlag), Spanish (The Plains as Las llanuras, and Something for the Pain as Una vida en las carreras, all published by Editorial Minúscula), Catalan (The Plains as Les planes, also published by Editorial Minúscula), Swedish (Inland as Inlandet, The Plains as Slätterna, Velvet Waters as Sammetsvatten and Barley Patch as Korntäppa) and Serbian (The Plains as Ravnice; Inland as Unutrašnjost, both published by Blum izdavaštvo 2025).
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December 20, 202413 A Puzzle: An Author Completely in Control, and Yet Utterly Uncontrolled
Murnane writes exceptionally strong fiction, in the sense that his pieces have a consistent inner logic, steady pacing, and unfaltering attention to a problem or idea. If literary strength can be partly comprised of those qualities, then Murnane is one of the world's major writers. The caveat, for me, is that I am not sure how much of his writing Murnane controls, and how much is the result of a way of thinking or set of mental habits that occasionally intersect with the project of writing fiction. None of us has full control of either our intentions or our literary structures, and I do not object to rule-generated fiction. But with Murnane the compulsive, automatistic elements are both fundamental and pervasive, so my reading is divided: I can read the work as fiction, meaning as intended invention, but I need to also read it as symptom. I think of this as a limitation, not of the text's interest as a document of psychology or psychopathology, and not for its interest for a sociology of fiction, but for my capacity to read and value it as a contribution to the history of modernism, postmodernism, or fiction.
The clearest sign that fiction is only one of several interchangeable modes in which Murnane records his thoughts is the existence of his forty-odd filing cabinets cmoprised of a twenty-drawer "personal" or "chronological archive" (including notes on every woman he went out with), a "literary archive" in tweleve drawers, and other filing cabinets filled with an elaborate information about two horse racing leagues, including the names and studbooks of every horse, all their races, invented pennants, chronology, jockeys, and venues, all invented. (Some of this is in the New York Times Sunday Magazine profile, which I refer to on another Goodreads review; the counts of drawers are from an interview with Antoni Gach in the Review of Contemporary Fiction, fall 2013, and there is more information in a Paris Review interview, winter 2024.)
I will only give one example of this double reading here. One of the stories in this collection is "The Battle of Acosta Nu."
(A note about spoilers. This is literary fiction, so the concept of a spoiler does not apply: what matters is the way the work is constructed. In this review I reveal something that happens toward the end of Murnane's story: but it isn't a spoiler. There is, in the final paragraph of the story, an existential turn, which could be imagined as a spoiler. I won't mention it. But the fact that mentioning it could undermine a reading of the story may be a sign that it is not integrally part of the story, and that the "Battle of Acosta Nu" is something other than literary fiction.)
The narrator in "Battle of Acosta Nu" descends from Australians, but lives in Paraguay. He has never been to Australia, but he is exclusively preoccupied with what he imagines as Australia, and the presence of covert, perhaps unconsciously Australian people in Paraguay. His son falls ill, and over the course of the story, slowly worsens and dies. In that sense the story's model is "The Death of Ivan Ilych," except this is sociopathically cold and affectively nearly a perfect vacuum.
As his son lies in his hospital bed, struggling for life, the narrator thinks:
"Standing awkwardly apart from them I felt compelled to perform some Australian gesture in that room where the very air seemed oppressively Paraguayan. In the corner was a couch where a parent could sleep during a night watch. I sat down on this couch and took out of my bag a book of fiction that was my current reading. I thought I noticed a sudden tension in the room as the doctors and nurses noticed one by one what I was doing and looked at me curiously. I hoped I was not mistaken; it would have cheered me just then to have those orthodox Paraguayans wondering what subject could be so important that a man would want to read about it while his son lay fighting for his life nearby." (p. 87)
These episodes of cognitive dissonance, in which the father thinks only of his imagined Australian and Paraguayan identities, continue to the very end. In the last ten pages they are increasingly striking and bizarre; in the logic of the narrative they are signs of the father's inability to connect and to be fully present at the death of his son. The entire story is a consistent parable about lack of feeling and lack of capacity for feeling.
That is a first reading, done without knowledge of Murnane, the author. In a interview in 2013 (in the journal I cited above), Murnane said two momentous things had happened in his otherwise unmemorable life, which he had spent exclusuvely in Victoria (he never traveled outside Australia, and rarely outside the suburbs of Melbourne). The first was when he held his dying son in his arms, and then his son revived; and the second was the more recent death of his wife. He said he hadn't yet written about his wife's death, because usually there was a time lag between such an event and the fiction that came from it.
"There's always this time lag... my son fell seriously ill in 1977. And it was five years before I fictionalized that experience, in something that's a sadly neglected piece of fiction. This piece is in "Landscape with Landscape." It's called "The Battle of Acosta Nu." ... the medical details of that are exactly as they were in real life, so to call it, except that in real life the son is revived after his heart stopped beating, but in the story he doesn't, he's not revived." (p. 36)
Notice the phrase, "so to call it." Murnane has said that in different ways, he considers his fictions as real as so-called real life, and in some ways even more so, and he has always spoken of his "fictions" as if they were problems to be solved, or inquiries, and not fictions in the usual sense, except in terms of readers' expectations. Note also the weird present tense in the next clause: "the son is revived," as if his son was a character in fiction.
With this knowledge in mind, a re-reading of "The Battle of Acosta Nu" reveals an author (Murnane, not the anonymous implied author of the text) who believes he is writing a "fiction" about a man who lives in a place he, Murnane, has never been, and who also knows that he is somehow, after "a time lag" following his son's recovery, writing a "fictionalized" account--that is, he's coming to terms with the experience of nearly having lost his son by writing about a man who could not think directly about his son. He is encountering an unthinkable experience by imagining a person who could not encounter either unthinkable experiences or ordinary, everyday ones.
A difficulty, for me, is that knowing this, I see the story not as a controlled fiction, but as an uncontrolled, automatically generated text that uses its narrator's emotional absence to convince the author that he has thought things through. Toward the end of the story, where the son is clearly dying and the father still thinks about Australian identity, the surreal juxapositions of unspeakable suffering and unaccountable detachment are clearly devised to shock. After his son dies, the narrator walks out of the hospital:
"Outside the hospital I walked beside a busy road that led into the centre of Melbourne," he writes, shocking us as readers, since he has always been in Paraguay. "It was a cool cloudless morning that promised another of those autumn days more Australian than Paraguayan." The explanation shows he is, in fact, in Paraguay, but that's a different kind of shock because it shows how little he is thinking about his son.
Earlier in the story, however, the juxtapositions of events in the narrator's life and his preoccupations happen more slowly and organically, and that's where I lose the ability to understand this fiction as a piece that was planned around a certain idea (a man who thinks only of an Australia he's never seen, no matter what happens to him). Instead I'm presented with a writer, Murnane, who is himself in the hurricane of his thoughts, which tear him from the "so called" real world and into his writing, whether it's about imaginary horse races or his own son. In "The Battle of Acosta Nu" he sets out to think about his son by writing about a man who cannot not think about his son, and he sets up a simple and strong rule to keep his story in order: the man sees everything in the world as a problem of hidden Paraguayan and Australian identities.
But Murnane is not in control of this simple and strong idea. It is not a strategy for fiction or mourning: it's the way he thinks. It's a kind of writing that wants to demonstrate complete control, by an author who believes himself to be in control, but isn't: his writing is also a symptom of a syndrome that happens to include work that other people read as fiction.
c. 2020, revised 2024
Murnane writes exceptionally strong fiction, in the sense that his pieces have a consistent inner logic, steady pacing, and unfaltering attention to a problem or idea. If literary strength can be partly comprised of those qualities, then Murnane is one of the world's major writers. The caveat, for me, is that I am not sure how much of his writing Murnane controls, and how much is the result of a way of thinking or set of mental habits that occasionally intersect with the project of writing fiction. None of us has full control of either our intentions or our literary structures, and I do not object to rule-generated fiction. But with Murnane the compulsive, automatistic elements are both fundamental and pervasive, so my reading is divided: I can read the work as fiction, meaning as intended invention, but I need to also read it as symptom. I think of this as a limitation, not of the text's interest as a document of psychology or psychopathology, and not for its interest for a sociology of fiction, but for my capacity to read and value it as a contribution to the history of modernism, postmodernism, or fiction.
The clearest sign that fiction is only one of several interchangeable modes in which Murnane records his thoughts is the existence of his forty-odd filing cabinets cmoprised of a twenty-drawer "personal" or "chronological archive" (including notes on every woman he went out with), a "literary archive" in tweleve drawers, and other filing cabinets filled with an elaborate information about two horse racing leagues, including the names and studbooks of every horse, all their races, invented pennants, chronology, jockeys, and venues, all invented. (Some of this is in the New York Times Sunday Magazine profile, which I refer to on another Goodreads review; the counts of drawers are from an interview with Antoni Gach in the Review of Contemporary Fiction, fall 2013, and there is more information in a Paris Review interview, winter 2024.)
I will only give one example of this double reading here. One of the stories in this collection is "The Battle of Acosta Nu."
(A note about spoilers. This is literary fiction, so the concept of a spoiler does not apply: what matters is the way the work is constructed. In this review I reveal something that happens toward the end of Murnane's story: but it isn't a spoiler. There is, in the final paragraph of the story, an existential turn, which could be imagined as a spoiler. I won't mention it. But the fact that mentioning it could undermine a reading of the story may be a sign that it is not integrally part of the story, and that the "Battle of Acosta Nu" is something other than literary fiction.)
The narrator in "Battle of Acosta Nu" descends from Australians, but lives in Paraguay. He has never been to Australia, but he is exclusively preoccupied with what he imagines as Australia, and the presence of covert, perhaps unconsciously Australian people in Paraguay. His son falls ill, and over the course of the story, slowly worsens and dies. In that sense the story's model is "The Death of Ivan Ilych," except this is sociopathically cold and affectively nearly a perfect vacuum.
As his son lies in his hospital bed, struggling for life, the narrator thinks:
"Standing awkwardly apart from them I felt compelled to perform some Australian gesture in that room where the very air seemed oppressively Paraguayan. In the corner was a couch where a parent could sleep during a night watch. I sat down on this couch and took out of my bag a book of fiction that was my current reading. I thought I noticed a sudden tension in the room as the doctors and nurses noticed one by one what I was doing and looked at me curiously. I hoped I was not mistaken; it would have cheered me just then to have those orthodox Paraguayans wondering what subject could be so important that a man would want to read about it while his son lay fighting for his life nearby." (p. 87)
These episodes of cognitive dissonance, in which the father thinks only of his imagined Australian and Paraguayan identities, continue to the very end. In the last ten pages they are increasingly striking and bizarre; in the logic of the narrative they are signs of the father's inability to connect and to be fully present at the death of his son. The entire story is a consistent parable about lack of feeling and lack of capacity for feeling.
That is a first reading, done without knowledge of Murnane, the author. In a interview in 2013 (in the journal I cited above), Murnane said two momentous things had happened in his otherwise unmemorable life, which he had spent exclusuvely in Victoria (he never traveled outside Australia, and rarely outside the suburbs of Melbourne). The first was when he held his dying son in his arms, and then his son revived; and the second was the more recent death of his wife. He said he hadn't yet written about his wife's death, because usually there was a time lag between such an event and the fiction that came from it.
"There's always this time lag... my son fell seriously ill in 1977. And it was five years before I fictionalized that experience, in something that's a sadly neglected piece of fiction. This piece is in "Landscape with Landscape." It's called "The Battle of Acosta Nu." ... the medical details of that are exactly as they were in real life, so to call it, except that in real life the son is revived after his heart stopped beating, but in the story he doesn't, he's not revived." (p. 36)
Notice the phrase, "so to call it." Murnane has said that in different ways, he considers his fictions as real as so-called real life, and in some ways even more so, and he has always spoken of his "fictions" as if they were problems to be solved, or inquiries, and not fictions in the usual sense, except in terms of readers' expectations. Note also the weird present tense in the next clause: "the son is revived," as if his son was a character in fiction.
With this knowledge in mind, a re-reading of "The Battle of Acosta Nu" reveals an author (Murnane, not the anonymous implied author of the text) who believes he is writing a "fiction" about a man who lives in a place he, Murnane, has never been, and who also knows that he is somehow, after "a time lag" following his son's recovery, writing a "fictionalized" account--that is, he's coming to terms with the experience of nearly having lost his son by writing about a man who could not think directly about his son. He is encountering an unthinkable experience by imagining a person who could not encounter either unthinkable experiences or ordinary, everyday ones.
A difficulty, for me, is that knowing this, I see the story not as a controlled fiction, but as an uncontrolled, automatically generated text that uses its narrator's emotional absence to convince the author that he has thought things through. Toward the end of the story, where the son is clearly dying and the father still thinks about Australian identity, the surreal juxapositions of unspeakable suffering and unaccountable detachment are clearly devised to shock. After his son dies, the narrator walks out of the hospital:
"Outside the hospital I walked beside a busy road that led into the centre of Melbourne," he writes, shocking us as readers, since he has always been in Paraguay. "It was a cool cloudless morning that promised another of those autumn days more Australian than Paraguayan." The explanation shows he is, in fact, in Paraguay, but that's a different kind of shock because it shows how little he is thinking about his son.
Earlier in the story, however, the juxtapositions of events in the narrator's life and his preoccupations happen more slowly and organically, and that's where I lose the ability to understand this fiction as a piece that was planned around a certain idea (a man who thinks only of an Australia he's never seen, no matter what happens to him). Instead I'm presented with a writer, Murnane, who is himself in the hurricane of his thoughts, which tear him from the "so called" real world and into his writing, whether it's about imaginary horse races or his own son. In "The Battle of Acosta Nu" he sets out to think about his son by writing about a man who cannot not think about his son, and he sets up a simple and strong rule to keep his story in order: the man sees everything in the world as a problem of hidden Paraguayan and Australian identities.
But Murnane is not in control of this simple and strong idea. It is not a strategy for fiction or mourning: it's the way he thinks. It's a kind of writing that wants to demonstrate complete control, by an author who believes himself to be in control, but isn't: his writing is also a symptom of a syndrome that happens to include work that other people read as fiction.
c. 2020, revised 2024
September 24, 2013
Where is it that we end and others begin? Can we enter beyond that line, explore that landscape and know we can return to ourselves? These are questions that in part determine whether we answer if we choose to live life in the affirmative or negative. More to the point do we have the choice to provide that answer.
In, Landscape With Landscape, Gerald Murnane does battle with the world of boundaries in six first person stories. This is importantly not a collection nor is it a novel. It begins with, Landscape With Freckled Woman. The narrator is the only male on a committee of ten. The freckled woman, the committee president, the narrator himself appear to be not what they appear but characters in a story, (written by the narrator?) or possibly this story is contained within another written story or that within another. The president and he talked about his writing-he was to stand and introduce himself saying a little something about his work. He told her his first story, Sipping The Essence, was expected to be published. Not by coincidence this is the name of the next story in the book. When we read this next story we are reading a fiction that comes out of the fiction we just previously read. And so on and on.
This is not the opening of a doll which then contains a smaller doll, then which opens onto a….Each story, a fiction within a fiction within its previous fiction is a further and further distancing. We are nestled away from…from what? From the truth? From the truth of fiction? The levels of fictitiousness?
Our narrator, not the author, pursues a life of an abstracted search for a landscape where he can be himself and find his ideal woman. Both are just beyond his reach. That which is within his reach is persistently insufficient. The viciousness of this circularity is eased with his daily drinking of beer beginning before breakfast and continuing on throughout the day. It provides a slushiness to buttress any fall. He senses there is something else of greater substance but is unable to pursue it.
The content and structure of this book are sewn together. We, as reader, possibly reading ourselves as reader or written into the story as reader, experience the dizziness, the levels of abstraction, dissonance, distractions, avenues of escape, in our attempts in life to reach towards, if not to know, a reality.
It is a book carefully crafted to subvert any sense of stability, comfort. If this is why one reads you are in the right place. If not you are welcome to leave, if you can find the exit.
December 27, 2016
We – or at least I – tend to think prose-fiction is independent of aesthetics. Not consciously, of course, but I’m surprised when friends or famous critics revere Pale Fire or If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, as if it weren’t simply a matter of diverging aesthetics. Surprising too, on the other hand, that I so love Gerald Murnane, because in precis his “aesthetic” (spiralling self-conscious treatment of dun-coloured suburbia, young celibate sexual angst and Catholic guilt) and mine would seem not to match. But subject matter, as we know, is no reliable measure of a book’s worth, and nor is genre.
Genre – it’s an interesting question with regards to Murnane. To glance at his 1985 story-collection-cum-novel Landscape with Landscape might be to miss his “meta” tendencies, while being repelled or seduced by his – as the book unfolds – increasingly glaring idiosyncrasies. As Murnane books go, Landscape... is something of a slow-burner, the black sheep, an anomaly. For those craving confrontation, unlike A Million Windows or Barley Patch or Inland, it won’t hit you between the eyes from the first page with its paradoxes. In fact, aside from a few brain-bending and arch-Murnanian passages, and if not for the severely brain-bending “The Battle of Acosta Nu” (if interpretation is a function then this may be the most functional story Murnane has written yet), the casual reader might reasonably view this book as, from a genre standpoint, pretty ordinary – not parenthetical enough to be meta, nor flamboyant enough to be experimental, just another life of the artist as a young man (and a dull and tortured life at that). More like, if we’re categorising, a plain old confessional / autobiographical novel.
Incidentally, a perennial favourite among young writers of such exposés is here, in Landscape..., as in many of Murnane’s works, in the form of Jack Kerouac. And maybe, who knows, it’s Kerouac Murnane sees when he protests that his works are not “self-conscious fiction” (á la Pale Fire or ... Traveller), even at their most meta. Maybe, after all these years, and despite all appearances to the contrary, it’s Kerouac’s example of semi-fictional autobiography which Murnane is following. Definitely Kerouac had a huge influence on him, and surely there can be few more baffling, confounding or paradoxical outcomes of such an influence in literature. Which is to say (a) that the conjunction of Murnane (who in 70+ years has never left the Australian state of Victoria; who writes like a confluence of the streams of Proust and Thomas Bernhard) and Kerouac in this reader’s mind is apt, in itself, to resemble a near-irresolvable paradox; and (b) that what Murnane has done with this influence is, in itself, so surprising as to suggest a major talent.
To answer the obvious question, then: yes, if I were to file Landscape... anywhere it would have to be (despite the brain-busting “Battle...”) under Artist’s-Portrait Confessional Fiction, but of the most exquisite, exploratory and explosively paradox-hunting variety. Maybe after his previous book, The Plains (published as speculative fiction by a science fiction imprint), it all seemed, at first glance, to reviewers and the few readers it garnered, too ordinary, but to my mind the free-roaming explorations (for, as must be obvious, the near-memoir form offers infinite scope for internal roaming) of Landscape... are deep and stimulating. As to the (fairly cheap, it must be said) structural ruse of having each story “enclose” the next, well, I don’t think he’s entirely serious in this – or if he is, I’m afraid it’s slight overreach by a still-young writer just finding his feet as an experimenter. Nonetheless, while it doesn’t work as meta, to me the ruse is successful in showing structurally a theme and mental / emotional process which seems to haunt Murnane’s protagonist(s) throughout – that of the writer seeking, often through drunkenness, revelation. In fact, when I think back on Landscape... what I mostly see is an image of a young man seemingly on the verge of breakthrough – gazing drunk and alienated through stained glass from outside the Great Artist’s house in “Landscape with Artist”, or along the one curved tree-lined street in his grid-shaped suburb as the tram disappears in “Charlie Alcock’s Cock”. Again and again he seems about to lift the gauze, to uncover something central to his quest, but always he circles back, again, to novicehood. Thus the circling structure, thus (as Borges once described the aesthetic experience) “the imminence of a revelation that does not occur”.
The work of a writer on the very cusp of greatness, Landscape... is, despite surface appearances to the contrary, its own beast entirely, flawed, warped, but nonetheless near-perfect (since Murnane’s craft, his work as prose-writer, is never here less than brilliant). Sure, it got all but ignored in the eighties, but it’s back and it’s here to stay. If there’s any justice (if Murnane – as just might happen, they say – wins the Nobel) then 2016’s reprint of this lost classic will be seen as an Australian publishing event, and the moment when it became clear, to a wide audience, that everything Murnane has written since the mid-eighties is worthy of the most serious attention.
Genre – it’s an interesting question with regards to Murnane. To glance at his 1985 story-collection-cum-novel Landscape with Landscape might be to miss his “meta” tendencies, while being repelled or seduced by his – as the book unfolds – increasingly glaring idiosyncrasies. As Murnane books go, Landscape... is something of a slow-burner, the black sheep, an anomaly. For those craving confrontation, unlike A Million Windows or Barley Patch or Inland, it won’t hit you between the eyes from the first page with its paradoxes. In fact, aside from a few brain-bending and arch-Murnanian passages, and if not for the severely brain-bending “The Battle of Acosta Nu” (if interpretation is a function then this may be the most functional story Murnane has written yet), the casual reader might reasonably view this book as, from a genre standpoint, pretty ordinary – not parenthetical enough to be meta, nor flamboyant enough to be experimental, just another life of the artist as a young man (and a dull and tortured life at that). More like, if we’re categorising, a plain old confessional / autobiographical novel.
Incidentally, a perennial favourite among young writers of such exposés is here, in Landscape..., as in many of Murnane’s works, in the form of Jack Kerouac. And maybe, who knows, it’s Kerouac Murnane sees when he protests that his works are not “self-conscious fiction” (á la Pale Fire or ... Traveller), even at their most meta. Maybe, after all these years, and despite all appearances to the contrary, it’s Kerouac’s example of semi-fictional autobiography which Murnane is following. Definitely Kerouac had a huge influence on him, and surely there can be few more baffling, confounding or paradoxical outcomes of such an influence in literature. Which is to say (a) that the conjunction of Murnane (who in 70+ years has never left the Australian state of Victoria; who writes like a confluence of the streams of Proust and Thomas Bernhard) and Kerouac in this reader’s mind is apt, in itself, to resemble a near-irresolvable paradox; and (b) that what Murnane has done with this influence is, in itself, so surprising as to suggest a major talent.
To answer the obvious question, then: yes, if I were to file Landscape... anywhere it would have to be (despite the brain-busting “Battle...”) under Artist’s-Portrait Confessional Fiction, but of the most exquisite, exploratory and explosively paradox-hunting variety. Maybe after his previous book, The Plains (published as speculative fiction by a science fiction imprint), it all seemed, at first glance, to reviewers and the few readers it garnered, too ordinary, but to my mind the free-roaming explorations (for, as must be obvious, the near-memoir form offers infinite scope for internal roaming) of Landscape... are deep and stimulating. As to the (fairly cheap, it must be said) structural ruse of having each story “enclose” the next, well, I don’t think he’s entirely serious in this – or if he is, I’m afraid it’s slight overreach by a still-young writer just finding his feet as an experimenter. Nonetheless, while it doesn’t work as meta, to me the ruse is successful in showing structurally a theme and mental / emotional process which seems to haunt Murnane’s protagonist(s) throughout – that of the writer seeking, often through drunkenness, revelation. In fact, when I think back on Landscape... what I mostly see is an image of a young man seemingly on the verge of breakthrough – gazing drunk and alienated through stained glass from outside the Great Artist’s house in “Landscape with Artist”, or along the one curved tree-lined street in his grid-shaped suburb as the tram disappears in “Charlie Alcock’s Cock”. Again and again he seems about to lift the gauze, to uncover something central to his quest, but always he circles back, again, to novicehood. Thus the circling structure, thus (as Borges once described the aesthetic experience) “the imminence of a revelation that does not occur”.
The work of a writer on the very cusp of greatness, Landscape... is, despite surface appearances to the contrary, its own beast entirely, flawed, warped, but nonetheless near-perfect (since Murnane’s craft, his work as prose-writer, is never here less than brilliant). Sure, it got all but ignored in the eighties, but it’s back and it’s here to stay. If there’s any justice (if Murnane – as just might happen, they say – wins the Nobel) then 2016’s reprint of this lost classic will be seen as an Australian publishing event, and the moment when it became clear, to a wide audience, that everything Murnane has written since the mid-eighties is worthy of the most serious attention.
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December 30, 2022Landscape, with literature left, front, & centre.
December 9, 2015
Murnane's fiction is like Bernhard's; someone, not me as far as I can remember, described Bernhard's books as slices of a long sausage, and Murnane's works--at least prior to Barley Patch--might be described as slices from a long Lamington.
LwL gives you everything you'd expect: some realistic memoiry seeming realism, some very odd imaginings, much consideration of what it means to live more or less in your own head, and a yearning for something else, without really defining what that something else might be. As I read it, the structure seemed silly. In the first piece our narrator tells another person that he's just written a story, which is, of course, the following piece in LwL, all the way until the last piece in which, predictably enough, the piece named is the first piece in LwL. This added roughly nothing to the work as a whole. Another reviewer argues, convincingly enough, that this is a device meant to plunge us ever further into the fictional realm, so that the second piece is a fiction in the first, the third a fiction in the second, and so on. I would like to believe this argument, but can't quite bring myself to accept it. The circularity just suggests the kind of pomo tricksiness that Murnane is wary of.
But despite this, LwL is another wonderful work. It's particularly interesting to read this back to back with Barley Patch. In the later work, the narrator claims to have no imagination. He says he can't "create" characters or plot or anything. Here, our narrator (I'm fairly confident the narrators are the same personage) tells us that "If I needed to think of my ruling faculty I thought of my imagination... a space wide enough for a system of roads to intersect in it and then diverge and then perhaps meet up again by way of strange branchings and detours." That's a pretty good summary of Murnane's method, as later summed up in Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, and suggests either that the denial of imagination in Barley Patch is ironic (highly unlikely, given our author) or that the meaning of "imagination" differs in the two (three) works.
LwL gives you everything you'd expect: some realistic memoiry seeming realism, some very odd imaginings, much consideration of what it means to live more or less in your own head, and a yearning for something else, without really defining what that something else might be. As I read it, the structure seemed silly. In the first piece our narrator tells another person that he's just written a story, which is, of course, the following piece in LwL, all the way until the last piece in which, predictably enough, the piece named is the first piece in LwL. This added roughly nothing to the work as a whole. Another reviewer argues, convincingly enough, that this is a device meant to plunge us ever further into the fictional realm, so that the second piece is a fiction in the first, the third a fiction in the second, and so on. I would like to believe this argument, but can't quite bring myself to accept it. The circularity just suggests the kind of pomo tricksiness that Murnane is wary of.
But despite this, LwL is another wonderful work. It's particularly interesting to read this back to back with Barley Patch. In the later work, the narrator claims to have no imagination. He says he can't "create" characters or plot or anything. Here, our narrator (I'm fairly confident the narrators are the same personage) tells us that "If I needed to think of my ruling faculty I thought of my imagination... a space wide enough for a system of roads to intersect in it and then diverge and then perhaps meet up again by way of strange branchings and detours." That's a pretty good summary of Murnane's method, as later summed up in Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, and suggests either that the denial of imagination in Barley Patch is ironic (highly unlikely, given our author) or that the meaning of "imagination" differs in the two (three) works.
January 19, 2023
In einer Landschaft aus Literatur, Alkoholismus, Katholizismus und sexueller Frustration wird ein Melbourne der 1960er Jahr gezeichnet, in dem in 6 jeweils etwa 60 Seiten langen Stories Männer beschrieben werden, die keine Beziehungen zu Frauen aufbauen können (obwohl dies das Einzige ist, um das es zu gehen scheint) und sich geschlagen in literarische Fantasien stürzen. Ein interessantes Sujet, aber in der Fülle und thematischen Redundanz der Erzählungen selbst frustrierend und ermüdend, gerade in der Mitte des Romans. Ich würde als Leseempfehlung die fünfte Story "Charlie Schwarz' Schwanz" (sic) angeben, in der der Protagonist damit zu kämpfen hat, dass sein von Frauen umschwärmter jüngerer Neffe sich zu einem zölibatären Leben als katholischer Priester entscheidet.
August 9, 2018
Onlangs las ik het ongehoord vreemde en intrigerende "The plains" van Gerald Murnane, volgens sommigen de grootste schrijver van wie niemand nog heeft gehoord. Dat boek blies mij totaal omver, dus las ik meteen een andere Murnane: "Landscape with landscape". Dat was aanvankelijk vrij teleurstellend. De ongrijpbare allegorische sfeer van "The plains" was in "Landscape with landscape" beduidend minder aanwezig, en diverse passages vond ik taai of wijdlopig. Maar al gauw werd dat gecompenseerd door passages vol vervreemdende schoonheid, die mij paf lieten staan en verrukten juist omdat ik niet kon samenvatten wat ik zonet had gelezen. Bovendien begon ik meer en meer bewondering te krijgen voor de even vreemde als functionele vorm van het boek als geheel. Zo overweldigend als "The plains" werd "Landscape with landscape" voor mij niettemin niet, maar ik moest toch geregeld jubelen over de oogverblindende pracht van de stijl en vorm. Ook dit boek deed mij dus weer verlangen naar meer van Murnane, want die man is voor mij echt een ontdekking, zo bleek ook nu weer.
Intrigerend en inspirerend vind ik om te beginnen de vorm van het boek als geheel. Op het eerste gezicht lijkt het te gaan om een bundel verhalen, al zijn al die verhalen wel doordesemd van ongrijpbaar associatieve en onbepaalde passages die eerder doen denken aan proza-gedichten, en van passages vol suggestieve verwondering. Tegelijk echter lijken al die verhalen, in al hun associatieve ongrijpbare onsamenhangendheid, ook onderlinge resonanties en samenhangen te hebben: de ik- figuur in elk verhaal worstelt steeds met schrijverschap en kunst, heeft steeds ingewikkelde verhoudingen met raadselachtige vrouwen, zuipt als een comazuipende tempelier, en verwondert zich op even filosofische als dichterlijke wijze over het gedroomde, vergeefs nagejaagde landschap in zijn eigen hoofd. Bovendien, in elk verhaal doet de ik-figuur cryptische uitspraken over een verhaal dat hij ooit schreef, en dat verhaal heeft dan de titel van het verhaal dat volgt. Behalve het laatste verhaal, dat weer verwijst naar het verhaal waarmee het boek opent, daarmee suggererend dat het boek niet eindigt of logisch afgerond wordt maar oneindig circulair doorloopt. Elke ik- figuur is dus de verteller en hoofdpersoon van een verhaal dat door een andere ik- figuur in een eerder verhaal is genoemd en verzonnen. Die verzonnen ik- figuur is dan vaak wel een alter ego of afsplitsing van de ik- fguur die hem verzint: een personage waarin bepaalde latente obessies van "de auteur" ( de verzinnende ik-figuur) worden uitvergroot of nader worden onderzocht, of waarin de "auteur" iemand verzint die op hemzelf lijkt maar in een andere omgeving verkeert dan hij, en dus toch op andere wijze gaat denken, voelen en dromen. Vaak zegt de ik- figuur dan ook dat de door hem verzonnen ik- figuur weliswaar fictief is, maar toch onvermoede potenties in hemzelf exploreert en daardoor een diepere waarheid bevat. Zonder dat die diepere waarheid ooit onthuld of duidelijk geparafraseerd wordt, want elk verhaal is vol intrigerende raadsels die bewust open worden gelaten.
Kortom: "Landscape with landscape" zou je ook als roman kunnen lezen, en alle verhalen als hoofdstukken in die roman. Zo las ik het boek uiteindelijk zelf in elk geval wel, vooral omdat er tussen die verhalen veel meer resonanties bestaan dan in een gewone verhalenbundel. Alleen, deze roman draait dan niet om een enkele ik- figuur, maar om een veelheid van elkaar verzinnende fictieve ik- figuren, een veelheid van raadsels, een veelheid van verschillende associatieve en enigmatische perspectieven. Fragmentatie en veelvormigheid vieren dus hoogtij. Te meer omdat je niet kunt zeggen dat de ik-figuur in het eerste verhaal aan de oorsprong staat van alle ik- figuren en verhalen die nog komen: de ik- figuur uit het allerlaatste verhaal noemt zich immers de auteur van het allereerste. Alle ik-figuren, op zichzelf al raadselachtig en meerduidig door het raadselachtige en meerduidige verhaal waarin zij optreden, worden dus NOG raadselachtiger door de ik- figuren en verhalen ervoor en erna. Redelijk duizelingwekkend, deze vorm. Veel mensen zullen dit als loze "Spielerei" opvatten, als moeilijkdoenerige virtuositeit zonder functie. Maar ik vind deze opzet en vorm juist functioneel en inspirerend. Er zijn meer romanciers, filosofen en dichters die hebben gezegd dat niemand van ons een homogeen mens uit een stuk is. Zelf ben ik daar ook sterk van overtuigd. De wereld rondom ons is meerduidig en veranderlijk en poly-interpretabel, de wereld in ons hoofd is dat niet minder. Niemand van ons is maar "een" persoon, heeft maar "een" enkel ik. Zeker in onze dromen en in onze verbeelding zijn we veel meer dan dat. En precies dat wordt naar mijn idee mooi voelbaar gemaakt door de raadselachtige veelvormigheid die zo centraal staat in "Landscape with landscape". Ik ken veel romans waarin de ik- figuur zichzelf als veelvoudig raadsel ervaart, maar weinig boeken waarin de ik- figuur zo radicaal wordt vermenigvuldigd in allerlei afgesplitste raadselachtige ik-figuren. Dus in dat opzicht vind ik "Landscape with landscape" bewonderenswaardig uitzonderlijk.
Nog fraaier en inspirerender vind ik bovendien de landschap- metafoor die in alle hoofdstukken (verhalen) terugkeert. Steeds gaat het om een landschap van de verbeelding: om het zoeken naar de onvindbare coordinaten van onze oneindige binnenwereld, om het doorgronden van alle betekenispotentieel van het landschap rondom ons, en om het peilen van de resonanties tussen binnen- en buitenwereld. Het landschap is dan steeds veel meer dan het waarneembare landschap: "The young man believed he might draw a map of a city beyond the reach of normal perception and only faintly recalling the city where he had lived his early life. The suburbs and districts in the new city would be sized and spaced according to the intensity of the poetic feeling he had once felt in this or that part of another Melbourne". Of ook: "[H]e began to form an new notion of his landscape. He thought of it as lying within himself - within some broad but invisible zone composed of his memories (which were mostly memories of dreams)". Soms gaat het om daadwerkelijk bestaand landschap, maar dan wel getransformeerd door verbeelding en droom: een door de dichterlijke verbeelding opnieuw opgebouwd Melbourne bijvoorbeeld. Waarin de latente rijkdom van het fysieke landschap meer naar voren komt dan in een realistische schildering. En waarin ook de latente rijkdom van de dichterlijke binnenwereld wordt ontploooid, omdat het ZIJN dichterlijke verbeelding is van dat landschap. Bovendien, sommige landschappen zijn puur mentaal: "His novel was not itself a landscape but it marked out the space around him where a landscape could have been". Dan is het landschap zelfs pure potentialiteit, die zich niet hoeft te storen aan de beperkingen van het realistisch bestaande landschap. En bij het waarnemen van bestaande landschappen gaat het vaak om gevoeligheid voor ongeziene kleuren, nog niet gerealiseerde potenties, latente mogelijkheden: "[T]he unnoticed corners of almost- deserted alcoves where fragile specimens [ of birds and insects] gripped their desiccated twigs or hung from their labelled pins, waiting for the few searchers who could make out the faded sheen of their feathers or wing- cases and wonder about a land where such things would dazzle the eye".
Kortom, in "Landscape with landscape" draait het om landschappen die zijn getransformeerd door de verbeelding of zelfs afkomstig zijn uit die verbeelding. Waarbij die verbeelding ook weer wordt voorgesteld als vertakt en bovendien ongrijpbaar landschap: "not as something with any colour or shape but as a space wide enough for a system of roads to intersect in it and then diverge and then perhaps meet up again by way of strange branchings and detours". En dankzij deze hoogst divergerende verbeeldingskracht dromen de ik- figuren van Murnane allerlei prachtige, ongrijpbaar rijke landschappen te voorschijn. Bijvoorbeeld een alleen in dromen bestaand Australie, dat onzekere vorm aanneemt in het hoofd van iemand die in Paraguay woont, maar vermoedt dat hij afstamt van Australische voorouders, die ooit naar Paraguay kwamen omdat ze droomden van Paraguay. Of een oneindig suggestieve wereld vol ongehoord raadselachtige groentinten, die opstijgt uit de werken van Thomas Hardy en de ongelukkige dichter Housman. Of de bestaande wereld die heel anders gaat ogen als men er naar kijkt als door het dronken, naar nieuwe betekenis dorstende oog van iemand als Jack Kerouac. Want die begreep tenminste "that a writer has to compose long sentences leading like roads away from the country that presses against the back of his neck, roand from which the South Platte valley seems almost lost to view and Wyoming only in the sky". En dat alles steeds in een brandend verlangen om meer te zien dan gezien en afgebeeld kan worden: "I speculate continually about places far beyond the meeting- point of all the lines of perspective in all the painted landscapes".
In elk verhaal (elk hoofdstuk) exploreert de ik- figuur dus allerlei niet afbeeldbare landschappen, in een onmogelijke en dus tot mislukking gedoemde poging om meer te zien dan gezien kan worden. In die pogingen onthult hij van alles over zijn omgeving en zichzelf, maar blijft de betekenis van wat hij onthult raadselachtig en onafgerond. Dat wordt nog versterkt door de eerder beschreven vorm van dit boek: alle verhalen resoneren op raadselachtige wijze in elkaar, wat betekent dat elk op zich al raadselachtig landschap van de verbeelding zich vertakt in andere raadselachtige landschappen van de verbeelding. Dus inderdaad, dit boek is wat de titel al suggereert dat het is: een landschap met daarin meerdere landschappen. Waarin elk landschap nog weidser is dan de landschappen die wij met het blote oog menen te kunnen zien. Daardoor is dit boek, voor mij, een stimulerende en inspirerende ode aan de verbeeldingskracht, en aan ons onblusbare verlangen om te dromen over wat wij niet kunnen weten of kunnen zien.
Intrigerend en inspirerend vind ik om te beginnen de vorm van het boek als geheel. Op het eerste gezicht lijkt het te gaan om een bundel verhalen, al zijn al die verhalen wel doordesemd van ongrijpbaar associatieve en onbepaalde passages die eerder doen denken aan proza-gedichten, en van passages vol suggestieve verwondering. Tegelijk echter lijken al die verhalen, in al hun associatieve ongrijpbare onsamenhangendheid, ook onderlinge resonanties en samenhangen te hebben: de ik- figuur in elk verhaal worstelt steeds met schrijverschap en kunst, heeft steeds ingewikkelde verhoudingen met raadselachtige vrouwen, zuipt als een comazuipende tempelier, en verwondert zich op even filosofische als dichterlijke wijze over het gedroomde, vergeefs nagejaagde landschap in zijn eigen hoofd. Bovendien, in elk verhaal doet de ik-figuur cryptische uitspraken over een verhaal dat hij ooit schreef, en dat verhaal heeft dan de titel van het verhaal dat volgt. Behalve het laatste verhaal, dat weer verwijst naar het verhaal waarmee het boek opent, daarmee suggererend dat het boek niet eindigt of logisch afgerond wordt maar oneindig circulair doorloopt. Elke ik- figuur is dus de verteller en hoofdpersoon van een verhaal dat door een andere ik- figuur in een eerder verhaal is genoemd en verzonnen. Die verzonnen ik- figuur is dan vaak wel een alter ego of afsplitsing van de ik- fguur die hem verzint: een personage waarin bepaalde latente obessies van "de auteur" ( de verzinnende ik-figuur) worden uitvergroot of nader worden onderzocht, of waarin de "auteur" iemand verzint die op hemzelf lijkt maar in een andere omgeving verkeert dan hij, en dus toch op andere wijze gaat denken, voelen en dromen. Vaak zegt de ik- figuur dan ook dat de door hem verzonnen ik- figuur weliswaar fictief is, maar toch onvermoede potenties in hemzelf exploreert en daardoor een diepere waarheid bevat. Zonder dat die diepere waarheid ooit onthuld of duidelijk geparafraseerd wordt, want elk verhaal is vol intrigerende raadsels die bewust open worden gelaten.
Kortom: "Landscape with landscape" zou je ook als roman kunnen lezen, en alle verhalen als hoofdstukken in die roman. Zo las ik het boek uiteindelijk zelf in elk geval wel, vooral omdat er tussen die verhalen veel meer resonanties bestaan dan in een gewone verhalenbundel. Alleen, deze roman draait dan niet om een enkele ik- figuur, maar om een veelheid van elkaar verzinnende fictieve ik- figuren, een veelheid van raadsels, een veelheid van verschillende associatieve en enigmatische perspectieven. Fragmentatie en veelvormigheid vieren dus hoogtij. Te meer omdat je niet kunt zeggen dat de ik-figuur in het eerste verhaal aan de oorsprong staat van alle ik- figuren en verhalen die nog komen: de ik- figuur uit het allerlaatste verhaal noemt zich immers de auteur van het allereerste. Alle ik-figuren, op zichzelf al raadselachtig en meerduidig door het raadselachtige en meerduidige verhaal waarin zij optreden, worden dus NOG raadselachtiger door de ik- figuren en verhalen ervoor en erna. Redelijk duizelingwekkend, deze vorm. Veel mensen zullen dit als loze "Spielerei" opvatten, als moeilijkdoenerige virtuositeit zonder functie. Maar ik vind deze opzet en vorm juist functioneel en inspirerend. Er zijn meer romanciers, filosofen en dichters die hebben gezegd dat niemand van ons een homogeen mens uit een stuk is. Zelf ben ik daar ook sterk van overtuigd. De wereld rondom ons is meerduidig en veranderlijk en poly-interpretabel, de wereld in ons hoofd is dat niet minder. Niemand van ons is maar "een" persoon, heeft maar "een" enkel ik. Zeker in onze dromen en in onze verbeelding zijn we veel meer dan dat. En precies dat wordt naar mijn idee mooi voelbaar gemaakt door de raadselachtige veelvormigheid die zo centraal staat in "Landscape with landscape". Ik ken veel romans waarin de ik- figuur zichzelf als veelvoudig raadsel ervaart, maar weinig boeken waarin de ik- figuur zo radicaal wordt vermenigvuldigd in allerlei afgesplitste raadselachtige ik-figuren. Dus in dat opzicht vind ik "Landscape with landscape" bewonderenswaardig uitzonderlijk.
Nog fraaier en inspirerender vind ik bovendien de landschap- metafoor die in alle hoofdstukken (verhalen) terugkeert. Steeds gaat het om een landschap van de verbeelding: om het zoeken naar de onvindbare coordinaten van onze oneindige binnenwereld, om het doorgronden van alle betekenispotentieel van het landschap rondom ons, en om het peilen van de resonanties tussen binnen- en buitenwereld. Het landschap is dan steeds veel meer dan het waarneembare landschap: "The young man believed he might draw a map of a city beyond the reach of normal perception and only faintly recalling the city where he had lived his early life. The suburbs and districts in the new city would be sized and spaced according to the intensity of the poetic feeling he had once felt in this or that part of another Melbourne". Of ook: "[H]e began to form an new notion of his landscape. He thought of it as lying within himself - within some broad but invisible zone composed of his memories (which were mostly memories of dreams)". Soms gaat het om daadwerkelijk bestaand landschap, maar dan wel getransformeerd door verbeelding en droom: een door de dichterlijke verbeelding opnieuw opgebouwd Melbourne bijvoorbeeld. Waarin de latente rijkdom van het fysieke landschap meer naar voren komt dan in een realistische schildering. En waarin ook de latente rijkdom van de dichterlijke binnenwereld wordt ontploooid, omdat het ZIJN dichterlijke verbeelding is van dat landschap. Bovendien, sommige landschappen zijn puur mentaal: "His novel was not itself a landscape but it marked out the space around him where a landscape could have been". Dan is het landschap zelfs pure potentialiteit, die zich niet hoeft te storen aan de beperkingen van het realistisch bestaande landschap. En bij het waarnemen van bestaande landschappen gaat het vaak om gevoeligheid voor ongeziene kleuren, nog niet gerealiseerde potenties, latente mogelijkheden: "[T]he unnoticed corners of almost- deserted alcoves where fragile specimens [ of birds and insects] gripped their desiccated twigs or hung from their labelled pins, waiting for the few searchers who could make out the faded sheen of their feathers or wing- cases and wonder about a land where such things would dazzle the eye".
Kortom, in "Landscape with landscape" draait het om landschappen die zijn getransformeerd door de verbeelding of zelfs afkomstig zijn uit die verbeelding. Waarbij die verbeelding ook weer wordt voorgesteld als vertakt en bovendien ongrijpbaar landschap: "not as something with any colour or shape but as a space wide enough for a system of roads to intersect in it and then diverge and then perhaps meet up again by way of strange branchings and detours". En dankzij deze hoogst divergerende verbeeldingskracht dromen de ik- figuren van Murnane allerlei prachtige, ongrijpbaar rijke landschappen te voorschijn. Bijvoorbeeld een alleen in dromen bestaand Australie, dat onzekere vorm aanneemt in het hoofd van iemand die in Paraguay woont, maar vermoedt dat hij afstamt van Australische voorouders, die ooit naar Paraguay kwamen omdat ze droomden van Paraguay. Of een oneindig suggestieve wereld vol ongehoord raadselachtige groentinten, die opstijgt uit de werken van Thomas Hardy en de ongelukkige dichter Housman. Of de bestaande wereld die heel anders gaat ogen als men er naar kijkt als door het dronken, naar nieuwe betekenis dorstende oog van iemand als Jack Kerouac. Want die begreep tenminste "that a writer has to compose long sentences leading like roads away from the country that presses against the back of his neck, roand from which the South Platte valley seems almost lost to view and Wyoming only in the sky". En dat alles steeds in een brandend verlangen om meer te zien dan gezien en afgebeeld kan worden: "I speculate continually about places far beyond the meeting- point of all the lines of perspective in all the painted landscapes".
In elk verhaal (elk hoofdstuk) exploreert de ik- figuur dus allerlei niet afbeeldbare landschappen, in een onmogelijke en dus tot mislukking gedoemde poging om meer te zien dan gezien kan worden. In die pogingen onthult hij van alles over zijn omgeving en zichzelf, maar blijft de betekenis van wat hij onthult raadselachtig en onafgerond. Dat wordt nog versterkt door de eerder beschreven vorm van dit boek: alle verhalen resoneren op raadselachtige wijze in elkaar, wat betekent dat elk op zich al raadselachtig landschap van de verbeelding zich vertakt in andere raadselachtige landschappen van de verbeelding. Dus inderdaad, dit boek is wat de titel al suggereert dat het is: een landschap met daarin meerdere landschappen. Waarin elk landschap nog weidser is dan de landschappen die wij met het blote oog menen te kunnen zien. Daardoor is dit boek, voor mij, een stimulerende en inspirerende ode aan de verbeeldingskracht, en aan ons onblusbare verlangen om te dromen over wat wij niet kunnen weten of kunnen zien.
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January 26, 2024Did not like this one as much as The Plains or Inland. It has some vintage Murnane stuff—and I thought the Paraguay/Australia bit was pretty funny.
December 5, 2018
Catching up on the few Murnanes that I've missed. This one was Murnane's fourth book, coming after The Plains and before Inland. Those two are both favourites of mine and now so is this one. It's kind of a collection of short stories, but the six stories all have narrators that are variations of the "Murnane" narrator that we see in many of his other books including the late fiction, writers who have worked as teachers and live in various suburbs of Melbourne. The one exception is "The Battle of Acosta Nu" which is set in a kind of Paraguay of the mind, inspired by the story of the Australian settlers who tried to set up a utopian community there in the late nineteenth century. This story is narrated by a descendent of those settlers who has an idealised vision of Australia in his mind and sees himself as superior to the Paraguayans. I was particularly interested in this having spent a year in Paraguay when I was young and visited the site of Nueva Australia.
All of the stories explore the narrator's idea of a special landscape that he wants to access and they're linked through the metafictional device of each story supposedly being written by the narrator of the previous one, with the final story looping around to the first. There are a few other metafictional intrusions in a couple of the stories. This playing around with the levels of reality and the narrators' somewhat obsessive natures put me in mind of Coover's Universal Baseball Association, although that's otherwise a very different book.
Read as a whole work rather than discrete stories it's a book of remarkable power. Murnane really is a giant, if anyone needed reminding.
All of the stories explore the narrator's idea of a special landscape that he wants to access and they're linked through the metafictional device of each story supposedly being written by the narrator of the previous one, with the final story looping around to the first. There are a few other metafictional intrusions in a couple of the stories. This playing around with the levels of reality and the narrators' somewhat obsessive natures put me in mind of Coover's Universal Baseball Association, although that's otherwise a very different book.
Read as a whole work rather than discrete stories it's a book of remarkable power. Murnane really is a giant, if anyone needed reminding.
July 19, 2019
Showing by doing absolutely nothing but telling is the curious destabilizing strategy adopted by Gerald Murnane in Landscape with Landscape. His use of the first-person point of view is relentless and strangely effective. There is no dialogue; he has distanced himself from the forms called the novel and the short story, and written instead “fictions” which inhabit a silkily shifting undefinable zone between personal diary, autobiography, and hybrid autofiction. The literary allusions read like a mature student’s history of his academic soul, and the timid seemingly wannabe Don Juan narrator’s reticence with women combined with his microscopic attention to and retention of female detail, down to the last freckle, is odd and interesting. As John Gardner says in On Becoming a Novelist, inevitably the best writers have a certain strangeness of style. This is true of Murnane’s prose. Once you give up on categorizing his writing and just flow with it, Murnane will frequently reward you with sentences that sparkle like shards of obsidian in white granite. Here are a few examples:
“And by way of saying goodbye the publisher pointed a little east of north (which was exactly the direction of the writer’s own suburb) and told him to spend every afternoon going from door to door in his suburb, introducing himself as a writer to every young woman who was at home alone, telling her he was looking for material for his next book of fiction, then having an affair with every one of the dozens who would volunteer, and finally urging each of the women to buy the book when it was published and to tell her friends to buy it.”
“At some time in my imagined future I would have wanted to see my landscape as a private place marked off from all others: a place that distinguished me as surely as a pattern of freckles could distinguish a woman.”
“Her face was carefully made up. Whenever she had to concentrate on her driving I looked sideways at the faultless texture of her cheeks and the shiny spicules of silver under her eyebrows and saw into a part of Australia I had scarcely thought about. I saw into ten thousand bathrooms all over Melbourne in the hot, slack hours of Saturday afternoon when young women were getting ready to go out with their regular boy friends.”
“And in the hour before sunrise when I woke to hear Carolyn’s bare feet on my floor as she passed on the way back from the bathroom, and when I heard her pause in the middle of my room and step very quietly towards my bed, and I knew she was standing only a little way from me in the grey half-light, shivering slightly in her thin shortie pyjamas, looking down on me and ready, if I opened my eyes, to sit on the edge of my bed and discuss seriously what she would have called my emotional problem, even then I went on breathing easily and kept my eyes closed until she understood that between the two of us was a broad zone of dreams she knew nothing about, and she turned and went back to her bed.”
“The bar had windows of thick, orange-gold frosted glass, and when I looked towards a window through my beer I felt at a safe distance from Melbourne, ready to go home to my bachelor’s flat and write like a man in the depths of the north: at two removes from the unpoetic experiences of his early years.”
“I began at last to feel that a whole continent was spread out inside me. The feel of its immense prairies and its ten thousand lakes made me no longer anxious to impress the Paraguayans around me or to treat with their young women. I thought I could be content to wait for years until a few discerning people recognised me as a man with a vast and foreign land behind my face.”
“I used to lead the boy to the cases of birds and stand beside him silently, hoping his eye might be taken by all those other eyes – tiny, dark, and staring fixedly at something that was in our world if only we could focus on it.”
“I might have been satisfied, I thought, if the only landscape that seemed my preserve was a dark and complex series of back lounges of hotels each framed within the other and stretching along a sort of tunnel within the ordinary cheerful daylight of Victoria from that bayside suburb to a remote western town, nothing of which was visible around the dark mousehole where I tossed down the last pinpoint of gold, the molten drop that dissolved what was left of my liver and killed me.”
“I was reassured to think of the women of my own city clothing themselves in the same colours that lay just beneath my own skin.”
“Now I was ready to take up my life’s work of searching for the many skeins still missing from the huge, coloured fabric strung between my nervous system and the world. I would be helped in this work by a young woman whose preferred colours could lie like wild stripes among my own. And the promptings of my nerves suggested that the art teacher was such a woman.”
“If I needed to think of my ruling faculty I thought of my imagination – not as something with any colour or shape but as a space wide enough for a system of roads to intersect in it and then diverge and then perhaps meet up again by way of strange branchings and detours.”
“I could have been still standing on a rectangle of asphalt, a road cut off at its beginnings, while I went on looking at the thick trunks and the many layers of leaves in the place that was more quiet than any I had known.”
“And by way of saying goodbye the publisher pointed a little east of north (which was exactly the direction of the writer’s own suburb) and told him to spend every afternoon going from door to door in his suburb, introducing himself as a writer to every young woman who was at home alone, telling her he was looking for material for his next book of fiction, then having an affair with every one of the dozens who would volunteer, and finally urging each of the women to buy the book when it was published and to tell her friends to buy it.”
“At some time in my imagined future I would have wanted to see my landscape as a private place marked off from all others: a place that distinguished me as surely as a pattern of freckles could distinguish a woman.”
“Her face was carefully made up. Whenever she had to concentrate on her driving I looked sideways at the faultless texture of her cheeks and the shiny spicules of silver under her eyebrows and saw into a part of Australia I had scarcely thought about. I saw into ten thousand bathrooms all over Melbourne in the hot, slack hours of Saturday afternoon when young women were getting ready to go out with their regular boy friends.”
“And in the hour before sunrise when I woke to hear Carolyn’s bare feet on my floor as she passed on the way back from the bathroom, and when I heard her pause in the middle of my room and step very quietly towards my bed, and I knew she was standing only a little way from me in the grey half-light, shivering slightly in her thin shortie pyjamas, looking down on me and ready, if I opened my eyes, to sit on the edge of my bed and discuss seriously what she would have called my emotional problem, even then I went on breathing easily and kept my eyes closed until she understood that between the two of us was a broad zone of dreams she knew nothing about, and she turned and went back to her bed.”
“The bar had windows of thick, orange-gold frosted glass, and when I looked towards a window through my beer I felt at a safe distance from Melbourne, ready to go home to my bachelor’s flat and write like a man in the depths of the north: at two removes from the unpoetic experiences of his early years.”
“I began at last to feel that a whole continent was spread out inside me. The feel of its immense prairies and its ten thousand lakes made me no longer anxious to impress the Paraguayans around me or to treat with their young women. I thought I could be content to wait for years until a few discerning people recognised me as a man with a vast and foreign land behind my face.”
“I used to lead the boy to the cases of birds and stand beside him silently, hoping his eye might be taken by all those other eyes – tiny, dark, and staring fixedly at something that was in our world if only we could focus on it.”
“I might have been satisfied, I thought, if the only landscape that seemed my preserve was a dark and complex series of back lounges of hotels each framed within the other and stretching along a sort of tunnel within the ordinary cheerful daylight of Victoria from that bayside suburb to a remote western town, nothing of which was visible around the dark mousehole where I tossed down the last pinpoint of gold, the molten drop that dissolved what was left of my liver and killed me.”
“I was reassured to think of the women of my own city clothing themselves in the same colours that lay just beneath my own skin.”
“Now I was ready to take up my life’s work of searching for the many skeins still missing from the huge, coloured fabric strung between my nervous system and the world. I would be helped in this work by a young woman whose preferred colours could lie like wild stripes among my own. And the promptings of my nerves suggested that the art teacher was such a woman.”
“If I needed to think of my ruling faculty I thought of my imagination – not as something with any colour or shape but as a space wide enough for a system of roads to intersect in it and then diverge and then perhaps meet up again by way of strange branchings and detours.”
“I could have been still standing on a rectangle of asphalt, a road cut off at its beginnings, while I went on looking at the thick trunks and the many layers of leaves in the place that was more quiet than any I had known.”
June 24, 2018
Never in my wildest dreams did I ever, EVER imagine I would describe a work of fiction by Gerald Murnane as Philidickian but here I am doing exactly that. I’m a fan of both authors but until today I wouldn’t have imagined they had much in common other than they write in English. More fool me. Dick, of course, was obsessed by the nature of reality. So is Murnane, in fact he writes, in ‘Landscape with Artist’ the final story in this collection, “I write fiction in order to discover the pattern of myself and my life.” But, of course, that’s not Murnane speaking; it’s the story’s narrator. Only it’s not the story’s narrator because, as we were reading the penultimate story in the book ‘Charlie Alcock’s Cock’, we learn that ‘Landscape with Artist’ is a story that story’s narrator wrote. But it gets worse. ‘Charlie Alcock’s Cock’ is a story the narrator of ‘A Quieter Place than Clun’ wrote. And so on and so forth. Which begs the question: Is Landscape with Landscape a collection of short fiction or what we would normally think of as novel? It’s something the author of ‘Landscape with Artist’ wonders too when he’s not wondering if he’s “some character in a work of fiction” himself.
If you’ve never read Murnane before this might not be the best place to start. Most people would say go with The Plains or Tamarisk Row and there’re good reasons to begin there but before you get stuck into the likes of Inland you probably should read this book because in it he explains as best he can what his entire œuvre is about. As one of his nameless proxies puts it:
There is an interesting passage in Barley Patch I’d like to draw your attention to:
After you’ve read the book—and I do recommend you read it—you might want to check out Karin Hansson’s ‘The Departure of the Artist: A Post-Structuralist Reading of Gerald Murnane’s Landscape with Landscape’ as well as some of the other reviews on Goodreads. This isn’t a perfect book by any manner or means but it’s as perfect as it was ever going to be at describing a flawed and fluctuating landscape.
There is a theme running through this book: a writer is struggling to understand the way he views the world and then tries to communicate said understanding to others. It’s a common problem. All you have to do is talk to artists like Giacometti or the notoriously secretive Rothko; the most self-deprecating of writers, Beckett, or composers like Gloria Coates and her interminable glissandi and that control freak Stockhausen to understand the struggle, what they went through to produce art the common man shrugs at. Although not a conventional autobiography by any means what Murnane is doing here is explaining the process, how he got from being a bad poet to being nominated for the Nobel Prize.
If this is the first you’ve heard about him there’re plenty of articles about him now. Many dwell on what an odd bird he is and there’s no doubt he is an odd bird—he wouldn’t deny it (‘I don’t know what anyone is thinking,’ Murnane has said. ‘People are a mystery to me’)—but I’m not sure he’s any odder than those I mentioned in the last paragraph; it kinda goes with the territory. The most recent article I read about him is definitely worth a read. It was in The New York Times entitled ‘Is the Next Nobel Laureate in Literature Tending Bar in a Dusty Australian Town?’ and ends with following excerpt from a poem which is the only one of his I’ve seen in print. He clearly got better:
If you’ve never read Murnane before this might not be the best place to start. Most people would say go with The Plains or Tamarisk Row and there’re good reasons to begin there but before you get stuck into the likes of Inland you probably should read this book because in it he explains as best he can what his entire œuvre is about. As one of his nameless proxies puts it:
I despaired of writing publishable fiction because as soon as I began a story or a novel I lost sight of my subject and wrote page after page trying to explain what was wrong with me as a writer, which was that I hardly noticed people and things around me because I was always looking for some kind of ideal scenery that would correspond to obscure places in my thoughts.Many authors have taken a word and made it their own. With Murnane that word is “landscape:”
The moment that changed my life was when I muttered a solemn phrase that had suddenly become rich with meaning. I said the words ‘literary landscape’ as though I was naming my lost homeland, announcing a destination I was about to make for, and explaining the oddness that others seemed to see about me.This is a deep book; don’t let its mundanity con you. As always with Murnane it feels as if he’s just droning on and on and, yes, he can drone with the best of them but really his problem stems from the fact he can’t find a way to boil what he has to say down into tasty sound bites. Just think about a landscape you’re familiar with—any landscape with do, even your back garden—and try to do it justice in words. Murnane’s books are really only a single massive work trying to describe the literary landscape he’s been exploring all his life. It feels and sounds a lot like the real world but, as with Dick at his best, it’s just a little bit skewed. It’s tempting to think of Murnane’s work as autobiographical fiction and there’s no doubt he’s drawn heavily on his life but that’s because the literary landscape he inhabits inhabits him.
There is an interesting passage in Barley Patch I’d like to draw your attention to:
During most of the years before I stopped writing fiction, I would have afforded little cheer to any personage who had begged me in a dream to allow him or her into my fiction. I would have tried to explain to the personage that he or she would still be no more than a personage, even if I were to report his or her existence in my fiction. I would have tried to explain that no sort of character could be said to exist in my fiction; that anyone mentioned in my fiction could be never more than a fictional personage, even if he or she might have seemed to resemble some or another person who lived in the place often called the real world or some or another character mentioned in some or another work of fiction. In fairness to myself, however, I might have tried to explain that the state of existence of the personages in my fiction was by no means wretched; that many such personages appeared against a background of mostly level grassy countryside; and that many a personage was the object of my continual curiosity, so that I longed to be on familiar terms with the personage, even if my only means of achieving this might have been the preposterous project of my becoming myself a personage in my own fiction.I struggled with that the first time I read it. Now it’s beginning to make some sense. I should read the book again and I likely will but not for a while. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about Murnane is to give his writing space.
After you’ve read the book—and I do recommend you read it—you might want to check out Karin Hansson’s ‘The Departure of the Artist: A Post-Structuralist Reading of Gerald Murnane’s Landscape with Landscape’ as well as some of the other reviews on Goodreads. This isn’t a perfect book by any manner or means but it’s as perfect as it was ever going to be at describing a flawed and fluctuating landscape.
There is a theme running through this book: a writer is struggling to understand the way he views the world and then tries to communicate said understanding to others. It’s a common problem. All you have to do is talk to artists like Giacometti or the notoriously secretive Rothko; the most self-deprecating of writers, Beckett, or composers like Gloria Coates and her interminable glissandi and that control freak Stockhausen to understand the struggle, what they went through to produce art the common man shrugs at. Although not a conventional autobiography by any means what Murnane is doing here is explaining the process, how he got from being a bad poet to being nominated for the Nobel Prize.
If this is the first you’ve heard about him there’re plenty of articles about him now. Many dwell on what an odd bird he is and there’s no doubt he is an odd bird—he wouldn’t deny it (‘I don’t know what anyone is thinking,’ Murnane has said. ‘People are a mystery to me’)—but I’m not sure he’s any odder than those I mentioned in the last paragraph; it kinda goes with the territory. The most recent article I read about him is definitely worth a read. It was in The New York Times entitled ‘Is the Next Nobel Laureate in Literature Tending Bar in a Dusty Australian Town?’ and ends with following excerpt from a poem which is the only one of his I’ve seen in print. He clearly got better:
Reader, if you’re urged
to learn more about this imagined world,
outlive me and my siblings and visit the library
where my archives end up. You’ll find there a filing
cabinet full of the sort of detail
that I wanted to include in this poem but failed.
You’ll read thousands of pages, though you’ll never see,
unfortunately, what they revealed to me.
February 28, 2021
Dies ist nun der dritte auf deutsch publizierte Band von Murnane, den ich mir eigentlich für eine größere Reise vorgenommen habe, aber nun zu Pandemiezeiten nicht mehr länger warten wollte.
Er enthält mehrere aufeinander folgende Kurzgeschichten, die mehr oder weniger aufeinander referieren und am Ende mit der Erzählung ‚Landschaft mit Künstler‘ ihren Höhepunkt finden. Wie die Titel der Erzählungen schon verraten, geht es hauptsächlich um Landschaften, dabei aber vor allem um die ‚inneren Landschaften‘ - symbolische Bilder, Träume und Fiktionen.
Dieser Band liest sich weniger kryptisch im Vergleich zu den anderen, sondern die einzelnen Erzählungen folgen einem roten Faden. Meistens geht es um Individuen, deren Lebensgeschichte über Jahrzehnte nachverfolgt wird. So ranken sich die Erzählungen um nicht erfüllte Träume, verpasste Chancen und Entscheidungen, die vor sich hergeschoben werden.
Als Einstieg in sein Werk würde ich dieses Buch unbedingt empfehlen, auch wenn es, wie in den anderen Werken, mitunter seine Längen hat. Folgt man bis zum Ende, dann entfaltet sich ein Hybrid aus Träumen und Fiktion, die Referenzen entwickeln immer mehr ein Eigenleben, erreichen diverse (Meta-)Ebenen und die Figur des Erzählers lässt sich von den Figuren der Erzählungen nicht mehr unterscheiden. So entsteht eine unverwechselbare Spannung und ein großartiges Leseerlebnis.
Er enthält mehrere aufeinander folgende Kurzgeschichten, die mehr oder weniger aufeinander referieren und am Ende mit der Erzählung ‚Landschaft mit Künstler‘ ihren Höhepunkt finden. Wie die Titel der Erzählungen schon verraten, geht es hauptsächlich um Landschaften, dabei aber vor allem um die ‚inneren Landschaften‘ - symbolische Bilder, Träume und Fiktionen.
Dieser Band liest sich weniger kryptisch im Vergleich zu den anderen, sondern die einzelnen Erzählungen folgen einem roten Faden. Meistens geht es um Individuen, deren Lebensgeschichte über Jahrzehnte nachverfolgt wird. So ranken sich die Erzählungen um nicht erfüllte Träume, verpasste Chancen und Entscheidungen, die vor sich hergeschoben werden.
Als Einstieg in sein Werk würde ich dieses Buch unbedingt empfehlen, auch wenn es, wie in den anderen Werken, mitunter seine Längen hat. Folgt man bis zum Ende, dann entfaltet sich ein Hybrid aus Träumen und Fiktion, die Referenzen entwickeln immer mehr ein Eigenleben, erreichen diverse (Meta-)Ebenen und die Figur des Erzählers lässt sich von den Figuren der Erzählungen nicht mehr unterscheiden. So entsteht eine unverwechselbare Spannung und ein großartiges Leseerlebnis.
July 28, 2022
Reading this book feels like looking through green tinted glass
October 31, 2019
I'm somewhat agnostic about Murnane, Australia's Calvino, but his shorter fiction is perhaps his ideal outlet. Ideas crawling over each other, as Durrell once said, like crabs in a basket. Very worthwhile little peeks under the rug at what lies beyond our conception of literature...
March 11, 2025
I read this book to penetrate into Gerarld Murnane's worldview, attempting to understand the personage who pieces together the words that changed my reading life. Who is the narrator whose amorphous presence bends and folds and unfolds the familiar? Having finished, I feel closer yet more estranged from who I hold this person to be in my mind. Thanks, Gerald.
"my writing is meant to fill. The only writers I know are those whose photos I see each week in the book review pages of Time. I envy most the men who pose against trunks or branches of trees, patches of unkempt grass, or corners of old buildings. I assume that these photos are the same ones that appear on the dust-jackets of the men's books. I imagine this or that photo facing me on the rear cover of a novel or a collection of poems. I see the author standing easily in the foreground of the landscape he has chosen to define himself. I postulate the existence some· where in the depths of that landscape of a horizon too fine for my eyes to make out, the horizon between the end of that landscape ad the beginning of the landscape which is the equivalent of the contents of the book. Last of al, I speculate about the subtlest of all horizons. This quite imperceptible boundary would mark, if anyone saw it, the beginning of the furthest of all landscapes, the place that the writer once looked at in the days before he composed his book. And although I read about these writers and their books, and dream of becoming such a writer myself, I do not read their books"
July 26, 2019
read this one quickly, intently. deals with alcohol, obsession, self-creation/performativity. the self as a failed work of art. felt much sympathy with the truly pathetic alcoholics that fill this one, the wide-eyed moments of brightness and clarity of the true booze lover, the ones that get you proselytizing some pissweak, hastily-constructed philosophy are the emptiest creative acts.
lots of anger here for me to work out, mr. murnane and his masterpiece dont deserve this. a beautiful book. carver without the idiotic self-mythologising and borges with out the smugness. a good starting point for the great man as well.
nothing to be said of murnane's idea of landscapes, a sort of purely introspective creation/representation(?) of the self. frankly it remains just an evocative abstraction of something beyond me at this point, i hope with further reading i can grasp it.
lots of anger here for me to work out, mr. murnane and his masterpiece dont deserve this. a beautiful book. carver without the idiotic self-mythologising and borges with out the smugness. a good starting point for the great man as well.
nothing to be said of murnane's idea of landscapes, a sort of purely introspective creation/representation(?) of the self. frankly it remains just an evocative abstraction of something beyond me at this point, i hope with further reading i can grasp it.
February 1, 2022
From Landscape with Freckled Woman-- "I had paused over those women because they might have proved I was no ordinary dreamer. Other young men, admirers of white and tanned skin, could dream only of what they supposed ideal: of an unclouded sky or an unspeckled skin or an untroubled smile. I, the admirer of freckled women, had taken to dreaming not because the world I saw by daylight was not enough for me but because it was too much."
Read
September 22, 2022Sure, he's an exceptional prose stylist. But maybe Murnane finds more drama in the act of writing (an act that involves a lot of thinking about writing without actually writing, at least for his characters) than I do. Consequently, a little goes a long way for this reader. The first story in this collection, though... casually mind-bending.
August 18, 2018
Interlocking iterations exploring the pervy, self-absorbed obsessions of male adolescence. For some, those obsessions apparently continue into adulthood. I did not enjoy the reminiscence.
April 23, 2019
I really liked the first story “Landscape with freckled woman” but felt lost after that.
March 21, 2022
Landscape with Freckled Woman ~ ★★★★
Sipping the Essence ~ ★★★★
The Battle of Acosta Nu ~ ★★★★
A Quieter Place than Clun ~ ★★★★★
Charlie Alcock’s Cock ~ ★★★★★
Landscape with Artist ~ ★★★★
Sipping the Essence ~ ★★★★
The Battle of Acosta Nu ~ ★★★★
A Quieter Place than Clun ~ ★★★★★
Charlie Alcock’s Cock ~ ★★★★★
Landscape with Artist ~ ★★★★
October 2, 2024
His best, I believe, work of short fiction. Bridges the gap between Murnane of The Plains and Murnane of Inland.
October 6, 2024
An amazing collection; the stories were painfully real and emotionally complex, and dripping with longing for a sense of identity that is just out of reach.
June 25, 2024
Everything "If on a winter's night..." promised to be, but wasn't. I'm not dissing Calvino, but (at least on this sui-generis sample of his fiction) Murnane has shown the mastery of the "Cubist novel" that later writers would develop in the 21st century [Imagine IWWHFTL if Justin Isis preferred to read Jack Kerouac and hanging out in Australian suburbs rather than dating models and drinking with friends in Shinjuku).
January 28, 2019
very cool to read the earlier stories and see his usual obsessions show up in a more overtly 'fictional' mode. the quality of these is kind of uneven(i didn't really like the last one with all the kerouac stuff in it)) but the story 'the battle of acosta-nu' is probably the best thing ive read by him.
January 28, 2017
I've done two blog posts about this book:
https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/01/15/l...
and
https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/01/22/a...
https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/01/15/l...
and
https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/01/22/a...
Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews