Inland

by Gerald Murnane

Is it possible to fall in love with a correspondent based entirely on a fascination with his or her handwriting, with a map of the country they live in, with the syllables of their name? What about, then, a fictional character, in a book about a country one has never, and will never, visit?

Inland is a compact story—or group of stories, each nested within another—nonetheless opening onto a seemingly endless fractal geography, where the interior of Australia, the Midwestern prairie, and the Hungarian Alföld merge, imitate, and enfold one another in the mind of a man sitting alone in a room full of books. Perhaps the greatest novel by Gerald Murnane, Australia’s reply to Proust and Calvino, and a Nobel favorite for several years running, Inland shows that one can as easily be an exile in one’s own interior as out in the wide world, and as easily feel the loss of people one has only imagined as those who have shared our lives in the flesh.

Genres: Fiction, Australia, Literary Fiction, Short Stories, Novels, Literature, 20th Century

169 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Murnane'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).

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is a room full of books… In the room there is a table… And there is a man sitting at the table… The man writes… He doesn’t write a book… He just writes…

Yet I do not want the woman to look at me. She will look into my face and I will have to speak to her. I will have to explain to her what I meant by all those pages that I covered with my writing when I was a man in the library of a manor-house and she was a young woman looking out at her dream-prairie near the town of Ideal. All this is too much to explain.

He writes to his nonexistent editor… His texts are fragmentary… His universe is irrational… Described events defy logic… Everything in his writings turns around his idée fixe…

I have always understood that the people whose names are on the pages of my books are all dead. Some of those people were once alive but now they are dead. Others of those people have never been alive; they have always been dead.
Today I am thinking of the people whose names are on the covers of books: the same people who wrote the pages inside the books. I have always supposed that all of those people are dead. But I used to suppose that the people first wrote the pages of the books and then died. They wrote their books and then they died. Today I believe that the people who wrote the pages of the books may have died before they wrote.

He recalls his adolescence… His recollections are inconsequential… His thoughts are mixed up… His ideas are vague…

Someone reading this page deep in the Institute of Prairie Studies may wonder why a man of my age and standing writes at this table for day after day about a twelve-years-old child. But I am not writing about a twelve-years-old child. Each person is more than one person. I am writing about a man who sits at a table in a room with books around the wall and who writes for day after day with a heaviness pressing on him.

The world, seen through the eyes of lunatic, turns into another world.

[Fionnuala]

Gerald Murnane has a strange preoccupation with windows. The reader of his novels eventually begins to wonder what exactly these windows symbolise, and how they are defined in Murnane's personal dictionary.

In The Plains, Murnane preferred to have "windows" remain a mysterious element but within the pages of Inland, he develops the theme much more concretely. From the beginning, by means of stories within stories, he makes the reader aware of the narrative itself as a series of windows through which we must step in order to follow his thought. Towards the end of Inland, he explains his preoccupation with windows in greater detail: he mentions their mirror function and goes on to explain how a page in a book can be a window/mirror; how in fact any page of writing can become such a window/mirror; how the reader/viewer is seeing what he himself seeks, reflected in the window/page.

When early in this novel, the narrator deliberately triggers memories from his childhood by looking at an old photograph of a prize-giving ceremony, I found my own memories of being an eleven-year old in a Catholic school at a similar ceremony merging with Murnane’s account just as yours are perhaps now being triggered as you read about mine and Murnane’s on this window/page. It had become clear to me even before Murnane explained it that the kind of writing he tries to create is that which provokes the reader to reflect, to access his own "Inland"; the aspects of books which please him most are not the plot or character elements but the passages which inspire reflection, as for example the very last paragraph of Wuthering Heights: I lingered round them, under the benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumber for the sleepers in that quiet earth

Murnane’s narrators spend a lot of time in rooms with windows through which they stare, as in this book, or through which they peer only on rare occasions through the narrow gap of the curtains, as in The Plains. When they do look out, it is always at plains or grasslands, real plains or those imagined on maps of countries which contain vast expanses of waving grasses, heath and hare-bells of different kinds. Sometimes there is a figure in the distance, a female figure, often unknown, and the narrator as voyeur will address this young woman from behind the window of his eyes, seeking to make her story part of his own by making himself part of hers just as French poet Stephane Mallarmé does to an unknown woman in this sonnet, M’introduire dans ton histoire*.

Sometimes, the girl-woman (Murnane’s title for Proust’s jeunes filles en fleurs**) is encountered in the street and the narrator desperately seeks to see himself acknowledged in her eyes, to know that she might have loved him in some alternative life, echoing a theme found in both Proust and Baudelaire, Ô toi que j'eusse aimée, ô toi qui le savais!***

In Inland, there is a specific girl whom the narrator obsessed over as a twelve-year old and though she has long been absent from his life (and we wonder if she was ever very present), it is as if he seeks to hold her prisoner in his mental world. Women who are mothers are not obsessed over in this book, nor are prepubescent girls, only these girl-women of his youth; there is the implication that it is only by means of the mysterious (as it was to his twelve-year old self) cleft between the thighs of these girl-women that he can access the centre of his existence.❏ The parting fronds of grasslands take on new meaning as do all manner of openings, and even the word "inland" itself.
The twelve-year old voyeur of the narrator’s memory, though not part of the frame story of this book, is more present on the pages of Inland than the shadowy narrator himself who sits in a room with wide windows, writing to a female researcher in a grasslands institute far away, evoking his youthful preoccupations with girl-women on page after page of eloquent window/writing. This is "Inland" country.

Reviewed in 2014
* references:

*M'introduire dans ton histoire
C'est en héros effarouché
S'il a du talon nu touché
Quelque gazon de territoire

A des glaciers attentatoire
Je ne sais le naïf péché
Que tu n'auras pas empêché
De rire très haut sa victoire

Dis si je ne suis pas joyeux
Tonnerre et rubis aux moyeux
De voir en l'air que ce feu troue

Avec des royaumes épars
Comme mourir pourpre la roue
Du seul vespéral de mes chars

Mallarmé, 1886

**The title of the second volume of Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu is translated as In the shadow of young girls in flower.

***À une passante by Charles Baudelaire 1857

La rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait.
Longue, mince, en grand deuil, douleur majestueuse,
Une femme passa, d'une main fastueuse
Soulevant, balançant le feston et l'ourlet;
Agile et noble, avec sa jambe de statue.
Moi, je buvais, crispé comme un extravagant,
Dans son oeil, ciel livide où germe l'ouragan,
La douceur qui fascine et le plaisir qui tue.
Un éclair... puis la nuit! — Fugitive beauté
Dont le regard m'a fait soudainement renaître,
Ne te verrai-je plus que dans l'éternité?
Ailleurs, bien loin d'ici! trop tard! jamais peut-être!
Car j'ignore où tu fuis, tu ne sais où je vais,
Ô toi que j'eusse aimée, ô toi qui le savais!

Here is a translation by Roy Cambell:
A Passer-by

The deafening street roared on. Full, slim, and grand
In mourning and majestic grief, passed down
A woman, lifting with a stately hand
And swaying the black borders of her gown;
Noble and swift, her leg with statues matching;
I drank, convulsed, out of her pensive eye,
A livid sky where hurricanes were hatching,
Sweetness that charms, and joy that makes one die.
A lighting-flash — then darkness! Fleeting chance
Whose look was my rebirth — a single glance!
Through endless time shall I not meet with you?
Far off! too late! or never! — I not knowing
Who you may be, nor you where I am going —
You, whom I might have loved, who know it too!

[Katia N · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is like a poetry in someone’s else’s mind before it has been written.

That was my initial impression. What follows is an impression after I've finished reading this book for the second time.

It was a freezing autumn morning sometime in the second decade of the 20th century somewhere on a farm-estate in Hungary. A twelve year old boy and his friends were stopped on their way to school by a shocking scene.

When the boy has grown up and has become a young man he has written a book. It was not a fictional book. He wanted to describe the life of the community he was born into. He did it in a very detailed way. He wanted to be scientific and objective in his descriptions. He did not want to leave any areas out. But also he was a poet. That is how he presented the scene he has witnessed as a young boy:

“The cowherds pulled her out when they watered the cattle at dawn. By the time we arrived there on our way to school, she was lying on the thin ice formed by the water by the water which had been spilt from the well. Under this covering the black clods of earth, the pieces of straw and dung glinted and sparkled like rare jewels under the glass. There she lay with one eyes in which, like the small objects under the ice, was frozen the broken terror of a startled glance.”

The girl was a farm-hand. After being sexually exploited by a middle age farm-administrator, she could not survive the trauma and drowned in the well. Such type of sexual exploitation was “a normal” practice of the land still in place when the young man was writing his book. He has finished it sometime in the third decade of the 20th century. The girl has drowned and no-one saved her then. But she at least was saved in one way: she was saved “from oblivion” by this young man. Later, the book was translated into English.

Even later, sometime in the seventh decade of the 20th century and in a very different corner of the world, but also a corner with a remote horizons of the flat land covered by green grass, another young man came across this book. In the one of the chapters he has met the passage about the girl. It is unclear what exactly this young man felt while reading this passage for the first time. But “the personage” of the girl “had come to life” in his mind. Almost five decades later the young man who would become the old man would say:

“Who could begin to estimate the number of girls and young women, in Hungary alone, who might have endured what the drowned girl could not endure? Their stories were never told, and hers might never have been told” (if not for the school-boy).

It is plausible to assume that the young man has had a similar thought five decades earlier. That might be the one of the reasons why the girl and the image of a well has lived in his mind since.

And one day, around a decade later since their first meeting the drowned girl “found her way into a work of fiction” of this young man who was getting older.

It is plausible to assume he wanted to get closer to this dead girl placing his narrator into the geography and time she was born into. He wanted to write about death in general. Maybe he wanted to write about violence against the weaker creatures: girls, but also birds, dogs and trees; the violence so often hiding behind either customary norms or simple denial.

It is equally plausible that at the same time he has read a line from the letter by Hemingway: “I believe that basically you write for two people; yourself to try to make it absolutely perfect… Then you write for who you love whether she can read or write or not and whether she is alive or dead.” And he wanted also to write his own letter.

In any case, instead of the book about death he has written a visceral first love story containing the images of pages with written words drifting from one place to another, from one book to another, from one world to another like clouds on the sky. His narrator, who looked very much like him, has also discovered that “No thing in the world is one thing; that each thing in the world is two things at least” and “There is another world but it is within this one.” He has seen this last sentence attributed to Paul Eluard in the one of the books in his shelves. It has confirmed his discovery.

He has also discovered that the drowned girl who he has initially considered dead is actually therefore alive. And the girl, he has fallen in love with for the first time aged twelve, whom he thought he has lost twice: once when he has been moved to a different town and second time when they've both grown up... He discovered this girl still can be reached. She can be found in that “another world” if he writes about her.

Another discovery he made was about the colours. He has noticed if one looks long enough at Hungarian flag, one would be able to see how red, white and green start to form a visible pattern everywhere else where one turns his eyes after that. He did all these discoveries in this book he wrote when he was still a young man but getting older. Or what did he actually do in the book?

Sometime, in the third decade the 21th century a woman has just finished reading the last page of this book. She thought she grasped the meaning of his work. But holding on to it was like holding a bird - let it loose and it will fly out without a trace; grip tighter - it will be hurt and lose some of its feathers. The young man who has written the book has populated its pages with the images expressed in exact words. She thought she could see the images both through the eyes of the writer and his narrator as well as through her own eyes. She thought she has caught how they transposed and blend with each other. But whilst seeing these images the words on the page would totally disappear to be replaced by them in her mind. She faced with the difficulty how to render this multidimensional “bird” in her mind back into a linear sequence of black symbols on the white background in order to tell someone else what she saw. Moreover, she wondered what would her sequence of black letters add to the sequence of the images and words by those men and women dead or alive who has been already the part of this story for the last hundred years?

Then she came across this phrase in the novel:

“every thing would always be more than one thing... everything would always contain another thing, which would contain another thing, which would contain still another thing or which would seem, absurdly, at first sight, to contain the thing that seems to contain it.”

And this has made her happier about holding this “bird” of hers.

The young man in the beginning of the 20th century was Gyula Illyés. The book was People of the Puszta. The young man later in the century was Gerald Murnane with this novel.
He also was the old man from the 21th century who wrote Last Letter to a Reader, the essays about his main works. The woman in the 21th century was me.

This is how i was about to end this piece. But I found myself unable to leave this book. So I continue.

No writing can express the pleasure of the interaction with this work. He writes like some people paint. Imagine huge empty canvas or a white ceiling of a cathedral. He fills in some part of it with one image like painting a fresco. Then he goes far away through the empty space and fills another corner with seemingly unrelated image. Slowly but surely those initially unrelated images are connected into some kind of pattern either in his mind or in his reader’s mind or both; and a huge fresco finally appears, not necessarily the same for everyone. Then when you read again it is as if you are looking at a ceiling of a huge cathedral with this fresco. You need to walk around a lot. And there is no way you can remember the whole image, just parts of it. But each time you see different fascinating and beautiful details, discover new little stories.

That was mine impression. In his essay on time in Murnane and Borges's works, the critic Paolo Bartoloni expressed a similar idea in more theoretical way:

“In Murnane’s the cause and effect process is still present, but instead of propelling the story ahead along a linear time it generates a sprawling narrative which disperses itself in all directions. This fragmentation subverts the stable notion of `centre', be it a narrative's ending, the final destination of a journey or the paradigmatic order inscribed in the linearity of time, and in so doing it re-describes the reader's perception of and relation with the text. What we confront is a set of texts deprived of a central and guiding narrative whose place is occupied instead by a myriad of narratives which constantly keep interlocking and referring to each other.”

I consider “Inland” as the one of his best works. Mainly because one can see very clearly the transition here between his earlier post-modern elements that were more or less standard within the 80s paradigm towards uniquely Murnanian landscapes of his mind. And I am not alone. In 2012 Coetzee called this novel "the most ambitious, sustained, and powerful piece of writing Murnane has to date brought off."

The novel starts in a typical postmodern way: his narrator based in some estate in Hungary and writes in Magyar the text about his land. He sends it to America to Calvin O. Dahlberg institute where his editor is based. He goes all the way to point out in the text who was this Calvin O. (someone who “made a fortune from breweries and paper”). And of course after his narrator starts addressing some comments directly to his “reader”, anyone would has read If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler would connect the name of the institute to Italo Calvino. Dahlberg was apparently as well an American writer of the 20th century. However, “The reader” in this novel is not us, but someone in that institute, presumably an imaginary Calvino. So it makes them both readers and writers with a lot to talk about. His narrator also brings in Gyula Illyés and they talk about animal breeding with unsubtle connotations of sexual abuse of young women. The section is packed with meta-fictional and intertextual games and some exercises in style (an obituary).

Filled to the brim with these tricks, this part of the novel is playful in a postmodern way but could be a bit tiresome in parts. However, it does not last long. And some of the key images and patterns appear in this section for the first time. The rest of the novel is more elegant, sparse and with more meaningful intertextual elements.

But this initial section also contains what I consider a jewel, a poem in prose that touches upon his theme of who is really “dead” or “alive”. This relates to the concept of duality of “visible” and “invisible” world is Murnane’s worldview that was fully developed in his later work. In this book and it seems for the first time, he becomes concerned with the difference between everyday reality and the reality presented to him in the pages of books he reads. How do they interact and which one is “more real”. It becomes a proper ontological inquiry for him as an artist.

But let’s come back to the “poem”:

“I am writer of the books. I am ghost. While I was writing I died and became a ghost. While I was writing I saw ghosts of hundreds of books that I have never seen, nor will I ever see, in libraries where ghosts of men that I have never seen, nor I will never see, dreamed of writing to young women in America. I saw ghosts of my own books in ghosts of libraries where no one comes to unlock the glass doors of bookcases. I saw ghosts of men staring sometimes at ghosts of glass panes. I saw ghosts of images of clouds drifting through the ghost of an image of sky behind ghosts of covers and spines of ghosts of books. I saw ghosts of images of pages white or grey drifting through the same ghost of an image of sky. And I went on writing so that ghosts of images of pages of mine would drift over ghosts of plains in a ghost of a world towards ghosts of images of skies in libraries of ghosts of the ghosts of books."

In this passage he methodically modifies almost all nouns with the word “ghost”. In his initial understanding, these people and images the writer sees in his mental eye while writing cannot be real in the same way as his desk or people on the street, for example. However, he still sees them in his mental eye as well as he see his desk. Therefore, he should give them a special marker in writing. In this passage this marker is “ghost”. They do not exist like a desk or people on the street so they have to be “ghosts” then. Later, on the pages of this novel he would have an epiphany that people populating the world of his mind are not “ghosts”: they are not “dead” also, they are real to him in ontological sense of the world. He would carry this idea through the rest of his work.

I’ve read this passage so many times and each time I’ve seen the different image. At one point, I’ve just taken the word “ghost” out:

“I saw the images of clouds drifting through an image of sky behind covers and spines of books. I saw images of pages white or grey drifting through the same image of sky. And I went on writing so that images of pages of mine would drift over plains in a world towards images of skies in libraries of books.”

On one level, this is a very simple image he is referring to here. Have you ever stood in front of a bookcase with a glass panel on a bright but cloudy day? If you look at a shelf through the glass you would see the reflection of the sky and the clouds transposed over the spines of books. That is all it is. But he made it so profound and beautiful: he sees the blending of the two worlds instead. He imagines those clouds are drifting in the stories written in the books. He imagines new pages as white as the clouds “drift” in the world while he writes to be added to some books. This is also very imaginative way how to express intertextuality, the use by one writer of a line or a part of text written before by someone else.

This image of the books through the glass on a cloudy day is the one of the key symbolical images in the novel. It unites the duality of reflection and see-through effects: their inherent contradiction, but also complementarity. It seems the whole novel can be opened up through seeing this duality, the tension, but also the unity between the pairs Murnane knowingly or unknowingly have created on its pages.

The girl, his first love and the girl drowned in a well many decades ago. A twelve year old boy and a grown up man who has been this boy many decades ago. A pond he treasured as a child with a golden fish that eventually jumps out and dies and the well where the girl drowned. Two letters one send to the editor in America, another send to an acquaintance in order to regain his first love. Pairing and swapping writers of the books with their readers. Maps: a map of a land and a map of a person, “map of true part of you”. The list can go on.

And also of course his discovery after Eluard that "There is another world but it is within this one”:

“The other world, in other words, is a place that can only be seen or dreamed of by those people known to us as narrators of books or characters of books. If you or I, reader, happen to glimpse part of that world drifting past, as it were, it is because we have seen or dreamed of ourselves seeing for a moment as a narrator or a character in a book sees or dreams of seeing."

He plays very productively with the images revealing this duality. Visually for him is the tension between “see through” glass effect versus “reflection” effect. As a photographer, i could testify to this very striking collaboration. The image of the glass bookshelf i described above. But also an eye and a page of a book serves him well:

“Some people have said that an eye is a window, but anyone who has looked carefully has seen that an eye is a mirror. If I look at the eye I am writing about I see only red roofs.., white walls and the windows reflecting fields and grassland. And if I look closely, I see on the other side of the… a man writing.

In addition in the passage above one can see the recurring motive in the novel of red, white and green coming from Hungarian flag.

Every passage of this book, every sentence contain multitude visually, thematically, verbally. But there is also a big heart “seen through” its pages and “reflected” straight into your heart: love of people, love of books, love of life that persist and battles the “grey” of desolation, displacement and death.

“I have heard the pause while I wreathe next-to-last page in many a book. The larger, the solemn themes are about to go into battle for the last time. By now, of course, the solemn themes are not themes but men and women, and when they pause for the last time they look over their shoulders.

They look back towards some district where they lived as children or where they once fell in love. Perhaps they see the green lawn or even the branch with green leaves that they saw in their native district. For a moment a simple theme is the only theme heard; the greens appears in place of the greyness.

For a absurd moment within that moment, the listener or the reader dares to suppose that this after all is the last theme; this and not the others the end; the green has outlasted the grey; the grey has been covered over at last by the green.

But this is only a moment within a moment. The clouds resume their drifting; the four ends whistle. The solemn themes turn to meet the storm.”

[Chris Via]

Inland by Gerald Murnane (And Other Stories, 2024)
Imagine a sort of literary Gregor Mendel cross-breeding Proust's dreams, Hemingway's simplicity, and Stein's repetition, all tuned to the key of Guy Davenport's concept of the geography of the imagination. Now consider the topography of this nascent species as an intercalated series of plains, steppes, pampas, prairies, alfolds, and grasslands. Amidst these vast expanses a voice speaks in folds of prose that make Inland seem almost like sacred writing, wisdom literature. It wouldn't be too opaque to say that what this incantatory hybrid voice speaks into being is a book about "being about." Yet it also extends this ontological root by asserting that writing about being is to set in motion a perpetual coming into being like Mendel's successive generations of plants. Murnane is the master of beginning with a sort of annunciatory echo and then tracing that echo to capture its fading reverberations. And it is these long echoes that make us who we really are: "Whatever places you saw at such times, along with all the places you dreamed of yourself seeing, must all appear on the map of the true part of you" (96).

[Marc Lamot · Rating 2 out of 5]

For fans of postmodern novels with a meta-evocation of the act of writing, this must be the cream of the crop. Murnane hides behind a few personae (following Pessoa?) to do what he loves: writing at a table, looking out of the window and staring at the grasslands, successively in Hungary, South Dakota and Australia. It seems as if this book starts over every 30 pages, each time with the sentence “I'm writing…”. It gives an elliptical effect, which is fascinating, but in time also annoys (at least to me). Fortunately, there are the humorous elements, such as the 'Institute of Prairie Studies', or the writer who calls himself a 'scientist of grasslands', and the author regularly is playing tricks on us. More qualified readers probably would detect quite a lot of meta-layers in this book; unfortunately most of them ware lost on me. As mentioned, this is postmodernist stuff. While I was quite taken with The Plains, I'm starting to think Murnane might be a one-trick pony. And from the rare interviews with him, I gather that he thinks so too. Or could that be another trick of his?

[cycads and ferns · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I learned that no thing in the world is one thing; that each thing in the world is two things at least, and probably many more than two things. I learned to find a queer pleasure in staring at a thing and dreaming of how many things it might be.”

A man, possibly sitting in the library of a manor house on the Great Alford in Hungary, dreams of other lives in other lands. He imagines being in disparate locals, at various ages, and pursuing different interests and professions. One day, he dreams of his editor and translator, Anne Kristaly Gunnarsen, in her prairie home in Ideal, South Dakota.
“Anne Kristal Gunnarsen herself stares out at the place that she calls her dream-prairie….And she waits for my pages to come to her. I myself do just as I have already written. I sit at this table and sometimes I write a little, or I dream of myself writing.”

Then the man, dreaming of sitting in the garden of a large house between the Hopkins River and Russells Creek, addresses the reader.
“I am not sorry for you, reader, if you think of me as deceiving you. I can hardly forget the trick you played on me. You allowed me to believe for a long time that I was writing to a young woman I called my editor….Now you still read and I still write but neither of us will trust the other.”

One day, while possibly looking through a book, the man comes across a sentence written by the French poet, Paul Éluard.
‘There is another world but it is in this one.’
He thinks “There is another world, and I have seen parts of that world on most days of my life. But the parts of that world are drifting past and cannot be lived in. For as long as I used to see drifting past me those parts of the other world, I used to wonder about the place where all the drifting parts drift together. But I no longer wondered….”
The man considers what ‘this one’ refers to? A world existing within the pages of a book? Maybe a dream-book?

“I had believed for most of my life that a page of a book is a window. Then I had learned that a page of a book is a mirror.”

[Matthew Ted]

33rd book of 2024.

And Other Stories have taken the liberty of reprinting Murnane’s fourth novel (1988), Inland. It’s known as being plotless, nearly character-less, and has, as one can see by just looking through the GR reviews, arguments and misunderstandings about how many narrators the book even has. Is it one, or two? (Or many?) One fairly high up review states quite confidently there are two narrators in Inland; I found Murnane himself saying these theories are all wrong: there is a single narrator in the novel.

Which was a relief to me, who, whilst reading, could only see and sense a single narrator. The book is “plotless”, but I don’t think “character-less” is fair. The narrator is at his window writing, as the cover of this And Other Stories’ edition shows in the first few lines of the novel. It progresses in Bernhardian fashion, with simple but labyrinthine and muddling prose. He is writing. He is imagining the reader, perhaps you. He is also imagining the editor, in America, whom he does not know, nor she him, it seems. Most of his thoughts circle the same images. More often than not, the book is about “grasslands” and “plains”. Murnane’s most famous novel is titled The Plains.

I would like to write more about the skyscraper of marble and glass on the Great Plain of America, but that sort of writing is by no means easy. I have written that sort of writing only since I first thought of my editor as thinking of me as dead.
It is not easy to think of myself as a man who is thought of as dead. I might as easily think of myself as dead. And perhaps this is what some writers do before they begin to write. They think of themselves as dead. Or they think of themselves as thought of as dead.
I have always understood that the people whose names are on the pages of my books are all dead. Some of those people were once alive but now they are all dead. Others of those people have never been alive; they have always been dead.
Today I am thinking of the people who names are on the covers of books: the same people who wrote the pages inside the books. I have always supposed that all those people are dead. But I used to suppose that the people first wrote the pages of the books and then died. They wrote their books and then they died. Today I believe that the people who wrote the pages of the books may have died before they wrote. They died, or they thought of themselves as having died, or they thought of themselves as thought of as dead — and then they wrote.

As I said above, it’s muddling; that’s the best adjective I can think of. It gets you in a muddle. For the first one-hundred pages, mostly repetitive writing like quoted, about writing, reading, death, and the grasslands, always about grasslands, I was frustrated. Then I found J.M. Coetzee’s comments on the novel:

The most ambitious, sustained and powerful piece of writing Murnane has to date brought off. “Inland” is a letter to the girl from Bendigo Street: a declaration of love; a lament over lost opportunity. . . Woven into this narrative are a number of motifs whose common element is resurrection.

This unlocked a new door for me. I began hunting for this motif, but all I found was death. The strangely focussed description on the killing of baby birds and eggs. The random deaths of other people dropped into the narrative around all the looking out of the window at the grasslands. At the writing of words. The Proust elements are clear and Beckett, too (Murnane has been called Beckett’s heir). Slowly, the girl from Bendigo Street enters the dreamlike narrative. There’s no dialogue to speak of. Everything continues in its muddled and confused state, but it gets gradually clearer. A childhood emerges. The memory of this girl. When the final page came, I went back searching. Where was Coetzee’s resurrection?

Someone asked me recently, What’s your book about? I was reading it in a small office waiting for someone. I said, It’s about a man looking out of a window at some grasslands. What else? they asked. Nothing yet, I said. You look halfway through! they exclaimed. Yes… I said.

I had believed for most of my life that a page of a book is a window. Then I had learned that a page of a book is a mirror.

[Ian "Marvin" Graye · Rating 4 out of 5]

CRITIQUE:

Shifting Scenes

Although it starts off unsteadily, "Inland" is a worthy successor to "The Plains". Still, like the earlier novel, I can't honestly say that this novel is unflawed or worth five stars. Even four stars is stretching it.

Whereas the subject matter of the earlier novel was effectively set or contained in the narrator's/author's mind, the later seems to be more interested in the role of the narrator and the process of creating, writing and reading fiction.

Dual Narration

"Inland" has at least two narrators, both of whom write (or type) in the same environment.

The first narrator is based on the Hungarian writer, Gyula Illyés, who wrote "People of the Puszta", an account of the life of servants on the large farmland estates of the Great Alföld (also known as the Great Hungarian Plain [which forms part of Pannonia or the Pannonian Plain]).

The anonymous second narrator appears to be based on Murnane himself, although he isn't named as such in the novel, even if we're told that his surname is uncommon. Much of his part of the text seems to be autobiographical (or at least semi-autobiographical), although, assembled as it is with plausible deniability, it's not safe to assume so.

Windows, Wells and Fish Ponds

Both narrators sit on a chair and write on a table in the library of a large home or manor-house. The walls of the libraries are surrounded by shelves filled with books, which haven't necessarily been read by the narrators. From time to time, as they write, the narrators stand up and walk over to the windows, out of which they can see either a well or a fish-pond.

It's arguable that, although the first narrator was based on a real person (then recently deceased), the fullness of the narrator as a character of the novel is an invention of the author (i.e., who might be the second narrator).

In other words, the author or second narrator might have dreamed what the first narrator did and saw. Similarly, the first narrator might only have remembered the sight of the well or dreamed he had seen the well. The second narrator might have animated the first narrator or caused him to see or dream that he had seen the well.

While readers are used to believing that narrators or characters in novels are alive and actually do, say and see things, Murnane seems to be interested in the possibility that this is not in fact the case. Instead, it's possible that the narrators or characters are either dead or they never existed.


Backyard fish-pond (Source:)

Ghosts on Another World, Another Planet

The narrators describe the dead narrators or characters as "ghosts". This doesn't mean that they are literally ghosts or spirits. Instead, it might imply that they are creations or dreams or fabrications of the narrator. Unable to create a person in reality, they invent or fabricate them in fiction. Objects (such as the grasslands or plains) might therefore be "ghosts of images" seen or imagined by the narrator. This is the closest resemblance to the subject matter of "The Plains". Similarly, there might be "ghosts of clouds." These ghosts remain in both the mind of the author/narrator and the fiction (which is shared with the reader).

As the two narrators look out of their windows, they don't necessarily see the same objects, images or ghosts, although they might have parallel visions (e.g., one a well, and the other, a fishpond), which could have similar significance for them.

Murder Ballads and Suicide Stories

The significance of the well for the first narrator is that, in the Hungarian author's book, a guilt-ridden 12 to 13 year old girl had committed suicide by leaping into the well, after having had sex with the assistant farm-manager's son in his bedroom.

The second narrator (the Murnane substitute) spends much of the later part of the novel recollecting his Roman Catholic childhood, especially his obsession/ infatuation with schoolgirls from his native district (on the grasslands west of Melbourne) who were aged between 13 and 14. He's desperate to call one of these girls his girl-friend, and seeks them out in a caravan park he visits on the coast while on holidays. Here, he finds only three or four faces who appeal to him out of 3o girls. He describes this category of girls as "girl-women", much as the hebephile Humbert Humbert selected girls who qualified as "nymphets" in Nabokov's "Lolita".

While the second narrator doesn't engage in or describe any sexual activity with any of these girl-women, he does narrate the story of one of them being murdered by her step-father with whom she had had illicit sex under duress without the knowledge of her mother, his wife.

The sexuality of Murnane's narrators and characters reflects the fact that they're what the second narrator's father describes in the case of some relatives as "religious maniacs". Roman Catholics and former Catholics might understand or identify more with these characteristics. Non-Christians, Atheists, Protestants and former Protestants are more likely to be puzzled, relieved they aren't Catholics, or repelled by the hypocrisy.

"There is Another World, but It is in This One"

The above quote from Paul Eluard (an epigraph from Patrick White's "The Solid Mandala") either inspired Murnane to develop the conceit of his novel, or it expresses what he was trying to achieve.

For example, the world of the first narrator is or becomes part of the world of the second narrator, as well as the reader. Perhaps both the second narrator and the reader create their version of the first narrator's world in their own mind.

As was the case with Marcel Proust, a fiction "has made it possible for men and women who have never seen, nor will ever see, the land of France, to breathe with ecstasy, through the curtain of the falling rain, the scent of invisible yet enduring lilacs."

Murnane would return to this quotation many times in his writing. But he would also seek to create visions (or ghosts of images) that were invisible to the eye, yet endured in our memory.


BLOCKQUOTE:

"I am writing in the library of a manor-house...in Szolnok County. Now, something other than heaviness urges me to leave this table and to walk to the windows. I have to walk to the windows in order to learn whether I remembered, just now, the sight of a certain well, or whether I was dreaming. Perhaps I could say without leaving this table that I only dreamed of the sight of my well. If you recall, reader, I had not left my table when I began this inquiry. I had only dreamed of myself leaving my table and then returning to my table and then trying to recall what I might have seen through my windows. I dreamed of myself here at my table and then I wondered whether the man I dreamed of - whether that man remembered the sight of a certain well or whether he was dreaming. I will try for your sake, reader, to distinguish between what I see and what I remember and what I dream of myself seeing or remembering. My room contains only this table, the chair underneath me, a steel cabinet, and all the shelves of books around the walls. I sit at this table and sometimes I write a little, or I dream of myself writing. The book would be about people who were alive and had not died, and about grasslands. If the writer of books was a ghost, did he see the same view that I see from my window? I believe the writer of books saw the ghosts of things from my window. He saw things that I might have seen long ago but cannot see today. You are dreaming of yourself writing in the library of a manor-house, in Szolnok County, but while you were dreaming at your table I was writing on pages of books. I saw ghosts of my own books in ghosts of libraries where no one comes to unlock the glass doors of bookcases. I saw ghosts of men staring sometimes at ghosts of glass panes. I saw ghosts of images of clouds drifting through the ghost of an image of sky behind ghosts of covers and spines of ghosts of books...And I went on writing so that ghosts of images of pages of mine would drift over ghosts of plains in a ghost of a world towards ghosts of images of skies in libraries of ghosts of the ghosts of books. Some people have said that an eye is a window, but anyone who has looked carefully has seen that an eye is a mirror. I had thought of that man sitting at his table and not reading but writing. I had thought of him as having written all the pages around me. And then I thought of him as being about to write on the page that I had been about to write on when I left my table and walked towards the window. One day in this room I read in the preliminary pages of an unlikely book these words: 'There is another world but it is in this one.' Paul Eluard The other world , in other words, is a place that can only be seen or dreamed of by those people known to us as narrators of books or characters within books. If you or I, reader, happen to glimpse part of that world drifting past, as it were, it is because we have seen or dreamed of ourselves seeing for a moment as a narrator or a character in a book sees or dreams of seeing."

SOUNDTRACK:

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds (ft. Kylie Minogue) - "Where The Wild Roses Grow"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDpnj...

The Only Ones - "Another Girl, Another Planet"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvO7H...

You Am I - "Damage"

https://youtu.be/5P5UmaMKBJE

You Am I - "Words For Sadness"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdJ6W...

"I'm leaning out the window
That teases with shifting scenes,
But the air that used to fill my lungs
Has now got me on my knees"

Thelonious Monk - "Pannonica"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciqI9...

The first name "Pannonica" (shortened to "Nica" as a nickname) of Pannonica de Koenigswarter derives from Eastern Europe's Pannonian plain.

[Michael Jantz · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most wonderful books I have read in recent memory. Murnane's language is so simple, but he does with it very complicated and entertaining things. Inland is not so much a story about a man, but instead the thoughts of a man in a room remembering parts of his life and writing to his reader (whom he claims to know). The imagery is beautiful and the life of the narrator is one that could be quite a bit like the lives of any of his readers. This will be a book to read repeatedly. There is nothing to remember in it except for the joy I've felt while reading it.

[Paul Dembina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not sure quite what to say about this Murnane. As usual it has his preoccupation with open plains (or grasslands as prefers to call them). He notices whites and reds and greens (and a lot of grey).

The meaning eludes me, but in an interesting way. The narrator is nostalgic about a girl he briefly befriended when he was a schoolboy.

Doesn't sound like much - does it?

[michal k-c · Rating 5 out of 5]

What if the existential terrain of a writer were an actual landscape? It would look something like this novel. I was totally transfixed by this in ways I haven’t been by much else lately — including some of Murnane’s other writings (not fiction, not essay, but maybe “true fictions”, as the author indicated once). Barley Patch up next.

[Sini · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ik lees de laatste tijd veel van Gerald Murnane, en ik was erg benieuwd naar zijn moeilijk verkrijgbare roman "Inland". Dat is volgens sommigen namelijk Murnanes meesterwerk: in zijn enorm verhelderende essay "Reading Gerald Murnane" (opgenomen in "Late essays" ) noemt Coetzee het bijvoorbeeld "the most ambitious, sustained, and powerful piece of writing [ Murnane] has to date brought off". Dus ik was blij toen ik het boek onverwacht toch nog op de kop kon tikken. En zelfs nog blijer toen ik het twee keer achter elkaar ademloos had uitgelezen. Het boek is inderdaad nog ongrijpbaar- prachtiger dan "The plains" of "Barley Patch" (wat ik tot nu zijn hoogtepunten vond), nog fraaier en intenser van stijl, en nog rijker aan fascinerende en prachtig met elkaar verknoopte motieven. Of het echt Murnanes mooiste is weet ik niet, maar het maakte meer indruk op mij dan de andere Murnanes die ik ken. En dat wil wat zeggen.

Zoals zo vaak bij Murnane draait ook "Inland" weer om het verlangen van een naamloze ik- figuur naar de totaal van elk realisme onthechte ideaalwerelden van de fictie. We zien de ik- figuur (die zich bovendien geregeld afsplitst in door hem verzonnen of gedroomde ik- figuren) dromen, schrijven, dwalen in een enorme bibliotheek met ramen die op oneindige vlakten uitkijken, en mijmeren of dromen over wat hij schrijft en droomt. De door hemzelf volgeschreven pagina's vergelijkt hij soms met drijvende wolken, te ongrijpbaar om ooit deel uit te maken van een tastbaar boek. En soms leest hij teksten, die als wolken naar hem toe zijn gedreven: dit zijn dan "drifting pages", die - zo droomt hij- deel uitmaken van een oneindige bibliotheek vol "dream-books with dream-patterns on their jackets and dream-colours on their spines and dream- words on their preliminary pages". En op één zo'n naar hem toegedreven wolkachtige pagina staat een voor hem essentiële zinsflard: "There is another world but it is in this one". Een radicaal andere wereld dan de wereld die we kennen en zien...... DAT is waar de ik- figuur naar verlangt. Een fictionele wereld in onze bekende wereld die deze bekende wereld met veel raadselachtige onbekendheid verrijkt. Een zo radicaal andere wereld dat hij geheel onkenbaar, onbepaald en onzichtbaar moet blijven, totaal virtueel, vol ondoorgrondelijke openheid. "[T]he other world must be understood as lying within the virgin whiteness which is all that part of the page where, as yet, no word has been written", zegt hij dan ook. Zelfs de gewone fictie met concrete letters op de pagina, en met concreet herkenbare voorvallen en personages, is nog niet de "other world" die hij zoekt: hij zoekt de pure potentialiteit van de nog onbeschreven pagina, de oningevulde openheid van het wit. Want wit is niet één kleur, maar alle kleuren.

Niet voor niets is de ik- figuur zeer gefascineerd door ongrijpbare fenomenen als "the invisible yet enduring scent of lilacs" en zelfs "the invisible yet enduring scent of dream-prairies". Bovendien is voor hem elk ogenschijnlijk definieerbaar ding feitelijk oneindig veel dingen (of mogelijke dingen) tegelijk. "Beside every path that I followed, some plant had the look or the feel of human skin. Parts of the flowers of plants had the shapes of parts of men and women. Each thing was more than one thing. The long green leaves bunched around the agapanthus were the grasskirts of women who were naked above their waists.". En ook zijn eigen ik is een veelheid van werkelijke en mogelijke ikken: "Each year when I look around the cemetery at Fawkner I know I am looking at the place where all my lives, actual or conjectured will end. Whoever I am, whoever I might otherwise have been, whoever I might yet become- the lives of all these men will end in the one grassland, only for kilometres from the street where I was born."

Elk ding, wezen, voorval of gevoel is dus een veelheid. En die veelheid wortelt, ook in de citaten hierboven, in oneindige vlakten: Australische "grasslands", Hongaarse poesta's of steppen, Amerikaanse prairie. Of dat alles tegeljk, namelijk "dream- prairies" die zelf weer de imaginaire versmelting zijn van meerdere al dan niet gedroomde oneindige vlakten uit vele windstreken. Die vlakten symboliseren, net als in "The plains", volgens mij de oneindige openheid van het bestaan: alles is geworteld in een dragende grond, maar die dragende grond is oneindig en veelvormig. Ze symboliseren volgens mij ook de oneindigheden in onze binnenwereld, of van een verbeeldingskracht die zijn grillige dromen niet laat inperken door wat voor conventie dan ook. Die symbolische openheid van deze vlakten wordt in "Inland" prachtig voelbaar gemaakt. Net als het onblusbare verlangen van de ik-figuur naar die openheid. Want elke pagina opnieuw droomt hij op andere manieren over de grasslands, steppen, poesta's en/of prairies. En heel vaak kijkt hij ernaar vanuit zijn bibliotheek, met een niet te stillen gretigheid. Waarbij zijn ogen wijdopen ramen zijn, en tegelijk spiegels die elk detail spiegelen. Of spiegels die zijn droombeelden vermengen met het oneindige landschap buiten, en tegelijk ramen omdat dit met dromen vermengde landschap als het ware weer een uitzicht biedt op de vlakten in zijn innerlijk.

Intrigerend vind ik ook de fascinatie van de ik- figuur voor het katholieke evangelie. Dat is bij hem een soort verlangen naar trascendentie die trascendenter is dan transcendent: een droom van andere werelden en werkelijkheden die verder gaat dan het herkenbare Godsbeeld van veel traditionele gelovigen. Hij voelt zich bijvoorbeeld vooral aangetrokken tot de Heilige Geest, "the third person of the Blessed Trinity and traditionally the person of those three most ready to help writers, artists, and all who today would be called creative". Voor hem is de Heilige Geest veel belangrijker dan de Vader en de Zoon, want "the Holy Ghost was never represented in pictures as having a human shape. The Holy Ghost was shadowy and changeable. He was many things rather than one thing: sometimes a rushing wind and sometimes tongues of fire or a shaft of light". Vaak ook wordt de Heilige Geest als vogel voorgesteld, wat de ik- figuur heel goed bevalt: "I have admired birds for as long as I can remember for their furtiveness".

De ik- figuur zoekt steeds het andere, niet- conventionele perspectief, dat de ogenschijnlijk overzichtelijke dingen en patronen in onze wereld juist meerduidiger maakt. Vandaar zijn onorthodoxe aandacht voor de Heilige Geest. Kijkend naar een tapijt fascineert hem bovendien niet de overzichtelijke voorstelling, maar de grillige verknoopte bontigheden van de onderkant van het tapijt, waarin je de vormen niet meer herkent. Precies zo leest hij ook het Evangelie: "The colours and seasons of the Church were complicated, but I saw them only from beneath. the true pattern was on the other side. Under the clear morning sky of eternity, the long story of the Old Testament and the New was a richly coloured tapestry. But on my side, under the changeable skies of Melbourne County, I saw only the green and the white and the red and the violet strangely interlaced, and I made from them whatever patterns I could". Niet het transparante licht van waarheid en eeuwigheid wordt gezocht, maar grillige kleurschakeringen en verknopingen voorbij het herkenbare beeld. Niet de herkenbare God de Vader, maar de "shadowy and changeable" Heilige Geest. Niet het herkenbare oppervlak met het complexe maar herkenbare patroon, maar de onherkenbare onderkant van het patroon in het tapijt. En de dromen van nieuwe onherkenbare patronen die daaruit voortkomen. Dat is wat de ik- figuur zoekt, in zijn intense speurtocht naar andere werelden in deze wereld.

Die speurtocht wordt prachtig beschreven, en het brandende verlangen naar andere werelden wordt naar mijn smaak meeslepend voelbaar gemaakt. Elke zin van Murnane roept bij mij verwondering en bewondering op, door de poëtische kracht en de filosofische diepgang ervan. Bovendien verwerkt Murnane bovenstaande motieven op geniale wijze in een even originele en veelvormige als ontroerende liefdesgeschiedenis. De naamloze ik- figuur introduceert zichzelf eerst als Hongaar, die met Hongaarse zwaarmoedigheid over de vlakten kijkt en zijn volgeschreven pagina's stuurt naar een vrouwelijke editeur en vertaalster, die hij nooit heeft gezien en die juist daardoor uitgroeit tot een onvatbaar en precies daardoor ultiem verlokkend zinnebeeld. Ook zijn in dit verhaal subtiele verwijzingen vervlochten met mythen waarin jonge meisjes stierven door geweld, en herboren werden als legendes of Heiligen. De onuitgesproken suggestie is dat de vrouwelijke editeur en vertaler tegelijk ook kenmerken van deze mythische herrezen meisjes heeft, en - in de verbeelding van de ik-figuur althans- daardoor nog veelvormiger en zinnebeeldiger wordt. Na zo'n veertig pagina's echter is de ik- figuur ineens gesitueerd in Australië, en mijmert hij - op zeer aanstekelijke wijze- over de magie en vele onzekerheden van zijn lang vervlogen Australische pubertijd. En over de "girl from Bendigo Street", een twaalfjarige jeugdliefde die even naamloos blijft als hijzelf, en - zo droomt hij althans- iemand die "would be like myself in preferring many possible things to any one visible thing". Zijzelf is evenzeer onbepaald en veelvormig: om te beginnen door de associatieve overeenkomsten met de eerder genoemde vrouwelijke vertaler, maar ook en vooral omdat zij het hele boek door in nevelen blijft gehuld. Bovendien verdwijnt zij op vrij raadselachtige wijze uit het leven van de ik- figuur. Daardoor, en doordat de verliefdheid nergens wordt uitgesproken of benoemd, blijft zij een zinnebeeld. Een personificatie van het nooit bereikte. En van het grote onbekende, want haar naam en haar gevoelens blijven voorgoed versluierd. "Inland" groeit dan meer en meer uit tot een brief aan deze verloren liefde, of tot een poging om in fictie deze liefde alsnog te realiseren. Dus om "another world in this world" in te richten die beter is dan de werkelijke wereld, omdat deze liefde daarin wel vorm krijgt.

Maar die alternatieve fictionele wereld is dan wel een radicaal open wereld. Nergens wordt dus een concrete verzonnen ontmoeting beschreven: het blijft bij verwijzingen naar de fictionele werelden van Proust die zijn hele leven als in een kathedraal nieuwe vorm gaf, naar de na hun dood als spook herenigde geliefden uit "Wuthering Heights", en naar de verrijzenis van Christus. We krijgen dus meerdere tantaliserende beelden van mogelijke wederopstandingen in andere werkelijkheden, maar niet een concrete andere werkelijkheid waarin de ik- figuur en zijn "girl from Bendigo Street" verenigd herrijzen. De vereniging met haar blijft dus een pure meerduidige mogelijkheid, ook in de pagina's die de ik- figuur schrijft. Of zelfs een onmogelijkheid: "Today I am dead but the young woman remains alive in order to go on reading what I could never write". Maar precies die onmogelijkheid bewaart haar als zinnebeeld, als Ideaal, als niet door de werkelijkheid aangetaste Droom. "Inland" beschrijft de ongerealiseerde jeugdliefde van de ik- figuur en zijn "girl from Bendigo Street" heel aanstekelijk, zo aanstekelijk dat ik als lezer hoopte op een conventioneel happy end waarin ze elkaar alsnog zouden krijgen. Maar uiteindelijk groeit ze uit tot dragend element van "another world in this world" die ongrijpbaar open is en moet blijven, en die juist daardoor voor de ik- figuur zo ongelofelijk verlokkend is. En dat vind ik nog veel mooier dan het conventionele slot waarop ik zat te hopen. Vooral misschien omdat Murnane dat verlangen naar de totaal open en van de realiteit onthechte werelden van fictie zo meeslepend oproept met zijn vele beschrijvingen van eindeloze vlakten, van de dingen die vele dingen tegelijk zijn, van ogen als ramen en als spiegels, van pagina's als drijvende wolken, van de ongrijpbare patronen (en de onderkanten daarvan) binnen en buiten ons hoofd.......

Twee keer achter elkaar las ik het boek ademloos uit, twee keer deed het mij enorm mijmeren over de uitgestrekte openheid en ongrijpbaarheid van mijn binnenwereld en buitenwereld. En dat mijmeren gaat nog wel een tijdje door. Het dromen trouwens ook. Wat een prachtige liefdesgeschiedenis, die juist door zijn onvoltooibaarheid ontroert. Wat een schitterende evocatie van eindeloze vlakten binnen en buiten ons. Wat een boek. Wat een schrijver.

[Christopher]

A masterpiece that seems like Calvino at first, but does different things. The text just keeps mutating, reader. This is on my must-re-read shelf.

This is a turning point for me with Murnane, having only read The Plains prior to this. In a good way.

[Justin Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lovely meditation on childhood, first love, and geography; if you liked the early volumes of Proust (before he gets to the delicious society gossip), you might find something to like here. On the other hand, you might not. Where Proust is quite open about what he's doing, Murnane is very sneaky; where Proust is about people, Murnane is about (for want of a better term) constellations of sensation, whether those sensations are currently being experienced, being recalled, or being invented. Deleuze, for instance, would have loved this book. That's not to say that people who enjoy literature in, how should I put it?, a less idiosyncratic way won't find anything here. There is, eventually, plenty of traditional heart-string-tugging, that anyone who likes contemporary memoir would love (and it's much better done than any contemporary memoir I've seen).

But the opening chapter... rough. It's like Thomas Bernhard shorn of both his hatred and his sense of humor.

[Proustitute (on hiatus) · Rating 3 out of 5]

My review of this in the Sept. 2012 issue of The Quarterly Conversation: http://quarterlyconversation.com/inla...

[Christopher Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely fascinating. Probably my favorite thing I’ve read from Murnane so far, and that’s saying something considering how much I’ve loved the other 4 novels of his I’ve read to date. It touches on many aspects of his previous works, particularly the childhood depicted in Tamarisk Row and A Lifetime on Clouds, and the obsession with the mysteriousness of grasslands and open spaces so beautifully depicted in The Plains, but takes things in a completely different, non-linear, non-plot-oriented, insular direction that was puzzling, invigorating and very, very striking. I’ll be wondering about the intricacies of Inland for years and years to come. It demands a reread, and I’ll definitely oblige. Highly recommended.*

*Advice: DO NOT make this your starting place with Murnane. Read his earlier books first, as they heavily figure into this one. I would have been pretty lost in Inland without having read Tamarisk Row, A Lifetime on Clouds and The Plains.

[Uroš Višnjevac · Rating 5 out of 5]

Čitao bih ovu knjigu zauvek, a Marnejn bi je pisao zauvek, kad bismo mogli...

[Robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

One question that I ask myself is if whether there is a type of literary style I dislike? on looking back I’m finding out that I prefer to read more solid stories than experimental ones and I admit that it does bother me a bit.

Inland is, more than anything, a novel that creates an atmosphere with some autobiographical bits chucked in. It’s about a writer who goes on a metaphorical journey to the past, where he confronts certain aspects of his life that he has shied from when he was younger.

Despite the fact that this is a beautifully written book – its incredibly poetic at times, I did not really feel like reading something like this so my attitude towards Inland is a little bit negative. I thought the book dragged at times and despite it’s over a 160 pages I felt that it overstayed it’s welcome by a bit. It’s the exact same feeling I got when I read John Banville’s The Sea.

Inland is out of print so if you do decide to hunt it down to be a bit wary.

[George · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. An unusual, unique reading experience, mainly about longing and reminiscing. The narrator begins by writing about his writing relationship with his editor who lives in South Dakota. The narrator then recalls the constant displacements of residence he experienced as a young boy. The narrator and his family live mostly in country Victoria, Australia. He longs for the wide open spaces of the American prairie, the Australian and Hungarian plains. The narrator thinks back to his early years and the girls and women he befriended or remembered. There is no dialogue. It is a novel of reflections of who the narrator is and some of his life experiences.

Here is an example of the author’s writing style:
‘I had believed for most of my life that a page of a book is a window. Then I had learned that a page of a book is a mirror.’

[Baz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading Inland by Murnane was like experiencing a cross between Beckett and Proust. I loved this book. Its story is a story of images, of a man recording the interplay of his thoughts, as they move between the abstract and concrete, and the act of his writing of the pages of the book.

I love the seriousness of Murnane’s attention to images, spaces and sights, for example the image of a person in a room filled with books, inside a large house, standing at a window staring out at the vastness of grasslands and trees beyond, or of the particular shade of colour of some small thing that can only be seen in the sunlight of a specific time of the day, and through his sustained attention giving to them a strange power and significance. It was enchanting stuff.

Do you ever, in a long moment of pure idleness, find yourself simply looking at a thing? And then find yourself training your eye, bridging the distance and looking at it closely? Like the tip of your finger, your fingerprint? Or if you’re in a park at a leaf or single blade of grass? Your mind kind of empties out in a pleasant way as it becomes more focused.
Well in some way reading Inland was a bit like that experience. Murnane loves to look, and to write about the act of looking. There’s no proper plot, no themes that are explored, no ruminations or articulations. It’s mostly just an act of looking, remembering, of thinking, concentrating on certain things, certain obsessions, but there’s a palpable metaphysical quality in the writing and it’s delicious.

At one point in the book the narrator tells of a girl who would occasionally talk to him: “…every few days she rewarded me by telling me quietly something that was unimportant in itself but seemed a message from beneath the surface of her.” Reading Inland was like being quietly told things that are unimportant in themselves but seem a message from beneath the surface of us.

I don’t know wtf I’m saying but Murnane’s prose is hypnotic and gorgeous.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Inland is a strange adventure that plays with your mind from the first page. It’s not ‘easy’ but it’s not meant to be: Gerald Murnane is not that kind of writer. Before long he signposts what he is up to with a witty reference to Italo Calvino, and I am reminded of Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night, A Traveller – that strange, circuitous experience of reading about yourself as a reader, of being inside the book as well, sharing somehow in the writing of it.
To see the rest of this review, visit http://anzlitlovers.wordpress.com/200...

[v · Rating 4 out of 5]

Inland eventually turns towards an Australian narrator's attempts to write his childhood reminiscences, but it opens with a Hungarian narrator writing to a female editor at a scientific institute in America. The transition between these two narrative stances shows that Gerald Murnane's niche here is his painstaking examination of the nature of fiction, character, and words using the mysterious and erotically layered images of adolescence. Landscape and mind blend -- colors and scenes repeat and morph. It's hard to put one's finger on it, but somehow Murnane's writing keeps tugging the reader to the fringe of the inner ghost land: all the thoughts nearly thought, the places imagined momentarily, the spaces between spaces.

The worst death would be to drown in a tunnel, in darkness.

[Robert Wechsler]

My third book by the wonderful Gerald Murnane is, so far, the odd one out, different in that it has, sort of, characters and some plot, even if largely imagined, and a narrator who lives, sort of, outside of Australia. But with Murnane more is less, and around halfway through, despite some wonderful passages, I decided I’d had enough of this one, and moved on.

[Stephen P(who no longer can participate due to illness) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Possibly shrinking down towards a 3.5/5

[Fergus Nm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Weirdly, I found parts of this divinely boring - in lesser hands that would clearly be a fault, but Murnane has a way of opening up the boredom and revealing all the activity teeming inside. Murnane dissects memory and the reading process like no one else I can think of - it takes serious skill to depict the psychic interior at this level.

Also - after watching a video of Murnane, I can't help but read this with his South Victorian brogue in mind.

[Tuck · Rating 4 out of 5]

a novel questioning relationships lost and found, and ultimately, did they really even happen? what happens when a writer obsesses over an atlas, it's all grasslands eventually, even when covered over by houses, strip malls, and roads. so if you ever have had the urge to visit the Calvin O. Dahlberg Prairie Institute in west central Nebraska, now's your chance.

[Tonymess · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5/5

[David Karlsson · Rating 4 out of 5]

(4-)

Att Weyler förra året valde att ge ut denna bok på nytt kändes kanske inte helt självklart, men roligt. Jag gissar att det kan ha varit en Nobelprisgardering eftersom Murnane legat bra till på tipslistorna länge, men oavsett vilket är det fint att denna egensinniga australier får en plats i den svenska bokmyllan.

För egensinnigt är det, och om detta ens kan kallas roman är inte helt självklart. Här finns en man som tittar ut genom fönstret från sin herrgård mot ett slättland i Ungern, med väggarna runt sig täckta av böcker han inte läser, och skriver till sin översättare i Amerika som är kopplad till ett prärieinstitut (med ett namn som för tankarna till Italo Calvino), en annan slags slätt. Eller skriver han egentligen till hennes man, någon som närmast är hans fiende?

Här finns också en annan (?) man i Australien som ser tillbaka på sin barndom, även den upplevd på ett slättlandskap, även han omgiven av böcker han sällan läser och i färd med att skriva sin berättelse.

Om det är en eller två berättare vi möter är inte helt klart, men det rimmar väl med två återkommande deviser som förs fram: inget ting (och ingen plats) i världen är ett enda, de är alltid två eller flera, och det finns en annan värld men den finns i denna.

Återkommande teman och symboler är det inte heller i övrigt någon brist på: färgerna i den ungerska flaggan (rött, vitt och grönt), slätter, brunnar, fönster - listan kan göras lång.

Det är en bok som kanske mer fascinerar och stimulerar intellektet än griper tag känslomässigt. Inledningsvis drar det åt der lätt absurda och påminner på många sätt om "Slätterna", för att senare mer övergå i barndomsskildringar som i många avseenden tycks ligga Murnanes egna biografi nära. Jag lyckas själv inte fullt ut sy ihop de två olika aspekterna/berättarna, men det är heller inte nödvändigt för att gilla boken.

Jag hoppas att nyutgivningen (boken har alltså getts ut på svenska tidigare, om än sedan länge ur tryck) är ett tecken på förlaget har planer på att ge ut mer av Murnane. Jag har fortfarande en av de sedan tidigare översatta böckerna att läsa, men skulle gärna fortsätta med fler därefter.

[death spiral · Rating 3 out of 5]

Here’s a writer who has a singular point of view—a thoughtfully expressed way of seeing and being in the world. I just happen to think it’s wrong and bad.

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This wasn't an easy read, but there were some really lyrical sentences.