Barley Patch

by Gerald Murnane

Gerald Murnane is regarded by many as Australia's most innovative writer of fiction. Barley Patch is his first new work of fiction in fourteen years, written after a period in which he had thought he would never write fiction again.The book begins with the question, 'Must I write?' What follows is both a chronicle of the images that have endured in the author's mind, and an exploration of their nature.The clarity of the images is extraordinary, as is their range, from Mandrake the Magician to the bachelor uncle kicked in the 'stones' as a child, from the country cousin's doll's house to the mysterious woman who lets her hair down, from the soldier beetle who winks messages from God to the racehorces that run forever in the author's mind, beyond the grasslands, to the place where the characters of fiction dwell before they come into existence in books.

Genres: Fiction, Australia, 21st Century, Literary Fiction, Literature, Novels, Books About Books

272 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

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]

Barley Patch is a book about reading books, writing books and not writing books…

A person who claims to remember having read one or another book is seldom able to quote from memory even one sentence from the text. What the person probably remembers is part of the experience of having read the book: part of what happened in his or her mind during the hours while the book was being read. I can still remember, nearly sixty years later, some of what I read as a child, which is to say that I can still call to mind some of the images that occurred to me while I read as a child. As well, I claim that I can still feel something of what I felt while those images were in the foreground of my mind.

Barley Patch is recollections of childhood, of read books and seen pictures; memories of the family and the outside world – everything that participated in the forming of the author’s identity.
The boy reads a story and he interacts with the characters within… The boy sees the outside world and his imagination changes it to his own liking…

In short, I may have written those works only so that I could write at last about the images that had persisted for fifty years and more in the background of my mind no matter whom I fell in love with or who became my wife or what children were born to us or what befell us during the onrush of events that might be called my seeming life.
Another answer suggests itself. My published books may have been written not in order to remove images from my mind but to arrange them more appropriately and to give certain images their rightful prominence. I may have written during the past thirty years and more not one after another separate book but one after another chapter of the one book, the final chapter of which I am trying to write at present…

Barley Patch is like a journey through the mind of a strange and creative individual.
Remembering our own lives, we just take an erratic trip through the past altered with our imperfect memory and embellished with our rich imagination.

[Fionnuala]

Every individual title of Murnane 'fiction' I've read so far (and I couldn't even count them at this stage (but ok, here's an estimate: twenty-five)) has been made up of of nested narratives.

And the thing is, my journey through them has itself been a set of nested narratives. When I picked up Murnane's Last Letter to a Reader weeks and weeks ago, I left it down several times to pick up one after another of his own books mentioned in it, or at least those I hadn't yet read.

That's how I eventually got to Barley Patch. And no sooner had I begun Barley Patch than I left it down to pick up a book by Josephine Tey which was mentioned in the early pages, a book that left such a vivid impression on Murnane when he read it as a child that the main female character of that book came to embody his childhood idea of ultimate female perfection.

While I was reading Tey's book, I left it down briefly to chase after another book because the main female character in the Tey book thought its main character was her ideal of masculine perfection (and interestingly, that character, called Hereward, later turned up in Barley Patch).

So eventually, after those little nested deviations, I returned to Barley Patch and entered into it wholemindedly only to realise that a large part of it narrates the narrative of a book Murnane wrote years before but which was never published, called O, Dem Golden Slippers. Going by Murnane's detailed account of it, it seemed to have been a series of nested narratives as he circled the central image of a blur of colour by examining a series of other images, many also relating to colour, and in particular to light as seen through stained glass (whether in a beer bottle or a church window). Those fascinating images all eventually connected to the central blurred image in a clever way, and the 'golden slippers' image, itself recalling colored glass, was significant in the connecting process, as was the character from the Tey book that had been Murnane's ideal of female perfection in his childhood.
I'm glad I worked all that out!
…………………………………………
I don't know what my experience of reading Gerald Murnane would be if I didn't attempt to write something down after finishing each of his books. Incidentally, 'Writing about reading' is the only bit of information I've listed in the 'about me' section of my profile on Goodreads, so important to me has it become to write my way through my thoughts in order to work out something about what I've just read. And that's why I was very pleased to come across this statement by Murnane in Barley Patch: Many years passed before I began to understand that looking at line after line of text is only a small part of reading; that I might need to write about a text before I could say that I had fully read it

As I go through more and more of his work, I find more and more parallels between his and my relationship to reading, presumptuous as that may sound. Not only does he talk about 'images' he retains from his reading and how they furnish his memory as vividly as real life experiences do (something I relate to completely), but he also has a thing about peoples' and places' names just as I do (while at the same time he actively avoids naming people and places in his 'fictions').

A section of this book is a meditation on a place name from the Tey book mentioned at the beginning of this review, not only the etymology of it but the images the name gives rise to in his mind. Murnane mentions in passing how he identifies with Proust's narrator's fascination with names, both their etymology and their image-inspiring ability, in À La Recherche du Temps Perdu.

That reference reminded me immediately of an experience I had while reading Proust's Le côté de Guermantes back in 2013, so I was prompted to reread my review of that book. In it I had recorded memories of images that had appeared in my mind in childhood whenever I heard certain names mentioned by those around me. Those memories were directly triggered by Proust's narrator describing the images that appeared in his mind as a child when he'd hear the name of the duchesse de Guermantes mentioned by those around him (incidentally the duchesse, whom he caught a brief glimpse of in childhood, became his ideal of female perfection). He associated both her figure and her name with a colour, and that colour was connected to the way the light played on the stained glass windows of the church in Combray!

I didn't know when I started writing the second part of this review that I'd end up with another powerful stained-glass-inspired image but it fits perfectly with the set of colored images Murnane examines through the various nested narratives that together make up the text of Barley Patch

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Writers, or perhaps I should say ‘potential writers’, are the most paradoxical of creatures. They want to write and presumably they want to write so as to be read, but then they all too often lack when it comes to taking what must be the most brave of all leaps of faith – the belief that what they find interesting themselves will also be interesting to other people. So instead they write the sorts of things that they think other people will be interested in. And that is fatal because there is nothing quite so boring as reading something that someone who doesn’t know you has written not because they are interested in it, but because they think you might be. The leap of faith required of a writer is one in which the writer finally believes that what fascinates them will also fascinate their readers.

Except this lack of faith by the writer in the fundamental interest of what they want to write is a symptom, rather than the disease itself. The real problem is something that goes back to Socrates and him saying that the unexamined life is not worth living. In my experience there are two types of people who will quote that line of Socrates at you. The first are the sorts of people who write self-help books. Needless to say that is not the kind of ‘examined’ life I am talking about.

No, Socrates meant something quite different when he spoke of the examined life – and the best example I can give you of such an examination is Murnane’s fiction; of which Barley Patch provides a remarkable instance of what I mean.

To me, Murnane writes fiction that is reminiscent of Borges, although this is mainly because I have yet to read Proust. The difference, to me, is that Murnane’s fiction is much more personal than the Borges I have read.

Throughout his life Murnane has been fascinated by a series of images. He has been preoccupied by his thoughts around these images and he has spent a lifetime turning these images over in his mind and arranging them in ways that allow them to be illuminated variously. These central images could almost be Platonic forms – horse racing, marbles, pens and paper, inland planes and trees, models of houses or farms or landscapes or race courses – but the simplicity of these elements belies Murnane’s infinite fascination with both these images themselves and how he brings them together in his fictions.

Do you know of the memory technique that is sometimes called the Roman Room? It is a technique that is used particularly for those needing to make speeches. The speaker distils everything they want to say down to a collection of single images (not unlike those Japanese drawings that are composed of one or two strokes of an ink brush, but result in what are essentially bamboo). They use these distilled images to remind them of what they are to say at certain points in their speech. Then they think of a room in which they have a strong memory: their bedroom as a child, the lounge room of the first house they bought or perhaps a dolls’ house they played with as a young girl. The images they have distilled down of what they want to say will now have become objects and these objects can be draped over chairs or placed on mantelpieces or put in vases on television sets in these remembered rooms. And then, as the speaker walks around this room in their mind, they pick up the images in turn and that process leads them through their speech.

Murnane creates entire multi-storied buildings in this book of such rooms; rooms that often have surprising doorways linking them to other rooms or even hidden passageways.

No. Hidden is entirely the wrong adjective. Hidden implies Murnane is playing simple games with his reader, and I think to truly appreciate his writing you need to see that the game he is playing is much more complex than one in which he constructs a house with some clever panel work that slides aside to allow access from the kitchen to the bedroom.

Murnane’s fiction is an exploration of memory; an exploration of an internal world that has fascinated him since childhood.

Many people may wonder why Murnane does not call his writing autobiography. Why he persists in referring to it as ‘fiction’. I don’t want to over-simplify this, as this is an important and recurring theme of the book. But my understanding of what I take to be Murnane’s choice of the term fiction rather than autobiography for what he writes is affected by my understanding of a psychological experiment I learnt of many years ago and have thought about many times since.

A group of people have been asked to participate in an experiment. As is to be expected in these types of experiments everything starts with them being told a lie and that is that this experiment will involve them memorising nonsense syllables. Even though this is not the true meaning of the test, for half of the subjects that is exactly what the experiment does seem to involve. They spend their time trying to remember nonsense syllables or perhaps strings of unconnected words. Before the test begins, however, all participants are told that the experiment is running a little late and therefore that they must sit for five minutes in a chair that is conveniently located directly in front of a poster. The poster is generally of a highly confronting scene, let’s say it is of a nephew visiting for the last time a favourite, though estranged, uncle in hospital who, for sake of argument, might be dying of cancer. After sitting in front of this confronting scene for five minutes all subjects in the psychological test are taken to a room where they can no longer see the poster.

Half of them do the memorising task I mentioned above while the other half are asked a series of increasingly specific questions concerning the poster. The punch-line is that those asked questions like how they knew the two men were in a hospital and not the uncles own bedroom or whether the two men parted by shaking hands or if the young nephew had casually waved his farewell – those people who had been asked these and even more specific questions for half an hour were less likely to identify the poster as being the same poster they had seen in the waiting room than those who had spent their time reciting nonsense words.

To me there is nothing truer that can be said about what it means to be human than that. This type of highly fallible memory is often called recollective memory.

If I was studying philosophy I would probably write re-collection, rather than recollection – because that is a better way to show what is happening with this kind of memory. We look at the poster and we see what are really a series of images. But when we are asked to recall the poster our less than perfect recall lets us down and so we are forced to use something much more powerful – our ability to re-collect the images we think we saw on the basis of the story we deduced from our looking at the poster.

We think that we know well enough the story of the nephew and uncle in such circumstances, for isn’t it just the all-too-frequent story of the aging uncle dying of cancer and the nephew perhaps coming to terms for the first time with his own mortality? So, when we are asked to recollect the poster we add details to the mix images we automatically associate with this familiar scene and leave out details that don’t fit the story. But when we are finally again shown the ‘real’ image, after half an hour’s worth of interrogation and re-collecting, a majority of us are likely to say that the poster we are now being shown is not the same as the one we saw in the waiting room because look, the nephew has a racing form guide in his other hand and we are certain that in the poster in the waiting room he waved goodbye to his uncle, and definitely didn’t shake hands with such undisguised goodwill. No, the image we re-collect, that we have spent half an hour recollecting, is likely to be much more sad, much more heart-wrenching and much less normal than the one we are now witnessing, as if for the first time.

I have read in a few places that Murnane says that his second work of fiction, A Lifetime on Clouds, contains hardly any sex at all, but that readers often say it is overflowing with sex. I think both statements are true.

Recollection is an odd kind of memory and it is, I think, the main point of Gerald Murnane’s Barley Patch. If all of the types of memory were to be placed in the starting yard for a race, I think Murnane’s money would be on Recollection for the win. So let’s run that race on the imaginary racecourse of our minds; on a course with grass as green as the velvet on a snooker table although with a grey lake in the middle of the field surrounded by a line of thinly spaced and arching box gums.

In this race, this imaginary race of our memory horses, the jockey riding Recollection is wearing silks of two colours (a background of burnt umber and a sash of yellow ochre) symbolic of the two tones I can see in the grass outside the window where I sit now writing this review on holidays just outside Maryborough. The reason why Recollection is bound to win this memory race, showing herself to be in a class or two above the other horses on the field, is precisely the reason why people may have suspected she’d come last when they were placing their bets. You see, the mistakes that recollection is likely to make in remembering events of the past are made precisely because in putting the images back together again we are simultaneously seeking to make sense of those images. It is the sense-making that is the most important part of this process – it is the part of the process that shows us being human. We are the sense givers. To think that this is the least worthwhile of our kinds of memory is to have matters literally standing on their heads.

Why would a man of Murnane’s talents not write a work of published fiction for nearly fifteen years? And why, after a pause like that, would such a man once again lift his pen to construct remarkably clean and endlessly fascinating sentences such as: -

Many years passed before I began to understand that looking at line after line of text is only a small part of reading; that I might need to write about a text before I could say that I had fully read it; that even while I write this present piece of fiction I am trying to read a certain text.

I can only say again, this book is a wonderful example of what it means to examine a life in the way Socrates suggested. How could I not recommend you read it?

[Justin Evans · Rating 5 out of 5]

We're accustomed to literary masterpieces that can be read on their own. You don't need to read Dante's early poetry to read his Commedia, you don't need to read Milton's early poetry to read Paradise Lost, you don't have to read Dubliners to read Ulysses, and thanks all that is holy for that, because those earlier works are really bad.

Well, Barley Patch presents a bit of a problem, because if you haven't read, say, eighty percent of Murnane's earlier works, this will look, as one trustworthy goodreads friend puts it, "metafictional, and metaboring." Any given work of Murnane's will seem to be a postmodern book about books, or book about nothing, or book that just kind of meanders around and "trusts" the reader to find a way of connecting a bunch of more or less unconnected images. And that goes double for Barley Patch, which opens, unpromisingly enough, with the question "Must I write?" and by the second page is asking "Why had I written?" Large chunks of this book are about Murnane's previous works. Perhaps it's an essay. Who knows.

But read after Murnane's other books, this is an astonishing work. He stopped writing fiction for many years in between his collection of stories, Emerald Blue, and the present work (though Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, ostensibly a book of essays, is indistinguishable from his fiction). This was not a case of writer's block, of his being unable to write. He just didn't need to do it any more. Barley Patch is an attempt to explain why, and to explain how he came to write once again.

Still sounds metaboring, I know, but we're getting to the good stuff.

Murnane's work has always been about his own imagination, and his narrators have always been obsessed with imagination, but in Barley Patch he describes himself as lacking an imagination at all. What could that mean? As far as I can tell, Murnane decided that the word "imagination" was not the right word to describe what he was doing in his books, largely because what the world means by imagining is "being good at making stuff up." Murnane feels that he doesn't make stuff up in his fiction, that he is simply reporting the facts of his own thought. It can't be a coincidence that in describing his abandonment of writing, he also describes himself as lacking imagination. He came to see imagination as the key component of what the world calls literature, and decided that he did not have what the world calls imagination. By contrast, he could do what he had been doing in literature--i.e., report on his own thoughts--to himself, without writing them down. He no longer felt the "need" (a key word here) to write. He had solved, in some sense, the problem that he had set himself when he started to write fiction.

And then he started writing again, he again felt the need. To know why, you really have to read the book, but to simplify greatly I might say that it turns out there are reasons to write fiction other than to discover one's own thoughts to oneself. One might want, for instance, to discover them to other people.

This project (which Barley Patch succeeds very well in carrying out) is importantly different from both the anglo-modernist project of hiding meaning and demanding that a reader somehow divine what a text is meant to be about, and the anglo-post-modern project of writing about nothing in particular because it's all just a game.

Murnane's work, especially this one, is very demanding. But the demand being made here is not on one's ability to decipher fragments and clues and to reconstruct some kind of system or structure behind the text (whether you attribute that structure to the author or to language or whatever). There is no interpretation to be done here, no need to dig down beneath the words to the unspoken. Everything is there for you to work with. Murnane's demand is simply that you will think with him. He is not hard to read. He is hard to think with.

Although Murnane's thoughts seem limited (why write, why not write, etc...), they turn out to have no simple solutions. This does not mean, as it would in a postmodern text, "no solutions." The solution is the end of the book.

The thoughts also turn out to have a bearing on broader questions, but that will only be obvious to readers who have read Murnane's previous fictions. There, the imagination is not understood as the ability to make up stuff, but as an extraordinary longing for something that can barely even be named. Murnane has long interspersed his difficult, essayistic passages with fairly straightforward, realistic passages describing either the narrator's, or other people's attempts to name what they long for. This can be as "high" as God, or as low as sex with a busty blonde wench. Murnane's decision not to write, and then his decision to start writing again, are tied up with this: can imaginings and longings take place without communication? Or, perhaps, could it be that such imaginings and longings must be communal?

Barley Patch suggests that Gerald Murnane, at least, must try to communicate his own idiosyncratic imaginings--that communication of them is an important part of the imaginings themselves. Lucky for us, because he's writing again. Anyone interested in what a writer can do should read this book. After reading Murnane's first few books.

[Jim Elkins]

A Collision Between Metafiction and Empathy

An extremely inventive experimental novel, with a distinctive authorial voice. The back cover copy compares "Barley Patch" to Calvino and Perec: the first is wrong, the second misleading. It's a book about the author's decision -- which is rescinded and contradicted many times in the book -- to stop writing fiction. Its salient features are Murnane's strangely disaffected and self-aware voice, and his insistently overly accurate forms of description; in that last trait, I think, he is closer to Stein than Perec.

The book takes the form of narratives interrupted by italicized questions, asked by an imaginary reader, but in first person. In the following passage, the author is explaining why he thinks he does not have the kind of imagination necessary to write fiction (which he clearly has), and why that capacity would not, in any case, interest him:

"[In italics, asked by a reader:] Surely I have paused at least once during a lifetime of reading and have admired the passage in front of me as a product of the writer's excellent imagination.
"[In roman:] I can recall clearly my having paused often during my first reading of the book of fiction 'Wuthering Heights,' which reading took place in the autumn of 1956. I can recall equally clearly my having paused often during my reading of the book of fiction 'Tess of the D'Urbervilles,' which reading took place in the winter of 1959. I doubt that I paused in order to feel gratitude or admiration towards any authorial personage." (p. 95)

"Barley Patch" is at is best when Murnane is moving patiently among the apparently badly remembered episodes of his childhood ("apparently" because in fact he has manuscripts tens of thousands of pages long on his memories), which was mainly spent reading, and trying to re-allocate them as putatively fictional elaborations that would, supposedly, have been parts of the fiction project that he decided not to write, but which is, manifestly, the book "Barley Patch." The narrative slows in the middle section, in which he just goes ahead and tells the only story he thinks would have been worth making into a fiction, the story of how his parents met. First that story is told in a carefully distanced third person, but then it becomes first person, and toward the end there are rote mentions of the fictional frame:

"I would have reported in my abandoned work of fiction that the chief character, while he watched the rain..." (p. 221)

The book's strength is in its strangeness, and its strangeness is dependent on how carefully Murnane restricts the fiction of not writing fiction, and not writing autobiography, by confining fiction, writing, memory, and autobiography in elaborate stockades of conditionals and the past subjunctive mood. Later in the book, those devices become simpler. (For example, pp. 162-3.) (This slipping back from hypotheticals about unwritten fictions, to examples of those unwritten fictions, to the writing of the fictions themselves, also happens in "A Million Windows.")

At the beginning Murnane reports how, as a child, he experienced books by inserting himself into their fictional worlds, not as one of the represented characters, but as someone the author hadn't invented. That curious idea returns in a strange, almost mystical fashion at the end, when he speculates that characters in fictions might have even more complex lives beyond the fictions of which they are a part:

"During all the years while I had been a writer of fiction and while I had sometimes struggled to write fiction -- during all those years, I had wanted to learn what places appeared in the mind of one or another fictional character whenever he or she stared past the furthest place mentioned in the text that had seemed to give rise to him or her... Now, I was free to suppose what I had often suspected: many a so-called fictional character was not a native of some or another fictional text but of a further region never yet written about." (pp. 246-7)

For me the interest and the drawback of Murnane is condensed in this passage: it's interesting because it echoes Stein's compulsive grammars, but disappointing because the theme (imagined lives of fictional characters) is not the theme he'd started with (imagined lives of invented characters supposedly living among fictional characters). The former is more interesting than the latter, and the fact that the book starts with one and ends with the other is a sign that Murnane hasn't purified his project. "Barley Patch" is really about obsessive, compulsive distancing, categorizing, re-naming, and re-imagining.

To be exact, there are three founding fantasies: that fictional characters in fictions may lead lives beyond the fictions of which they are a part; that imaginary characters may also be objects of attention in the context of fictions that don't include them; and that it might be possible to wander in the spaces implied by a novel, even if they are not described. (This last comes from a meditation on a reproduction of Claude Lorrain's "Landscape with Samuel Anointing David," which has an enticing uninhabited distant landscape.) These fantasies congeal, I think, into a single desire to disappear multiply, repeatedly, beyond rescue: not only out of "the place that I called the world," as he says, and not only into fiction, but through or beyond fiction to places only partly represented, or not represented at all.

The desire is inseparable from Murnane's sense of writing: he repeats and elaborates it in "A Million Windows," 2016. (The book got a very unsympathetic review in the New York Times, June 19, 2016, which misses much of Murnane's point.) As the desire works itself into books, it produces an idiosyncratic theory of metafiction in which the usual acknowledgment of the artificiality of writing is mingled with a stubborn insistence that immersion happens best, or only, in imaginary figures within imagined fictions. I think Murnane isn't in control of this fantasy, which is a desire for full empathetic imagination and real immersive picturing, undercut by a disillusion about desire and a need to exhibit its failure. Just as deeply as he seeks immersion, he believes that it has to be constrained--in this book, immersion is located only certain rare species of invented creatures, and yet he cannot decide which sorts of creatures, because that would mean giving up the multiplying metafictional frames that protect him from those very creatures.

"Barley Patch" is not the book it appears to be. For a reviewer like David Winters, it calls attention "to the way the content of a work exceeds whatever words are read or written." ("The Far Side of Fiction," in the book "Infinite Fictions: Essays on Literature and Theory," 2015, p. 113.) It's true that "Barley Patch" is a disquisition on the openness of fiction: but that is its argument, not its expressive value. What matters here is how all that goes wrong, repeatedly, because Murnane is not, even as he writes, in control of his desire, which is at once to disappear into the work and to turn the sad impossibility of that disappearance into art.

[Ben Winch · Rating 4 out of 5]

OK I’ll admit it, this is pretty good. Great even. Certainly unique, and Murnane can sure craft a sentence: the precision on display here is awe-inspiring, and if there’s one thing I love it’s precision. He says what he means and if he can’t say it he lets you know it, and tries again. In this he’s like Beckett, and if there’s one thing I love it’s Beckett, but unique in this too―that while his writing shares some of the key salient features of Beckett’s writing, it doesn’t feel unduly influenced by Beckett’s writing. And maybe, in places, it’s the equal of Beckett’s writing, at least in my eyes, and surpasses other would-be contenders to that throne (the clearly Beckett-influenced Thomas Bernhard for eg, whose turn-on-a-dime, high-performance, self-satisfied prose so often resembles its own parody, which is fine and Murnane does that too but you want more sometimes; you want varied tone, direct emotion, more complexity). All of which, believe me, I’m surprised to hear myself saying, given I’ve never made it past twenty pages of The Plains, found Inland cryptic and impenetrable and Velvet Waters self-important (an impression I find hard to credit after Barley Patch) and even Barley Patch I had to start twice before it really struck me. Besides which, I find Murnane’s general drift bizarre. I tend to agree, at least partly, with one reviewer who described him as autistic―or maybe “autism spectrum” in today’s parlance, but with such a degree of self-awareness that, on the other hand, he can’t be, can he? But then, just how should I read him? When’s he serious, when’s he not? When he claims (as he does repeatedly―it’s a theme here) to have no imagination? Or then again, when he claims not to be nor to resemble his narrator even in the midst of that narrator’s describing episodes from what is almost certainly his (Murnane’s) own life? In the end, it may be nothing but a series of tricks with masks, but which somehow doesn’t undercut but enhances the seriousness of the would-be memoir. He’s got something, this Murnane character (taboo word, like “imagination”: “character”). Due to my typically fractured reading habits I may not fully grasp what he’s driving at (the parts about fiction and the world it inhabits/feeds off/feeds into I think I get; the parts about Catholicism and sexuality I’m not so sure) but I know I’ve never read anything like it. No it’s not perfect but it’s serious as hell, if a mundane provincial fifties Catholic hell. I’ll let Murnane tell it:

In the image that I see of my aunt’s face I can find no detail to explain the sternness and disapproval that seems to emanate from the image. However, I have for long recognised that time has no existence in the image-world. I am therefore able to suppose that my image-aunt, during her wanderings among my image-landscapes, has come upon certain image-evidence from the years during the 1950s when I masturbated often. That image-evidence would have included image-details of her image-nephew syping on his image-cousins, her image-daughters, during certain image-picnics on image-beaches during the early image-1950s, whenever one or another of the image-cousins leaned so far forward in order to reach for an image-tomato-sandwich or an image-patty-cake that the upper parts of her image-breasts were exposed or whenever she reached down to pick up some image-object from the image-sand and so caused the lower part of her image-bathing-costume to be stretched upwards, thereby exposing two image-rolls of image-flesh at the base of her image-buttocks. I am even able to suppose that my image-aunt may have come upon one or another image of a woman with an upswept image-hairstyle and an expression on her image-face of image-tolerance or even image-sympathy for the image-nephew and his image-spying, although I have never been able to suppose that my image-aunt would not have been sternly disapproving of such an image-image.

Did I mention it’s funny? Hilarious, like everything truly serious, truly real.

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

This is a battle. Not one one of the legions faced from opposite terrains. In his quirky, alienated voice Murnane moves closer in this personal battle not to find his place in life but to find life and what it is. Being clear, yet verging on the tendrils of autism he reports that he does not know the difference for himself between his written and read fiction and to what is referred to as actual life. He takes us along, must since his only weapon is writing.

A search ensues to separate, locate where fiction begins, where fiction ends. Often he thinks about, sees the image-this is a book about images which lie within his mind and must be explored to answer the, or the many, questions about meaning-the grassy field rolled out and out, reaching a plot of trees. He takes us on events of his life, his books, his characters. As we move further what seems as an event is told by a narrator within this book he is writing, an abandoned book since he has stopped writing and is telling us, why. Quickly the narrator’s tale becomes what it is that we are reading and part of his tale involves a narrative that a character within is writing trying to write.

The battle is waged. Blackened storm clouds hover over the grassy field, the treed horizon. Who is it? Who is he? The author of the book we are holding, a personage himself, the personage of the narrator, or the fictional personage of the chief character?

His characters are not planned for, not plotted. They are not written. He considers Turgenev and the dreamt dream of his characters existing and pleading with him to write them. A form of existence for them. In the thickness of Murnane’s battle he comes to realize that his characters do not need so. Quite different this revelation. These characters of his exist, alive in the far reaches of fiction waiting. Waiting for him to join them. They want him to join their state of potentiality. At the very edge of fiction looking out, alone and looking beyond. So, this is where, as the gray smoke clears, we find him. What is this? He beckons, inviting us.

[Katia N]

Another trip for me into the land of Murnane's mind. The territory is a bit more familiar this time. I've read it a while ago. So it is a good practice of his experiment he described in his A History of Books: what would remain in a memory after finishing a book. In my case and in the case of this book, all I remember is the uncle who has stopped communicating with his favourite nephew just because the latter has written a book that the former has found too explicit. And also I remember a young women who might have been the narrator's aunt looking out of the window. Just this image. And I am not even sure it was described in the book.

If you are interested to read some more coherent (or maybe just more lengthy) my reviews of his work, I think Inland might be a better place.

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are little ecstasies we might experience on this day that live beyond language. Their meanings point beyond the brilliantly shining colors of the gem worn on an old woman's necklace; the butterfly that lands on the top branches of the tree outside the window, adding a grace note to the morning breezes; the warmth a lover has trapped within her bathrobe when fresh from the shower, as she encloses you within it. Murnane calls these moments sacred vessels, and the place of these vessels in our lives is the subject of this strange piece of fiction. There are the worldly signs and the eternal signs. Most of us experience these little ecstasies and will then decide to get something nice for the wife - it feels that good. Or will thank goodness the bills have all been paid. But since Murnane is a poet he looks beyond the immediate reaction, convinced these vessels contain truths that most of humanity wouldn't recognize even if it came with a gift certificate to our favorite restaurant.

These sacred vessels are exactly what Emily Dickinson is writing about when she wrote,

There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons –
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes –

It's no accident that she's describing them in terms of the Christian Church, the place where these sacred vessels have been ritualized into the Mass. The next line she describes the "Heavenly Hurt" where "We can find no scar, but internal difference - where the meanings are." Meanings aren't found in the vessel, but are carried in the internal difference when transported from one vessel to the next. And what better vessels for sacred meaning in the world than the female body? Murnane apologizes for his obsession about this in a paragraph devoted to Proust,

The reader should not suppose that I fail to recognize the workings of the imagination in other writers of fiction because I search out too eagerly and read too hastily passages referring to young female persons. I tried to recall just now the occasion when I read for the first time the passage of fiction that has affected me more than any other passage that I have read during sixty years of reading fiction. I seemed to recall that I was walking across a courtyard on my way towards the front door of a mansion. I had been invited to an afternoon party that was then taking place in the mansion. A motor-car just then arriving in the courtyard passed close by me, causing me to step suddenly backwards. My stepping thus caused me to find myself standing with one foot on each of two uneven paving-stones. What happened afterwards is reported in the relevant passage in the last volume of the work of fiction the English title of which is Remembrance of Things Past.

And that's it, he doesn't tell us anything more about that meaningful passage, about what he found so spectacular about it. And, basically, that's how he treats his sacred vessels, pointing them out but telling us nothing about what's inside. This would have to make Gerald Murnane one of the oddest poets I've ever come across. Ordinarily once a poet spots a sacred vessel he tries to contain the experience in a poem. Murnane does everything about a poem but try and write one. In that sense he's an excellent Catholic, honoring the experience too much to vulgarize it with words and images.

Gilles Deleuze says of Proust: "the signs of love anticipate in some sense their alteration and their annihilation. It is the signs of love that implicate lost time in the purest state." That is why the Church is based on love. The sacred vessels within love are rare and infinite and forever being destroyed at its moment of utmost purity. Whether through poetry or parenthood time must be regained.

Murnane is more amusing about lost time than Proust, and I have a friend who compares his "reports" on these vessels (a favorite Murnane word) to the child-like, weird noises Glenn Gould emits when seated at his piano playing something intricate like the Bach of his Goldberg Variations. Especially amusing noises when it comes to Murnane's sexual fascination with those women out there!

The genius of the Catholic altar is that it sets up distances between the observer and the observed that is imbued with mystery in the spaces between. It would seem that everything about modern life, from the world of social media to the advances of science, is out to destroy this sense of mystery. Who wants to read what we can very well read for ourselves? Too many people, too, too many people prefer it this way. Boring! It's so much more fun guessing what's underneath. Dickinson on these mysteries that cannot be described,

None may teach it – Any –
'Tis the seal Despair –
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air –

It's fascinating that she chooses the word "affliction". Simone Weil, very much like Dickinson, has said it's these afflictions that teach us best the nature of God. In today's parlance affliction sounds like a condition that deserves a pill. Or a trip to the psychoanalyst. Murnane has a funny bit on these quacks who would tell us exactly what we don't understand. Nabokov, that clown, actually feared the Freudians with their exacting descriptions - Murnane doesn't. He simply makes fun of them, which is what you'd expect from the greater poet of the two.

Murnane is probably too much of a religious writer for most people's tastes. For Catholics, he is probably too irreverent, especially when imagining the priests and nuns disrobing for an orgy taking place at the altar. I feel bad for these two groups who miss out on some of the wonder and the glory of the radicalism Christianity permits. The eroticism of the Catholic mind, for instance, when imagining more than a hand reaching out to the ciborium: "I could only try to imagine the interior of the tabernacle, and whenever I thus tried I liked to suppose that the white curtain I often saw was only the outermost of a series of such hangings, so that the priest, whenever he pushed his fingers inwards towards the ciborium, felt his way through layer after layer of gently resisting plushness."

Ultimately, Murnane is really only doing what most Catholics I know are doing: defining the religion for themselves. There are the idols one is supposed to believe in, and then there are the ones you might find on your own (like when perusing a back issue of Playboy). It must be nice for once to have a Pope one doesn't feel embarrassed about.

Dickinson ends her poem on the sacred vessel this way:

When it comes, the Landscape listens –
Shadows – hold their breath –
When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
On the look of Death –

On the look of Death one can see Murnane's Plains. This strange work of fiction begins with a quote from Kerouac: "The Turf was so complicated it went on forever." Strange, in that by choosing not to describe these eternal signs Murnane has found a way to capture them in this very turf.

Murnane's appreciation of beauty in the spoiler,
While my father talks with the man of the house, a woman picks me up and carries me towards a doorway within the house. The smooth skin of the woman and her pleasant voice appeal to me. Beyond the doorway is darkness. The woman steps through the doorway, still carrying me in her arms. From somewhere in the darkness, the woman takes up a small object and then puts it into my hands. Outside again, in the bright sunlight, I see that the object is some sort of home-cooked biscuit or cake. The woman urges me to eat the object, but I want only to admire the colour of the object, which is a golden yellow. As soon as the woman has set me down, I take the object back through the doorway. I am eager to watch again while the eloquent yellow stands out from the blackness.

Glenn Gould at the piano:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2YMSt...

[Jonathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unfortunately both the ideas and the prose of this felt a little dull to me, I certainly found it hard to maintain my interest. The blurred boundary between "fiction" and "autobiography" (really one should say there is no boundary because all is fiction as all is narrative) is much more powerfully explored by Ricoeur and others. Finally I suspect I am a little bored by metafiction which circles around the author's block and his uncertainty as to whether or not he should write at all...others without this prejudice might enjoy the novel more than I did.

[Jack · Rating 4 out of 5]

Murnane is a little much for me sometimes - he is as 'difficult' a writer as any, in his own unassuming way, and sometimes I lose the run of this books, but I can't help but love them anyway. His way of thinking is totally unlike any other writer I know, and yet I grasp his perspective intuitively, or rather, semi-intuitively, because something is always lost. Things are lost in any novel, but perhaps here, in a slim volume of 250 or so pages, tens of thousands of the unwritten word is tangibly lost.
I want to read all of Murnane, again and again, and maybe in the future I can try to put to words exactly what it is he does I find so profound.

[Christopher]

So, writing one huge self-reflexive novel, are ya? Ok. Well, I liked this well-enough, though I thought it only really took off in the last 50-75 pages or so. Murnane on psilocybin. Depersonalization through fiction. The mind is amazing. Endless landscapes of the language technology. Ok, let’s get it.

Current Murnane Rankings as of 2/1/2024

1) The Plains
2) Inland
3) Barley Patch
4) Landscape with Landscape

Will continue to explore this terrain.

[michal k-c · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s a ghost story, in a way, absent the normal vertices of fictional form. Landscapes and characters are more like shadows of themselves — characters often unnamed and rarely individuated. And much like a shadow these abstractions represent something much more real just outside of the frame of the narrative here. The ending, with the young woman on the bus, hints at Murnane giving an edge to the image over the word. Words of course shadows themselves, only ever capable of hinting at another subject indirectly (Lacan said something along the lines of speech implies another subject)

[Al Bità · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a fictional novel about factual events; or a factual novel about fictional events.
This book is a memoir of true events written as objectively as possible; it is therefore not a novel.
This book is a factual analysis of fictional events written as a memoir; it is therefore a novel.
All the above sentences are true (or not true) of Murnane's 'Barley Patch'.

If you like the sort of intellectual gymnastics of paradoxes such as the above you might enjoy this book, and you might also philosophise about what it is to be a writer, what it is to be a reader, or maybe what it is like to be a writer writing about being a writer, or, indeed, a writer writing why he no longer writes fiction novels, recalling maybe some of the events, memories and images from his mind which may or may not be the source of the subjects of previous, current or future novels (which may therefore not be novels at all...) For me it is yet another example of postmodern-influenced writing gone wrong.

Take the very first sentence of this work (after the initial query 'Must I write?'):

"A few weeks before the conception of the male child who would become partly responsible, thirty years later, for my own conception, a young man..."

Why adopt this very convoluted way of writing? What's wrong with: "Before my paternal grandfather was conceived..."? And why do I need this information? Is it linked up to some significance later on in the novel? Not really. It is just convoluted writing; and it persists throughout the work.

Another persistent device used is continual back referencing that, it seems to me, is deliberately confounding for the reader; it begins early on in the work and continues regularly enough throughout. For example, we find on page 9: "Before I began to write the first of the three preceding paragraphs, I was about to report that a few images had come to my mind while I was writing the last two sentences of the paragraph preceding that paragraph." The next paragraph starts: "While I was writing the first few sentences of the previous paragraph ... At some time while I was writing the last two sentences in the previous paragraph ..." Thirteen paragraphs later we find: "Before I began to write the first of the six previous paragraphs ..." And so on.

Some people enjoy this kind of writing. I find it quite annoying, and I don't think it should be encouraged.

I believe that at the core of most extreme postmodern posturings and theorising there is a supercilious conceit that the recipient of any work of art (the audience, the reader) is merely a passive, unthinking, wholly receptive dolt. Proponents of this theory also appear to take it upon themselves to be the wake-up call for these dolts, reminding them always of their passiveness and doltishness. This 'need' to take the alleged passive participant to task infuses much postmodernist ideology and has been, in my opinion, a baleful influence on all the arts.

[Matthias · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is, after The Plains and Border Districts: A Fiction, the third book by Gerald Murnane I have read. If you have wondered what the fictional characters of books see when they look beyond the horizon of their fictional world, read this book. If not, read some of Murnane's other books. You will then come back later and read this one, too.
We learn a lot about Murnane's concept of fiction, his claimed lack of imagination, and the self-consciousness of his "personages". This books could have been an essay about the Murnane way of writing, but he calls it a work of fiction. This makes me suspicious that he is playing with the reader even more than with his "personages". So whether a reader eventually will enjoy the book depends to a large extent on their willingness to be toyed with...

[in8 · Rating 2 out of 5]

I blogged about it here: More here:
http://www.5cense.com/12/bangkok.htm

The book is essentially Murnane writing about writing (or not writing, as he renounces fiction writing)—a self-indulgent exercise for lack of anything else to write about. In answer to his question that prompts the book (inspired by Beckett), «Must I write?» the answer (to Murnane) is: no. If you don't have anything to say, then don't bother.

[Anirudh Karnick · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't think a book has mattered this deeply to me for a year.

[Mark Broadhead · Rating 2 out of 5]

Metafictional and, more pertinently, metaboring.

[Sini · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bijna niemand kent de zeer merkwaardige Australische schrijver Gerald Murnane, maar hij heeft een aantal beroemde bewonderaars - Ben Lerner, Coetzee, Teju Cole- , en verdient volgens sommigen de Nobelprijs. Zelf was ik een paar jaar geleden ook erg onder de indruk van het verpletterend vreemde "The plains". Daarna vermaakte ik mij best met "Landscape within landscape" en met "A history of books". En nu heb ik net "Barley Patch" gelezen, dat ik net zo verbluffend vreemd vond als "The plains" en ook net zo verbluffend goed.

De ik- figuur in het boek is een schrijver die al jaren niet meer geschreven heeft, net als Murnane, en die zichzelf existentiële vragen stelt van het type "Moet ik schrijven?" en "Waarom stopte ik met schrijven?". Het boek heeft daardoor iets weg van een min of meer autobiografische, en essayistische, reflectie op de aard en waarde van het schrijverschap. Tegelijk is het ook iets wezenlijk anders dan dat, want de ik- figuur herhaalt tot in het obsessieve dat zijn tekst "fiction" is. Bovendien vertakt die tekst zich al snel in allerlei verhalen, en verhalen in verhalen in verhalen in verhalen, met steeds andere anonieme ik- figuren en andere personages. Een zo'n personage bijvoorbeeld wordt aangeduid als een "chief character" in een fictieve tekst die door de schrijver ervan (een van de ik- figuren) nooit is afgemaakt. Wat vrij duizelingwekkend is: een hoofdpersoon in een nooit voltooid verhaal doet uitspraken die glimpen van een antwoord bevatten op de vragen "Moet ik schrijven?" en "Waarom stopte ik met schrijven?". De raadselen van dat op zich al raadselachtige verhaal worden bovendien nog aanmerkelijk vergroot omdat het in een veelheid van raadselachtige verhalen is ingebed, en omdat al die verhalen subtiel met elkaar contrasteren, of elkaars motieven hernemen op een manier die deze motieven alleen maar pluriformer en meerduidiger maakt. Temeer omdat al die ik- figuren in al die verhalen (en ook alle hij- figuren en zij-figuren) zeker wel kenmerken gemeen hebben met de ik- figuur die "Barley Patch" begon te vertellen, maar tegelijk ook nogal van die ik- figuur verschillen. Een verteller, die op vrij vreemde wijze wel lijkt op Murnane maar niet zonder meer Murnane is, splitst zich af in vele verschillende raadselachtige vertellers van ongrijpbare verhalen en in een resem van mistige mannelijke en vrouwelijke personages. Als antwoord op "Moet ik schrijven" krijgen we dus een veelvoud van ongrijpbare raadselen. Wat veel intrigerender is maar ook veel weerbarstiger dan 'gewoon' een beschouwing van Gerald Murnane over het schrijverschap.

Is dit nou een postmoderne stijloefening die ons ervan doordringen moet dat er in de hele wereld alleen fictie en niets dan fictie bestaat? Nee, volgens mij niet. Volgens mij gaat het om een onblusbaar verlangen naar het onmogelijke, het ongrijpbaar- zinnebeeldige, naar glimpen van een niet in woorden te vatten alternatieve wereld. Zo zegt een van de ik- figuren: "During the rest of my life I would concern myself only with those mental entities that had come to me almost stealthily while I read or while I wrote but had never afterwards detached themselves from me: I would contemplate those images and yield to those feelings that comprised the lasting essence of all my reading and my writing. During the rest of my life I would go on reading from a vast book with no pages, or I would write intricate sentences made up from items other than words". Een groot boek willen lezen zonder bladzijden, kunstige zinnen willen schrijven die van iets anders zijn gemaakt dan woorden..... Alsof de schrijver voorbij het schrijven en de taal wil tasten, alsof wat hij schrijven wil geen boek meer is en dus niet "geschreven" is in de normale zin des woords. Alsof hij droomt van een soort Platoons archetypisch boek voorbij alle boeken, zoals Borges soms deed. Alsof hij net als Symbolisten verlangt naar een taal voorbij de taal, een boek voorbij het boek, naar het Ultieme Boek dat alle boeken overstijgt en dus geen boek meer is.

Bovendien, geen enkel verhaal in "Barley Patch" is echt een verhaal met plot, middenstuk en staart. Elk verhaal lost namelijk als het ware op in ketens van associatieve beelden, stemmingen, flarden en grijstinten. Vaak worden die beelden ook nog eens van alle kanten bekeken, vol verwondering over de raadselachtigheid van die beelden en de ongrijpbaarheid van hun herkomst. Pagina's lang mijmert de ik- figuur bijvoorbeeld over een vrouwelijke bijfiguur met een dubbele identiteit uit een boek dat hij ooit las, en waar hij zich heel weinig meer van herinnert. Vele alinea's lang weidt hij dromerig uit over het beeld dat deze bijfiguur bij hem oproept, en alle associaties waarmee dat beeld is gevoed en verrijkt. En met evenveel verbazing als verrukking mijmert hij over de vele in nevelen gehulde raadselen die dat beeld oproept, de vele cryptische betekenissen en verhulde kleurtinten die het lijkt te hebben. Alsof dat beeld van alles zegt over de grillige geheime binnenwereld en de heimelijke verlangens van de ik- figuur, maar alleen via ongrijpbare suggesties tussen de regels door. En "Barley Patch" is helemaal doordrenkt van dat soort beelden: ook een poppenhuis of de herinnering aan een vroeger gretig gelezen stripverhaal mondt uit in lange droomsequenties vol van geheim. Vooral dat poppenhuis wordt bovendien een beeld van verboden erotisch verlangen, een ondoorgrondelijk erotisch mysterie dat de ik-figuur met zijn vinger en blik ontwijdt terwijl hij het door zijn angst en respect en omzichtigheid tegelijk bewaart en respecteert. Wat hij -of een andere ik- figuur- even later ook doet met het ondoorgrondelijke mysterie van het Goddelijke, dat hij vermoedt in het binnenste van een tabernakel. En elke verhaallijn in "Barley Patch" wordt helemaal overwoekerd door de meerduidigheid van deze ongrijpbare beelden. Alles lost op in ambiguïteit, zodat je als lezer soms echt het voel hebt "a vast book with no pages" te lezen, vol met "intricate sentences made up from items other than words". Wat voor mij trouwens puur een leesfeest is, want ik hou wel van geheimzinnigheid die de grenzen van mijn voorstellingsvermogen zo beproeft.

Niet de begrijpelijke taal van het conventionele verhaal staat dus in "Barley Patch" centraal, maar de voor taal onbevattelijke vreemdheid van het meerduidige beeld. Het boek is daardoor doordesemd van ongrijpbare beelden en soms ongelofelijk associatieve visioenen, die vaak ook opmerkelijk droomachtig en vloeibaar zijn. Soms zo vloeibaar dat ze regelrecht uit het onbewuste lijken voort te komen. Of uit regionen die zelfs nog onbekender en vreemder zijn dan het onbewuste. Zodat die beelden en visioenen sommige van de personages overweldigen door hun vreemdheid, "as though he had stood in front of a source of light so powerful that it caused to be projected on to some or another surface near by much- enlarged images of his brain or of his nerves". Die bron van licht heeft zeker ook mystieke en religieuze connotaties. En die keren terug, want over een ander personage wordt gezegd: "He did not understand until a few years afterwards that his notion of prayer and meditation was hardly different from his notion of writing. The writer struggled to discover, in some far part of his mind, subject- matter fit for poetry; the mystic struggled to glimpse God or heaven". En die glimp moet nadrukkelijk een glimp blijven, althans volgens een van de ik- figuren: "Now, I might try to glimpse in my own mind some of what might be glimpsed in the mind or remembered or dreamed of but never written about. Now, I was justified in believing in the existence of places beyond the places that I had read about or had written about: on a country on the far side of fiction". Fictie die tentatieve glimpen bevat op een wereld ver voorbij de fictie, maar ook ver voorbij de wereld die we kennen. Even onmogelijk als het eerder aangehaalde "vast book with no pages", gevuld met "intricate sentences made up from items other than words". En nog onvoorstelbaarder dan de God waar een mysticus of een monnik van droomt tijdens zijn gebed of zijn meditatie.

Kennelijk ziet Murnane fictie als hét middel bij uitstek om ons in verwondering te brengen over de vele raadselachtigheden in onze binnenwereld en buitenwereld, en over alles wat wij in die werelden alleen kunnen vermoeden en nooit kunnen kennen. Of als hét middel om te speculeren over alternatieve werkelijkheden, die zich als een soort raadselachtig potentieel ophouden in of naast de onze. In elk geval laat Murnane ons meditatief mijmeren over de vreemdheid van fictie, door in heel ongrijpbaar- vreemde fictie te schrijven over de vreemdheid van fictie, en door in heel ongrijbare beelden te mijmeren over de ongrijpbaarheid van het beeld. Veel van zijn zinnen zijn daardoor prozagedichten die bol staan van verlangen naar het onmogelijke. Nee, veel mensen zullen niet houden van Murnane. Maar ik vind hem prachtig.

[Noe · Rating 5 out of 5]

“In a certain corner of a garden behind a spacious house that my father sometimes visited, I found a fishpond full of shaggy water-plants and overhung by ferns. In another part of the same garden, an ornamental grapevine grew over the frosted-glass panels of a wall of the garage. Whenever I stood alone in these places, I felt nothing more subtle than a child's anger and helplessness, and yet the cause of those feelings was too subtle almost for me to explain nowadays. I wanted to see or to hear or to touch some or another being who was able to comprehend and to enjoy and perhaps even to express in words what I was only vaguely aware of in those places. It seemed to me impossible that what I was caught up in consisted of no more than myself and a pool of water or panes of glass and a few garden-plants; I was one small part of a mystery that I myself could never hope to explicate.”

[Jo Rooke · Rating 3 out of 5]

A person who claims to remember having read one or another book is seldom able to quote from memory even one sentence from the text. What the person probably remembers is part of the experience of having read the book: part of what happened in his or her mind during the hours while the book was being read.

I read this with a view of gifting it to a writer I love, and these 3 stars are very much a review of my own ability to engage with the book, rather than a reflection of its innate quality. Although I guess one of the points of the work is that there's no real innate quality of writing, more of reading. The start and end were most clear to me, and the middle I think requires more experience of Murnane's work in order to follow him down the garden path he has paved for us. Nonetheless, I can appreciate the unique writing style and mainly feel a little too rigid for it, which is strange since my imagination is usually one of my strengths. I think it will be one to re-read (at least thrice) and get something new every time. Izzi, you can still borrow my copy.

[Wayne · Rating 1 out of 5]

"So there's perhaps an autistic version of me that does my writing,
but I think I can...I'm communicating well enough with you."
-Gerald Murnane in an interview with Ramona Koval, 18th Feb. 2008.

This is Gerald Murnane finally admitting to what most honest readers would be painfully aware of from the opening sentence of his latest work "Barley Patch",and increasingly as one proceeds, which has ironically just won the the Adelaide Writers' Festival Award for Innovation!!! This awarding should make us highly suspicious of those who set themselves up as Gurus of the Literary Scene and who are unquestioningly endorsed by their fawning acolytes.Just visit some of the sites of Goodread Authors to witness this phenomenon in gross detail.

Prior to Murnane's sadly pleading statement above, Ramona Koval has gently suggested that this is the case:

R.K.:I'm kind of tempted to say...there are people now who write about such feelings of being a little bit separate from the world and making lists and making lots of categories (G.M. has been doing this throughout this interview.) and would say that's a slightly autistic way of being in the world.
G.M.: I may be that way. You asked me a question like this once before,(circa 2005) and the moment it came out of your mouth I bristled. I thought"I'm getting out of here", but you asked in a much more friendly way today.
R.K.:Maybe I've aged too.

This is an admirable interview and one can only feel sympathy for Murnane who it seems has been taken up by the Literary Gurus who have very little artistic integrity or judgement.
Hopefully they have been honest about his previous books none of which I have yet been able to purchase.But in this interview Murnane seems to be able to talk about his autism without using words as a vehicle to express his autism with its many obsessions as he does so very clearly in "Barley Patch".

This is the question that must then be asked: can autism filtered through a literary work translate into good literature and deliver up a writer of worth?
In the case of this particular book by this particular writer I can safely say no.

[Samantha · Rating 5 out of 5]

This may be the most recursive work of fiction that I've read. Recursive is a value-neutral term and how one appraises this book is likely to depend on whether one finds this recursiveness, this nesting of memories within memories and themes within themes, entertaining or frustrating. I'm probably in the former camp. The writing is methodical--all the "as it was once called"s and "what was known as"es can make it seem almost plodding. But the exploration of the writer's imagination, how characters come into being, etc., is resonant for the reader who has ever wanted to write. The writer in this case is certainly Gerald Murnane, whether his "chief characters" really are or really aren't. But one need not share Murnane's fascination with horse racing, or two-story buildings, or for that matter to have been raised in and broken with the Catholic Church to understand that certain ideas and objects have talismanic value for writers even when the reasons are not apparent. This book manages to be a work of autobiographical fiction that is also very ambitious.

[Robert Wechsler · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don’t think that this is the best place to start reading Gerald Murnane, but it certainly made me want to read more, to put this book into context and see what else this amazing writer is capable of. What I loved most about this work of fiction was (1) the way Murnane plays with the intersections, contrasts, and other relationships between fiction and life, (2) the exceptionally flat affect of the prose, and yet its beauty, and (3) the wonderfully allusive use of repetition.

The sole problem with the book is its length. Since the reader’s interest is primarily in the form and allusiveness (not to mention elusiveness), this interest can be lost (and in my case nearly was) by going on too long.

[Michael Zwiauer · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reading this fairly short book felt like climbing a mountain. One image after another, all inherently similar, rattled off in a faintly misanthropic manner. It’s meta-fiction at its most glassy and cold, with only a few memorable images to combat the boredom. Not for me, sadly!

[Scott Milton · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is an age-old sadness running through Barley Patch. The tone of the book feels like an unwanted inheritance, one that has complicated a life in ways the inheritor has tried, with varying degrees of success, to understand but never entirely managed to discard. Having previously read The Plains and Tamarisk Row, I now see those works as a kind of preparation for what Barley Patch proposes.

Murnane insists on calling this work of writing fiction, a categorisation that seems counterintuitive yet is crucial to his sense of what he is doing. In this work, the question of why one writes comes to the fore. Fiction for Murnane is not an escape from life but the very means by which he can reckon with the preoccupations and deficiencies of a mind that has always been drawn more to images and their contemplation than to lived experience. What we encounter is not autobiography but the image of a life: the contemplative space in which Murnane dwells, and the recurring images which like stars in a constellation lend his existence pattern, direction, and ultimately, motive for writing.

If we set aside his metaphysical digressions, and his quaint but unconvincing appeal to Turgenev as a way of resolving his long-standing unease with fiction, we find in Barley Patch both richness and poverty. The life of the mind, as articulated by Murnane, can be a deep well of imaginative intensity but also a coda to deprivation, a reminder of the narrowed horizon that comes from living chiefly among one’s own images.

The book closes on a note of optimism, but it is difficult to overlook the scenes of impotence, regret, and unresolved longing that have preceded it. Their poignancy derives not from abstraction but from their unmistakable biographical charge. Barley Patch leaves me with mixed feelings and a sense of the unresolved. What I can say with certainty, however, is that my sense of fiction, what it is, and what it does, has been permanently altered by the experience of reading it.

[Sir Jack · Rating 3 out of 5]

My reactions to this book ranged from stunned appreciation to exasperation/boredom. Solipsism can be used to produce revelatory content, but it has to be used the right way (or something), otherwise the writing starts wilting from lack of air.

I guess ultimately when I read a piece of fiction I want to experience an elaborate well-constructed world, one that reaches out towards or uses as its starting point the world we live in…. and not the ruminations of a man-boy and his obsessions with doll-houses and horse racing. For Murnane, the outside world does not really exist; the only thing of any reality is a small chunk of land in Australia and his direct impressions of this.

Murnane uses the word imagination in an odd, extremely limited sense. He claims to have no imagination and yet it’s clear that he has an extremely active imagination (though tightly bounded in the nutshell of his mind). What he seems to mean by “imagination” is the attempt to break out of this nutshell and reach beyond yourself when writing; he mocks this attempted losing of the self. Since Murnane has a complete lack of interest in anything not directly related to the extremely narrow strip of his life and daydreams, he thinks (with a weird amount of pride) that he is without this thing called imagination. For example, he goes out of his way to mock Mailer’s use of “imagination” in his novel about ancient Egypt. In Murnane’s view, Mailer should have instead written dozens of novels describing the sidewalks, streets, and bodegas right outside his Brooklyn brownstone, and how these objects made him feel inside and how they related to his childhood.

And why stop there: Shakespeare should be mocked for presuming to write about a Roman leader’s assassination; Tolstoy for writing about France’s 1812 invasion of Russia; Pynchon for writing about 18th-century English surveyors. All these writers would have been better served just writing about whatever stuff is directly outside their window, or whatever odd images tumble through their minds.

The narrator’s deepest dream is to go to the second story of a house and gaze out at “mostly level grassy countryside.” This desire carries much of the narrative, and this phrase is repeated dozens of times throughout the book. You see, the narrator lives in a one-story house surrounded by mostly level grassy countryside. But he yearns to view this same image from the second storey, or maybe even the third storey.

Even though this ideal is presumably right down the street, to the narrator it is a far-off thing, possibly unachievable. I suppose it is a metaphor.

As is the case with most writers, Murnane’s theories about fiction are entirely self-serving. Guess what, he thinks the best fiction is the kind written pretty much the way he writes it, a nonstop grab-bag of stray thoughts and images, fiction with no “characters” and no “imagination.” Literature of the Aimless, Endless Ramble is one of the premiere subgenres of the last half-century or so, and I’m not hating on it; but it’s a subgenre that I think strikes many readers as hit or miss. I really like Bernhard but can’t read Sebald, for example.

This all sounds very negative, but there is a charm (and I mean this in more than the principal sense) to Murnane’s forthright, searching narrative style. His writings about the ephemeral nature of reading and thought are compelling and perceptive. And the book overall is a unique reading experience with some passages of real beauty and strangeness.

[Scott · Rating 2 out of 5]

I look around my room and try to find the books I've started and never finished. Mostly they are non-fiction texts that I pick up at random and put down and come back to when in the mood for information. Rarely do I begin to read fiction and not finish it. I have to say, sorry Gerald, that I didn't finish 'Barley Patch'. Really. I can't be bothered. We read this as a text in a unit on 'Postmodernism' last semester at Sydney Uni. And, as much as the lecturer tried to enthuse and excite our interest in the text, I feel so underwhelmed. Gerald Murnane, like many writers, borders that odd borderland between creative eccentric and pathological obsessive compulsive. Some may find his waxing prose lyrical, imaginative and abundantly of the Australian landscape. Others, like myself, will find it tedious, boring and overwhelmingly uninteresting.

[Twodogs333 · Rating 1 out of 5]

Wow this book was annoying. This is the book from Australia for the World Cup of Literature.
The book drew me in as purporting to be about an author who "gives up" writing. The narrator says he is going to explain why. Instead of actually explaining anything the narrator just talks around and around and around. He hints at why he gave up writing, but never actually comes out and says it. He talks about the character he WOULD have written about if he had finished his half-started novel. It felt very much autobiographical--author who was once studying to be a priest and then quits and gets involved with horse racing--just like the author Murnane. Some of the piece was actually interesting or at least held my attention, but by the time I got to the last ten pages I had no idea what the narrator was going on about any more or why. Aussie Aussie Aussie...no no no!

[Blythe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Incomparable to any other book to do with time and memory. Superbly written, with the layers of memory suddenly accruing both authenticity and artistry towards the middle of the book. The remaining few chapters are both evasive and comforting as we are brought back again ad again to certain images and memories that by the end of the book seem so familiar to us they would be our own memories.