What do you think?
Rate this book
Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs
This collection of essays leads the reader into the curious and eccentric imagination of Gerald Murnane, one of the masters of contemporary Australian writing, author of the classic novel The Plains, and winner of the Patrick White Literary Award.
Delicately argued, and finely written, they describe his dislocated youth in the suburbs of Melbourne and rural Victoria in the 1950s, his debt to writers as unlike as Adam Lindsay Gordon, Marcel Proust and Jack Kerouac, his obsession with racehorses and grasslands and the Hungarian language, and above all, his dedication to the worlds of significance that lie within, or just beyond, the familiar details of Australian life.
Delicately argued, and finely written, they describe his dislocated youth in the suburbs of Melbourne and rural Victoria in the 1950s, his debt to writers as unlike as Adam Lindsay Gordon, Marcel Proust and Jack Kerouac, his obsession with racehorses and grasslands and the Hungarian language, and above all, his dedication to the worlds of significance that lie within, or just beyond, the familiar details of Australian life.
225 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2005
15 people are currently reading
593 people want to read
About the author
Gerald Murnane
31 books388 followersMurnane's first two books, Tamarisk Row (1974) and A Lifetime on Clouds (1976), seem to be semi-autobiographical accounts of his childhood and adolescence. Both are composed largely of very long but grammatical sentences.
In 1982, he attained his mature style with The Plains, a short novel about a young filmmaker who travels to a fictive country far within Australia, where his failure to make a film is perhaps his most profound achievement. The novel is both a metaphysical parable about appearance and reality, and a parodic examination of traditions and cultural horizons. The novel depicts an abstracted Australia, akin to something out of mythology or fable. The novel was followed by: Landscape With Landscape (1985), Inland (1988), Velvet Waters (1990), and Emerald Blue (1995). A book of essays, Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, appeared in 2005, and a new work of fiction, Barley Patch, was released in 2009. All of these books are concerned with the relation between memory, image, and landscape, and frequently with the relation between fiction and non-fiction.
Murnane is mainly known within Australia. A seminar was held on his work at the University of Newcastle in 2001. Murnane does, however, also have a following in other countries, especially Sweden and the United States, where The Plains was published in 1985 and reprinted in 2004 (New Issues Poetry & Prose), and where Dalkey Archive Press has recently issued Barley Patch and will be reprinting Inland in 2012. In 2011, The Plains' was translated into French and published in France by P.O.L, and in 2012 will be published in Hungarian. In July/August 2017, The Plains was the number 1 book recommendation of South West German Radio (SWR2). His works have been translated into Italian (Velvet Waters as Una Melodia), German (The Plains as Die Ebenen, Border Districts as Grenzbezirke, Landscape With Landscape as Landschaft mit Landschaft, all publ. Suhrkamp Verlag), Spanish (The Plains as Las llanuras, and Something for the Pain as Una vida en las carreras, all published by Editorial Minúscula), Catalan (The Plains as Les planes, also published by Editorial Minúscula), Swedish (Inland as Inlandet, The Plains as Slätterna, Velvet Waters as Sammetsvatten and Barley Patch as Korntäppa) and Serbian (The Plains as Ravnice; Inland as Unutrašnjost, both published by Blum izdavaštvo 2025).
In 1982, he attained his mature style with The Plains, a short novel about a young filmmaker who travels to a fictive country far within Australia, where his failure to make a film is perhaps his most profound achievement. The novel is both a metaphysical parable about appearance and reality, and a parodic examination of traditions and cultural horizons. The novel depicts an abstracted Australia, akin to something out of mythology or fable. The novel was followed by: Landscape With Landscape (1985), Inland (1988), Velvet Waters (1990), and Emerald Blue (1995). A book of essays, Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, appeared in 2005, and a new work of fiction, Barley Patch, was released in 2009. All of these books are concerned with the relation between memory, image, and landscape, and frequently with the relation between fiction and non-fiction.
Murnane is mainly known within Australia. A seminar was held on his work at the University of Newcastle in 2001. Murnane does, however, also have a following in other countries, especially Sweden and the United States, where The Plains was published in 1985 and reprinted in 2004 (New Issues Poetry & Prose), and where Dalkey Archive Press has recently issued Barley Patch and will be reprinting Inland in 2012. In 2011, The Plains' was translated into French and published in France by P.O.L, and in 2012 will be published in Hungarian. In July/August 2017, The Plains was the number 1 book recommendation of South West German Radio (SWR2). His works have been translated into Italian (Velvet Waters as Una Melodia), German (The Plains as Die Ebenen, Border Districts as Grenzbezirke, Landscape With Landscape as Landschaft mit Landschaft, all publ. Suhrkamp Verlag), Spanish (The Plains as Las llanuras, and Something for the Pain as Una vida en las carreras, all published by Editorial Minúscula), Catalan (The Plains as Les planes, also published by Editorial Minúscula), Swedish (Inland as Inlandet, The Plains as Slätterna, Velvet Waters as Sammetsvatten and Barley Patch as Korntäppa) and Serbian (The Plains as Ravnice; Inland as Unutrašnjost, both published by Blum izdavaštvo 2025).
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 36 reviews
February 16, 2025
Last year (not so long ago!) I read Murnane’s Inland and was confronted with something unlike I’ve ever read before. In some ways, like Proust, and in others, like Thomas Bernhard, but without the angst. Murnane’s prose is circular, repetitive, and in many ways, frustrating. I didn’t bother to rate it. But since then, I’ve been quietly obsessed with him, reading countless interviews, articles, reviews and profiles; I’m half convinced he’s destined for a Nobel Prize.
Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs (perhaps the most beautiful title I’ve come across for some time, taken from Proust) is a collection of essays, mostly about the act of writing itself, and surprisingly personal. I studied writing for six years in formal education and would say most writing advice now bores me to tears, for I’ve heard it all before. “Show don’t tell” was battered over my head for half a decade. Murnane’s writing advice is unlike anything I’ve heard before. His ideas of fiction are inimitable: he is entirely concerned with fiction comprised of images; he speaks nothing of the usual mantras of characterisation, plot, arcs, tension, conflict or change. For example, he greatly admires words he read many years ago (in many of Murnane’s essays he mentions words or phrases that have stayed with him for many years, even whole poems and passages he knows verbatim) by Herbert Read, ‘Good writing exactly reproduces what we should call the contour of our thought.’ In a later essay, Murnane says himself, ‘I have sometimes thought of the whole enterprise of my fiction-writing as an effort to bring to light an underlying order – a vast pattern of connected images – beneath everything that I am able to call my mind.’
I can’t even describe the beauty and symmetry of the titular essay on Proust.
I’ll be reading more of Murnane’s fiction this year.
Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs (perhaps the most beautiful title I’ve come across for some time, taken from Proust) is a collection of essays, mostly about the act of writing itself, and surprisingly personal. I studied writing for six years in formal education and would say most writing advice now bores me to tears, for I’ve heard it all before. “Show don’t tell” was battered over my head for half a decade. Murnane’s writing advice is unlike anything I’ve heard before. His ideas of fiction are inimitable: he is entirely concerned with fiction comprised of images; he speaks nothing of the usual mantras of characterisation, plot, arcs, tension, conflict or change. For example, he greatly admires words he read many years ago (in many of Murnane’s essays he mentions words or phrases that have stayed with him for many years, even whole poems and passages he knows verbatim) by Herbert Read, ‘Good writing exactly reproduces what we should call the contour of our thought.’ In a later essay, Murnane says himself, ‘I have sometimes thought of the whole enterprise of my fiction-writing as an effort to bring to light an underlying order – a vast pattern of connected images – beneath everything that I am able to call my mind.’
I can’t even describe the beauty and symmetry of the titular essay on Proust.
I’ll be reading more of Murnane’s fiction this year.
March 21, 2008
For a long time I knew there was something fundamentally wrong with me. Not only did I have no interest in any form of sport, but I felt no connection to any landscape. To be honest, I hadn’t realised landscapes could even be important until quite late in my teens. On rare occasions my parents would take us to the top of a hill somewhere – somewhere where there would be a vista, which is just an Italian word meaning view, and we would stand and look out at that vista and I would try to make sense of it. Try to make it mean something more than just a view.
I knew, you see, that some people are moved to tears by landscapes – that some people die if they are removed from a landscape. There had to be something in what I was seeing that I was not seeing. They must have been able to see something that was completely apparent but that to me was transparent to the point of being invisible.
This was a general feeling – not just one in which applied particularly to the observation of landscapes. No, landscapes were just a clear indication of my lack, of my inability to understand things that did not require explanation to others. For a long time I thought my inability to understand related to my being Irish in Australia – until I realised I wasn’t really Irish.
Another example of my not understanding is when people say things like, ‘the world may appear completely differently to me than it does to you’ with that certainty that always surprises me. For the greater part of my life such sentences have always sounded like piffle. If the world doesn’t appear the same to you as it does to me, then why don’t you bump your head on the door when you walk through it. I have a tendency to be boringly practical.
But as Lenin said, practice may be the highest criterion of truth, but no amount of practice ever disproved a theory. Just look at Economic Rationalism if you require some proof of the truth of these words of Lenin’s.
On Friday nights my father would sit at the bench with The Truth, a newspaper that had an extensive form guide and many photos of topless women, and he would pick the horses to place bets on for the following day. He would often bet on quadrellas, where he would be required to select all of the winning horses of four particular races. Or he would bet on trifectas where he would need to decide which would be the first three horses to cross the finish line in a single race.
The tinny, male voiced sounds of horse races being called from a white rectangular transistor radio occupied much of Saturdays of the early years of my life. My father often won large sums of money from these races. When I was eighteen or nineteen my father taught me how to read a form guide and we discussed the effect of adding weight to a horse and how much (in lengths) this would cost the horse in its run. But although I quite enjoyed the considerations and calculations and the near certainty prior to a race of which horse was most likely to win – during the race I was only too aware of the infinity of possible outcomes – so different to the certainty of an outcome I had derived from form and division and multiplication. And so I proved to never be a very good gambler – and am still not. This is not something I state with pride, it is something of no consequence to me at all beyond the meaning I assume is clear from the fact of my writing this paragraph.
When I was in my mid-twenties, and Gerald Murnane was seeking to teach me how to write clear sentences and not to write the sort of things I enjoyed writing at the time, stories that played with what I called ‘symbols’ and that were written in what I referred to as an ‘ironic tone’, I also decided that it was important that I learn to appreciate landscapes.
The first night he taught me he went around the room and asked each student to say their name. He told us that he would only need to do this once and he would remember each of our names from that moment on. When it was my turn to state my name, and for a moment or two after, he stared into my eyes and glanced across my face – clearly he was spotting some feature there that he could link forever with the word Trevor. I don’t believe I have a soul, but if I did believe such a thing I would say that Murnane took a piece of my soul at that moment. I was never surprised that he remembered my name after that encounter.
At about this time I realised that the streets of central Melbourne were not only a grid pattern, but were laid out running north/south and east/west. Well, that isn’t quite true, as they were laid out according to magnetic north in the 1840s and, of course, magnetic north has moved since then. I say, of course, even though I assume many people reading this would not know magnetic north could move. I have left the ‘of course’ there because it is one of the main concerns I have with all of my writing – that it is fundamentally pretentious. That when I write it is like someone is waiting for me to almost look away so they can put in some pretentious phrase to catch me out. And that person is also me.
Gerald Murnane can stand anywhere and know which direction he is facing and can give a description of the country that is there around him over the horizon. I can only do this if I stop and think and I can somehow orient myself in relation to the Town Hall corner of Swanston and Collins Streets.
Gerald Murnane taught me to write fiction at Victoria College for the year before my first daughter was born and on the year in which she was born. One of the things he taught me was to trust images over all other things. I had been coming slowly to this belief for sometime before he taught me – up until that time I would tell people I was not a very visual person and so images seemed like the last things I would write about.
Slowly, I was also coming to distrust irony. Other people may call irony, ‘subtext’. There was a time when I thought this was the most important thing about literature – the hidden story. Now I believe the opposite. Now I believe that only shallow people are obsessed by the depth below the surface that remains unseen – true depth is to be seen in the apparent and in really understanding it. The hardest thing, the thing that requires the most courage to say is not the deep and concealed meaning – it is the truth that is there in front of us but that we can hardly bring ourselves to say.
Murnane would teach by silence – his classes were the quietest I have ever attended. We would each of us sit over a piece of fiction written by an unknown member of the class and read it and make comments on it. Sometimes this was quite a painful exercise, but I think I learnt more from this and his classes than I have from anything else.
There are many things I do not like about his writing – but I do trust him. I believe he is one of the most honest writers I have ever read. Even though many of his obsessions are not at all my obsessions, even though he sees the world totally differently to me, even though there is much we could very easily argue over – when I read him I worry that he is taking over my soul and I will never be able to write a line of fiction in my own voice again.
He has many things to say about the writing of fiction in these essays and I think they are mostly important things.
I knew, you see, that some people are moved to tears by landscapes – that some people die if they are removed from a landscape. There had to be something in what I was seeing that I was not seeing. They must have been able to see something that was completely apparent but that to me was transparent to the point of being invisible.
This was a general feeling – not just one in which applied particularly to the observation of landscapes. No, landscapes were just a clear indication of my lack, of my inability to understand things that did not require explanation to others. For a long time I thought my inability to understand related to my being Irish in Australia – until I realised I wasn’t really Irish.
Another example of my not understanding is when people say things like, ‘the world may appear completely differently to me than it does to you’ with that certainty that always surprises me. For the greater part of my life such sentences have always sounded like piffle. If the world doesn’t appear the same to you as it does to me, then why don’t you bump your head on the door when you walk through it. I have a tendency to be boringly practical.
But as Lenin said, practice may be the highest criterion of truth, but no amount of practice ever disproved a theory. Just look at Economic Rationalism if you require some proof of the truth of these words of Lenin’s.
On Friday nights my father would sit at the bench with The Truth, a newspaper that had an extensive form guide and many photos of topless women, and he would pick the horses to place bets on for the following day. He would often bet on quadrellas, where he would be required to select all of the winning horses of four particular races. Or he would bet on trifectas where he would need to decide which would be the first three horses to cross the finish line in a single race.
The tinny, male voiced sounds of horse races being called from a white rectangular transistor radio occupied much of Saturdays of the early years of my life. My father often won large sums of money from these races. When I was eighteen or nineteen my father taught me how to read a form guide and we discussed the effect of adding weight to a horse and how much (in lengths) this would cost the horse in its run. But although I quite enjoyed the considerations and calculations and the near certainty prior to a race of which horse was most likely to win – during the race I was only too aware of the infinity of possible outcomes – so different to the certainty of an outcome I had derived from form and division and multiplication. And so I proved to never be a very good gambler – and am still not. This is not something I state with pride, it is something of no consequence to me at all beyond the meaning I assume is clear from the fact of my writing this paragraph.
When I was in my mid-twenties, and Gerald Murnane was seeking to teach me how to write clear sentences and not to write the sort of things I enjoyed writing at the time, stories that played with what I called ‘symbols’ and that were written in what I referred to as an ‘ironic tone’, I also decided that it was important that I learn to appreciate landscapes.
The first night he taught me he went around the room and asked each student to say their name. He told us that he would only need to do this once and he would remember each of our names from that moment on. When it was my turn to state my name, and for a moment or two after, he stared into my eyes and glanced across my face – clearly he was spotting some feature there that he could link forever with the word Trevor. I don’t believe I have a soul, but if I did believe such a thing I would say that Murnane took a piece of my soul at that moment. I was never surprised that he remembered my name after that encounter.
At about this time I realised that the streets of central Melbourne were not only a grid pattern, but were laid out running north/south and east/west. Well, that isn’t quite true, as they were laid out according to magnetic north in the 1840s and, of course, magnetic north has moved since then. I say, of course, even though I assume many people reading this would not know magnetic north could move. I have left the ‘of course’ there because it is one of the main concerns I have with all of my writing – that it is fundamentally pretentious. That when I write it is like someone is waiting for me to almost look away so they can put in some pretentious phrase to catch me out. And that person is also me.
Gerald Murnane can stand anywhere and know which direction he is facing and can give a description of the country that is there around him over the horizon. I can only do this if I stop and think and I can somehow orient myself in relation to the Town Hall corner of Swanston and Collins Streets.
Gerald Murnane taught me to write fiction at Victoria College for the year before my first daughter was born and on the year in which she was born. One of the things he taught me was to trust images over all other things. I had been coming slowly to this belief for sometime before he taught me – up until that time I would tell people I was not a very visual person and so images seemed like the last things I would write about.
Slowly, I was also coming to distrust irony. Other people may call irony, ‘subtext’. There was a time when I thought this was the most important thing about literature – the hidden story. Now I believe the opposite. Now I believe that only shallow people are obsessed by the depth below the surface that remains unseen – true depth is to be seen in the apparent and in really understanding it. The hardest thing, the thing that requires the most courage to say is not the deep and concealed meaning – it is the truth that is there in front of us but that we can hardly bring ourselves to say.
Murnane would teach by silence – his classes were the quietest I have ever attended. We would each of us sit over a piece of fiction written by an unknown member of the class and read it and make comments on it. Sometimes this was quite a painful exercise, but I think I learnt more from this and his classes than I have from anything else.
There are many things I do not like about his writing – but I do trust him. I believe he is one of the most honest writers I have ever read. Even though many of his obsessions are not at all my obsessions, even though he sees the world totally differently to me, even though there is much we could very easily argue over – when I read him I worry that he is taking over my soul and I will never be able to write a line of fiction in my own voice again.
He has many things to say about the writing of fiction in these essays and I think they are mostly important things.
May 24, 2008
Trevor McCandless sent me this book. He reviews lots of books on this site, and his reviews are quite something, so frankly, I'd trust his recommendation. It exceeded my expectations though, by a long chalk.
It is a REALLY WEIRD book of essays. It is weird because the author is a strange person with, I'd suggest, a unique ability to convey that strangeness to others. I read one of his novels before, and I found it interesting, but not like I found this interesting. In fact, I should now go back to the novel because it may well be that I just didn't know how to read it.
It is very hard to convey a sense of this writer. In 'The Breathing Author' (a number of these essays are about writing) he says, "Someone has written that all art aspires to the condition of music. My experience is that all art, including all music, aspires to the condition of horse-racing." Murnane is the only writer in the world, I imagine, who could write this intending it literally to be true. He is aware of the laugh factor, I expect, but he's not playing for laughs. He means it.
In that same essay, he talks about one of is greatest pleasures as a writer of prose fiction, namely "to discover continually the endless varying shapes that a sentence may take". And then later: "I encourage you to think of each of my seven published books as a report of some or another part of the contents of what I call my mind. And yet it seems to me, at the age of sixty-two, that the half-million words and more of my published books together reveal not a great deal about the interests and concerns of the person I believe myself to be."
At first you're drawn in by the oddness. You sense him deliberately pursuing connections and connotations, and being led by them in search of the sense he believes they will ultimately make. He believes that selective memory selects for a reason. He believes in meaning. But at the same time, the details he describes are mainly very ordinary. In 'Stream System', a swampy patch of ground connects in his mind with an image of a "slightly twisted" human heart. That in turn connects with an item of gold jewellery "in a catalogue issued by the Direct Supply Jewellery Company Pty Ltd in about the year 1946." That reminds him of his aunt, and where she lived and where her house was located. That leads him to reflect on the back of that house (because he always defines his position in terms of what lies around him) and at the back of that house, he recalls the Rye Paddock and the grassland behind it and the ultimate south of the land where sea, land and sky must have met. And that makes him think about what he would have thought about if (it's an 'if' of some moment) he had been sitting in his aunt's room trying to visualise the view to the north-east, striving for a picture of something more than "endless yellow-brown grass". I'm stopping there, although the line of thought is important, and I haven't followed him to one of his highpoints, because I want to make a point.
Why would anyone be interested in what Gerald Murnane might have thought in or around 1946 if he had been sitting in his aunt's room near Lawler's Hill in the vast continent of Australia? Two reasons, I guess. The first is that while reading him, you become intensely aware of the network of connections in your own mind. So a bit of you is thinking, yes, yes, this is what it is like to inhabit human consciousness. The other reason is the grace of his prose line, his sentences. You can't read him fast. You have to read slowly. And if you read slowly, you gradually realise that his style is both plain and beautiful. It has a kind of cleansing effect on the mind. It is not pretentious. It represents the author pursuing a thought, without any element of showing off or being Clever, and you can pursue it with him. It's like someone taking you on a very pleasant drive, pointing out the views from side to side, and then suddenly you realise you are INSIDE HIS BRAIN. It is a most curious sensation but slightly exhilarating in a quiet way, if there is such a thing as quiet exhilaration.
You come out of each essay breathing more easily. A bit of you has relaxed as a result of some kind of aesthetic pleasure which is more than itself. I have had this kind of pleasure in reading paragraphs of Jane Austen when I was reading not for the story but just for the love of the style and the pleasure of being inside her head.
He is a truthful writer. It occurred to me at several points during the book that he might be a great writer, and I hate that phrase. There was just a sense that he was doing something bigger than usual, something cleaner and almost frighteningly true. It's going to be an important book for me. I got to the end and started back at the beginning.
The best way to try to convey the style (because in this case style and substance cannot be disconnected) must be to quote a bit. I think the effect is partly cumulative but even in a few lines you can see the combination of plainness and oddly repetitive patterns. The repetition, I think, reflects his dogged pursuit of the image: " I often told my students that a writer of my sort of fiction is a technical writer. The task of this sort of writer is to report in the plainest language the images that most claim his attention from among the images in his mind and then to arrange his sentences and paragraphs (and, if applicable, his chapters) so as to suggest the connections between those images. This may seem to a gathering of scholars a niggardly account of how I came to write books of fiction that provide you with such a field of enquiry. For me to say that I wrote what I wrote simply by describing some of the contents of my mind -- is this too easy a way out for me?" ('The Breathing Author')
And I will end by quoting a bit from 'Stream System' because it is very moving, and it is true, even though he says the essay is a draft, and that every sentence in it is "a sentence of fiction":
"When my brother first went to school I used to hide from him in the schoolground. I did not want my brother to speak to me in his strange speech. I did not want my friends to hear my brother and then to ask me why he spoke strangely. During the rest of my childhood and until I left my parents' house, I tried never to be seen with my brother. If I could not avoid travelling on the same train with my brother I would order him to sit in a different compartment from mine. If I could not avoid walking in the street with my brother I would order him not to look in my direction and not to speak to me.
When my brother first went to school my mother said that he was no different from any other boy, but in later years my mother would admit that my brother was a little backward.
My brother died when he was forty-three years old and I was forty-six. My brother never married. Many people came to my brother's funeral, but none of those people had ever been a friend to my brother. I was certainly never a friend to my brother. On the day before my brother died I understood for the first time that no one had ever been a friend to my brother."
It is a REALLY WEIRD book of essays. It is weird because the author is a strange person with, I'd suggest, a unique ability to convey that strangeness to others. I read one of his novels before, and I found it interesting, but not like I found this interesting. In fact, I should now go back to the novel because it may well be that I just didn't know how to read it.
It is very hard to convey a sense of this writer. In 'The Breathing Author' (a number of these essays are about writing) he says, "Someone has written that all art aspires to the condition of music. My experience is that all art, including all music, aspires to the condition of horse-racing." Murnane is the only writer in the world, I imagine, who could write this intending it literally to be true. He is aware of the laugh factor, I expect, but he's not playing for laughs. He means it.
In that same essay, he talks about one of is greatest pleasures as a writer of prose fiction, namely "to discover continually the endless varying shapes that a sentence may take". And then later: "I encourage you to think of each of my seven published books as a report of some or another part of the contents of what I call my mind. And yet it seems to me, at the age of sixty-two, that the half-million words and more of my published books together reveal not a great deal about the interests and concerns of the person I believe myself to be."
At first you're drawn in by the oddness. You sense him deliberately pursuing connections and connotations, and being led by them in search of the sense he believes they will ultimately make. He believes that selective memory selects for a reason. He believes in meaning. But at the same time, the details he describes are mainly very ordinary. In 'Stream System', a swampy patch of ground connects in his mind with an image of a "slightly twisted" human heart. That in turn connects with an item of gold jewellery "in a catalogue issued by the Direct Supply Jewellery Company Pty Ltd in about the year 1946." That reminds him of his aunt, and where she lived and where her house was located. That leads him to reflect on the back of that house (because he always defines his position in terms of what lies around him) and at the back of that house, he recalls the Rye Paddock and the grassland behind it and the ultimate south of the land where sea, land and sky must have met. And that makes him think about what he would have thought about if (it's an 'if' of some moment) he had been sitting in his aunt's room trying to visualise the view to the north-east, striving for a picture of something more than "endless yellow-brown grass". I'm stopping there, although the line of thought is important, and I haven't followed him to one of his highpoints, because I want to make a point.
Why would anyone be interested in what Gerald Murnane might have thought in or around 1946 if he had been sitting in his aunt's room near Lawler's Hill in the vast continent of Australia? Two reasons, I guess. The first is that while reading him, you become intensely aware of the network of connections in your own mind. So a bit of you is thinking, yes, yes, this is what it is like to inhabit human consciousness. The other reason is the grace of his prose line, his sentences. You can't read him fast. You have to read slowly. And if you read slowly, you gradually realise that his style is both plain and beautiful. It has a kind of cleansing effect on the mind. It is not pretentious. It represents the author pursuing a thought, without any element of showing off or being Clever, and you can pursue it with him. It's like someone taking you on a very pleasant drive, pointing out the views from side to side, and then suddenly you realise you are INSIDE HIS BRAIN. It is a most curious sensation but slightly exhilarating in a quiet way, if there is such a thing as quiet exhilaration.
You come out of each essay breathing more easily. A bit of you has relaxed as a result of some kind of aesthetic pleasure which is more than itself. I have had this kind of pleasure in reading paragraphs of Jane Austen when I was reading not for the story but just for the love of the style and the pleasure of being inside her head.
He is a truthful writer. It occurred to me at several points during the book that he might be a great writer, and I hate that phrase. There was just a sense that he was doing something bigger than usual, something cleaner and almost frighteningly true. It's going to be an important book for me. I got to the end and started back at the beginning.
The best way to try to convey the style (because in this case style and substance cannot be disconnected) must be to quote a bit. I think the effect is partly cumulative but even in a few lines you can see the combination of plainness and oddly repetitive patterns. The repetition, I think, reflects his dogged pursuit of the image: " I often told my students that a writer of my sort of fiction is a technical writer. The task of this sort of writer is to report in the plainest language the images that most claim his attention from among the images in his mind and then to arrange his sentences and paragraphs (and, if applicable, his chapters) so as to suggest the connections between those images. This may seem to a gathering of scholars a niggardly account of how I came to write books of fiction that provide you with such a field of enquiry. For me to say that I wrote what I wrote simply by describing some of the contents of my mind -- is this too easy a way out for me?" ('The Breathing Author')
And I will end by quoting a bit from 'Stream System' because it is very moving, and it is true, even though he says the essay is a draft, and that every sentence in it is "a sentence of fiction":
"When my brother first went to school I used to hide from him in the schoolground. I did not want my brother to speak to me in his strange speech. I did not want my friends to hear my brother and then to ask me why he spoke strangely. During the rest of my childhood and until I left my parents' house, I tried never to be seen with my brother. If I could not avoid travelling on the same train with my brother I would order him to sit in a different compartment from mine. If I could not avoid walking in the street with my brother I would order him not to look in my direction and not to speak to me.
When my brother first went to school my mother said that he was no different from any other boy, but in later years my mother would admit that my brother was a little backward.
My brother died when he was forty-three years old and I was forty-six. My brother never married. Many people came to my brother's funeral, but none of those people had ever been a friend to my brother. I was certainly never a friend to my brother. On the day before my brother died I understood for the first time that no one had ever been a friend to my brother."
February 23, 2020
This was my first experience of Gerald Murnane. I found myself having a kind of internal discussion at about a quarter of the way through. Much of the book is about writing (there are essays about other authors and essays about Murnane’s own writing) and I was having an internal debate about whether it would have been better to first experience Murnane’s books that he is writing about before reading his thoughts about writing them. The deed is done now, of course, so there is no way to know: my first experience of Murnane is of his thoughts about writing rather than of his writing.
There’s a reason I was having this internal discussion with myself. After finding the first couple of essays enjoyable to read because Murnane’s style is very different to things I have read before, by about the fourth or fifth essay, I was beginning to find that style somewhat annoying.
This is a collection of essays that take us into Murnane’s mind, which is an unusual place. He sees things in a different way and has particular way of translating his thoughts into words on a page. We open with some thoughts about Adam Lindsay Gordon and then Jack Kerouac. Murnane’s writing has little in common with Kerouac’s, but he finds a bond between them in the world of horse racing. Horse racing is a recurring theme, leading to the quote that the publisher’s website has extracted to blurb the book:
Someone has written that all art aspires to the condition of music. My experience is that all art, including all music, aspires to the condition of horse-racing.
I think there’s probably no middle ground with Murnane: he has a very unusual writing style that readers will either love or hate. I have little knowledge of him, as I’ve already admitted, but I had heard before reading this that he was known for his sentences which are invariably grammatically correct and which, as he explains in an early essay here, he works on individually, not moving on to the next sentence until he has made the one he is working on sound right when he reads it aloud.
This did make me wonder when I read it. It made me think about my own approach to reading and what I enjoy. I am known for a degree of pedantry when it comes to grammar, but one thing I began to realise as I read this was that even I can have too much of a good thing: I began to long for a sentence when he would just relax for a moment and let it flow. Also, I realised, I don’t place so much value on individual sentences: I am happy to read less than perfect sentences if they combine with those around them to create a good impression overall.
So, overall, this was a bit of a disappointment for me. I thought I was going to enjoy the book a lot more than I did, but I did find food for thought about my own reading preferences.
This link takes you to a page that discusses the book and also includes notes on each essay:
http://jim-murdoch.blogspot.com/2012/...
There’s a reason I was having this internal discussion with myself. After finding the first couple of essays enjoyable to read because Murnane’s style is very different to things I have read before, by about the fourth or fifth essay, I was beginning to find that style somewhat annoying.
This is a collection of essays that take us into Murnane’s mind, which is an unusual place. He sees things in a different way and has particular way of translating his thoughts into words on a page. We open with some thoughts about Adam Lindsay Gordon and then Jack Kerouac. Murnane’s writing has little in common with Kerouac’s, but he finds a bond between them in the world of horse racing. Horse racing is a recurring theme, leading to the quote that the publisher’s website has extracted to blurb the book:
Someone has written that all art aspires to the condition of music. My experience is that all art, including all music, aspires to the condition of horse-racing.
I think there’s probably no middle ground with Murnane: he has a very unusual writing style that readers will either love or hate. I have little knowledge of him, as I’ve already admitted, but I had heard before reading this that he was known for his sentences which are invariably grammatically correct and which, as he explains in an early essay here, he works on individually, not moving on to the next sentence until he has made the one he is working on sound right when he reads it aloud.
This did make me wonder when I read it. It made me think about my own approach to reading and what I enjoy. I am known for a degree of pedantry when it comes to grammar, but one thing I began to realise as I read this was that even I can have too much of a good thing: I began to long for a sentence when he would just relax for a moment and let it flow. Also, I realised, I don’t place so much value on individual sentences: I am happy to read less than perfect sentences if they combine with those around them to create a good impression overall.
So, overall, this was a bit of a disappointment for me. I thought I was going to enjoy the book a lot more than I did, but I did find food for thought about my own reading preferences.
This link takes you to a page that discusses the book and also includes notes on each essay:
http://jim-murdoch.blogspot.com/2012/...
November 26, 2015
The more Murnane I read, the more I want to force him on everyone I know. The more I want to force him on people, the more I'm forced to consider what they should read first. And the more I consider that, the more I realize that all of his books, and none of them, are ideal first reads. Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs is a case in point.
On the one hand, Murnane spends a lot of time in these pieces explaining what he takes himself to be doing in his (official) fiction. The most interesting essays (/stories) here take Murnane and his works as their topics.
On the other hand, I have no idea what anyone would make of this if they tried to read these bits and pieces without having some idea of what his official fiction looked like. So maybe any friends out there who happen to be reading should read this short review, and then read a couple of his novels or collections, and then read this volume.
A few bits to get you in the right mood: Murnane writes, here, that sentences have a shape or sound that must approximate as much as possible their meaning. He writes that Herbert Read's phrase, "the contour of our thought," helps him "in the way that phrases from the bible or from Karl Marx probably help other people." In other words, his writing is deeply formalistic, but also has a definite subject matter: the shape of the thought of Gerald Murnane.
That thought is primarily about the imagination: what it is ("the strange territory that seemed to be lying all around me and just out of my view"), what it does for Gerald Murnane, how it touches or diverges from whatever isn't the imagination.
This results not only in a unique body of writing, at once entirely autobiographical and utterly fictional, totally fantastic and perfectly mundane, but also in a unique way of reading. "I remembered most clearly and with most pleasure [from all the books of fiction he had read] what I call spaces-within-spaces," either the two ways of Proust's novel in his narrator, or the house and moors of Wuthering Heights, or the infinite rooms he sees in Kafka and Musil.
It also results in a unique way of reading aspiring writers' work. The best fiction, he writes, "is fiction written by men and women not to tell the stories of their lives but to describe the images in their minds. My experience has been that a writer begins to write a piece of true fiction not knowing what he or she is trying to explain."
As for the fiction itself, he offers us "an emblematic scene... a scene that stands for the essence of [his] fiction."
"A man sits in a book-lined room in a house of many rooms. The window-blinds in the room are drawn, but the light at the edges tells me that the day outside is hot and bright. The silence in the room tells me that the house is surrounded by a wide and grassy and mostly level landscape. In the book-lined room, the sitting man sometimes reads and sometimes writes. What he mostly reads about or writes about is, perhaps, a woman or, perhaps, another wide and grassy and mostly level landscape further off from his own."
If you haven't read Murnane, this will sound excruciatingly dull. If you have read him, and enjoyed his work, it will bring back wonderful memories.
On the one hand, Murnane spends a lot of time in these pieces explaining what he takes himself to be doing in his (official) fiction. The most interesting essays (/stories) here take Murnane and his works as their topics.
On the other hand, I have no idea what anyone would make of this if they tried to read these bits and pieces without having some idea of what his official fiction looked like. So maybe any friends out there who happen to be reading should read this short review, and then read a couple of his novels or collections, and then read this volume.
A few bits to get you in the right mood: Murnane writes, here, that sentences have a shape or sound that must approximate as much as possible their meaning. He writes that Herbert Read's phrase, "the contour of our thought," helps him "in the way that phrases from the bible or from Karl Marx probably help other people." In other words, his writing is deeply formalistic, but also has a definite subject matter: the shape of the thought of Gerald Murnane.
That thought is primarily about the imagination: what it is ("the strange territory that seemed to be lying all around me and just out of my view"), what it does for Gerald Murnane, how it touches or diverges from whatever isn't the imagination.
This results not only in a unique body of writing, at once entirely autobiographical and utterly fictional, totally fantastic and perfectly mundane, but also in a unique way of reading. "I remembered most clearly and with most pleasure [from all the books of fiction he had read] what I call spaces-within-spaces," either the two ways of Proust's novel in his narrator, or the house and moors of Wuthering Heights, or the infinite rooms he sees in Kafka and Musil.
It also results in a unique way of reading aspiring writers' work. The best fiction, he writes, "is fiction written by men and women not to tell the stories of their lives but to describe the images in their minds. My experience has been that a writer begins to write a piece of true fiction not knowing what he or she is trying to explain."
As for the fiction itself, he offers us "an emblematic scene... a scene that stands for the essence of [his] fiction."
"A man sits in a book-lined room in a house of many rooms. The window-blinds in the room are drawn, but the light at the edges tells me that the day outside is hot and bright. The silence in the room tells me that the house is surrounded by a wide and grassy and mostly level landscape. In the book-lined room, the sitting man sometimes reads and sometimes writes. What he mostly reads about or writes about is, perhaps, a woman or, perhaps, another wide and grassy and mostly level landscape further off from his own."
If you haven't read Murnane, this will sound excruciatingly dull. If you have read him, and enjoyed his work, it will bring back wonderful memories.
Want to read
September 29, 2015Pending a Review:
MICROFICTION:
[Assembled from the Archives of Gerald Murnane]
The Three Archives of Gerald Murnane
http://www.musicandliterature.org/fea...
Peter Craven Thinks I Could Win the Nobel Prize; Helen Garner Doesn't
Helen Garner phoned me and said "The Plains" was male chauvinist word porn, but that like all porn it created an appetite for woman that it couldn't satiate. Paradoxically, she complained that the film-maker didn't even kiss the seventh land owner's wife. How gutless of me! I hate novelists who moonlight as literary critics reviewing other writers' work. Is this woman crazy? I rebuffed Helen Garner with much force. I told her that she's unreadable. Then I told her to fuck off. She hung up on me. I immediately phoned Imre Salusinzski, and we got together over a few bottles of Egri Bikaver. Much obscene humour from Imre Salusinzski. Egeshegedre!
When I Dream, I Dream About You
I dream a prophetic dream. I take a great risk. I court another man's wife. Now two women bother me. My wife nearly stops me from writing EMERALD BLUE. My students write comments about me. I fall out with an arrogant student of mine. Should I tell Literature to get fucked? I give up writing fiction - again! I resume when I win the Patrick White thing.
The Truth About Me
A day in the life of GM. 3-4,000 words about naked females. I distract myself with the burning issues of contemporary Australian culture. Bill Henson - artist or pornographer? Gerald Murnane - erratic or erotic craftsman? Either/Or. As if you can't be both! I write so that you might imagine. Female masturbation, for example, how I spend the last hour of every day. Wimoweh! Now the lion can sleep tonight. GM is a character in a novel. I'm a very strange fellow. But the implied author is stranger. He imagines me having any woman I want.
MICROFICTION:
[Assembled from the Archives of Gerald Murnane]
The Three Archives of Gerald Murnane
http://www.musicandliterature.org/fea...
Peter Craven Thinks I Could Win the Nobel Prize; Helen Garner Doesn't
Helen Garner phoned me and said "The Plains" was male chauvinist word porn, but that like all porn it created an appetite for woman that it couldn't satiate. Paradoxically, she complained that the film-maker didn't even kiss the seventh land owner's wife. How gutless of me! I hate novelists who moonlight as literary critics reviewing other writers' work. Is this woman crazy? I rebuffed Helen Garner with much force. I told her that she's unreadable. Then I told her to fuck off. She hung up on me. I immediately phoned Imre Salusinzski, and we got together over a few bottles of Egri Bikaver. Much obscene humour from Imre Salusinzski. Egeshegedre!
When I Dream, I Dream About You
I dream a prophetic dream. I take a great risk. I court another man's wife. Now two women bother me. My wife nearly stops me from writing EMERALD BLUE. My students write comments about me. I fall out with an arrogant student of mine. Should I tell Literature to get fucked? I give up writing fiction - again! I resume when I win the Patrick White thing.
The Truth About Me
A day in the life of GM. 3-4,000 words about naked females. I distract myself with the burning issues of contemporary Australian culture. Bill Henson - artist or pornographer? Gerald Murnane - erratic or erotic craftsman? Either/Or. As if you can't be both! I write so that you might imagine. Female masturbation, for example, how I spend the last hour of every day. Wimoweh! Now the lion can sleep tonight. GM is a character in a novel. I'm a very strange fellow. But the implied author is stranger. He imagines me having any woman I want.
February 17, 2020
I've heard various sources cite the Australian writer Gerald Murnane as the best English-language author people have never heard of. I myself heard of him only recently, and while he may very well be the best little known English language author, it's hard to say with confidence based solely on this collection of essays.
I've only read a handful of essay collections in my life, most of those by the late, great Christopher Hitchens. I should read more of them though, as an author's thoughts on the world and current events often, but not always, provide great insight into the kind of fiction they write.
The essays in "Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs" are somewhat like that tin of sardines that features on the cover, at least for me. Because while I enjoy sardines once in a while, I'm never left fully satisfied by them. While writing this I recall the tinny, somewhat copper taste left in my mouth after eating them straight from the tin, a taste tinged with regret. They're enjoyable but barely constitute a meal.
The problem with this particular collection of essays is that so many of them come off as slightly redundant. So many of the same themes are mentioned again and again and again that eventually your eyes just sort of gloss over the umpteenth likening of the final lap of a horse race to the reading of poetry or the writing of fiction.
Yes, Murnane is very fond of horse racing, and the majority of the essays in here have him talking about horse races and relating it to his reading or writing. Likewise, we learn early on that Murnane writes with an image in mind, a fish pond, say, and if he's capable of envisioning the full setting of the fish pond, the landscape that lays behind it, he knows he'll be able to finish whatever book he happens to be working on at the time that he's attached that image to.
Similarly, grass. Murnane goes on in certain of these essays about grass, about how the grass in his native Australia might differ from the grass one would find in Hungary, for example. Far too many lines are given to ruminating about these things. I can only imagine that were I in the audience when Murnane was reading one of these out (more than a couple of the included essays are actually speeches for some event or other), I would have fallen fast asleep.
But there are some very good essays here as well. "Why I write what I write" and "Secret writing" are fascinating insights into Murnane's process as a writer, and I found they gave me some insight into my own writing.
Likewise, "The transcript stops here: or, who does the consultant consult?" and "The breathing author" are interesting glimpses into how Murnane assesses the writing of others.
The problem is that the essays I liked the best tended to be the shortest. Just a few pages long. The essays I found the most laborious, the most repetitive, were 20 or 30 pages long. "Stream System" I could have easily done without, while the title essay, "Invisible yet enduring lilacs", provided an interesting look at Proust but was far too much about the minute details of Murnane's own life.
Murnane drops interesting facts about himself throughout these essays. For example, that he's never been on a plane before, that he's never left Australia, or even ventured more than 1,500 kilometers in any one direction from his home there. He easily loses track of the plot lines in films, and he has never heard an opera.
I wish he would have written more about some of these things. Why, for example, is he so adamant about not getting on a plane? Are there environmental reasons behind that, a fear of flight, or just a lack of desire to travel beyond his own country?
Ultimately, this collection is a somewhat tepid endorsement of Murnane's novels. I'm still curious to read his fiction, but I'm also afraid that they're nothing more than thousands of pages full of the minute details of grass and horse races.
I've only read a handful of essay collections in my life, most of those by the late, great Christopher Hitchens. I should read more of them though, as an author's thoughts on the world and current events often, but not always, provide great insight into the kind of fiction they write.
The essays in "Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs" are somewhat like that tin of sardines that features on the cover, at least for me. Because while I enjoy sardines once in a while, I'm never left fully satisfied by them. While writing this I recall the tinny, somewhat copper taste left in my mouth after eating them straight from the tin, a taste tinged with regret. They're enjoyable but barely constitute a meal.
The problem with this particular collection of essays is that so many of them come off as slightly redundant. So many of the same themes are mentioned again and again and again that eventually your eyes just sort of gloss over the umpteenth likening of the final lap of a horse race to the reading of poetry or the writing of fiction.
Yes, Murnane is very fond of horse racing, and the majority of the essays in here have him talking about horse races and relating it to his reading or writing. Likewise, we learn early on that Murnane writes with an image in mind, a fish pond, say, and if he's capable of envisioning the full setting of the fish pond, the landscape that lays behind it, he knows he'll be able to finish whatever book he happens to be working on at the time that he's attached that image to.
Similarly, grass. Murnane goes on in certain of these essays about grass, about how the grass in his native Australia might differ from the grass one would find in Hungary, for example. Far too many lines are given to ruminating about these things. I can only imagine that were I in the audience when Murnane was reading one of these out (more than a couple of the included essays are actually speeches for some event or other), I would have fallen fast asleep.
But there are some very good essays here as well. "Why I write what I write" and "Secret writing" are fascinating insights into Murnane's process as a writer, and I found they gave me some insight into my own writing.
Likewise, "The transcript stops here: or, who does the consultant consult?" and "The breathing author" are interesting glimpses into how Murnane assesses the writing of others.
The problem is that the essays I liked the best tended to be the shortest. Just a few pages long. The essays I found the most laborious, the most repetitive, were 20 or 30 pages long. "Stream System" I could have easily done without, while the title essay, "Invisible yet enduring lilacs", provided an interesting look at Proust but was far too much about the minute details of Murnane's own life.
Murnane drops interesting facts about himself throughout these essays. For example, that he's never been on a plane before, that he's never left Australia, or even ventured more than 1,500 kilometers in any one direction from his home there. He easily loses track of the plot lines in films, and he has never heard an opera.
I wish he would have written more about some of these things. Why, for example, is he so adamant about not getting on a plane? Are there environmental reasons behind that, a fear of flight, or just a lack of desire to travel beyond his own country?
Ultimately, this collection is a somewhat tepid endorsement of Murnane's novels. I'm still curious to read his fiction, but I'm also afraid that they're nothing more than thousands of pages full of the minute details of grass and horse races.
June 26, 2014
These essays cover some of the same ground as Murnane's last three 'fictions' (which they preceded), and it's interesting seeing some of the ideas being expressed in non-fictional form. There's actually not that much difference for Murnane beyond these not having the overarching architecture of Barley Patch, A History of Books and A Million Windows. There is plenty of absorbing material and the sentences are as meticulously crafted as always. Magnificent.
March 20, 2024
The title piece in this collection is so good, glad that I read this while also reading Proust. Reading Murnane can be so rewarding, and not in the way that I would normally say that reading a text is "rewarding" (ex: Ulysses is "rewarding" in the sense of decoding a difficult text). There really isn't much difficulty in reading Murnane though, not to say he isn't a bit deceptive in his simplicity.
Have his novel "Inland" on my desk gonna have to bump it up the stack
Have his novel "Inland" on my desk gonna have to bump it up the stack
April 29, 2013
Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs is a book comprising thirteen essays, all previously published in literary journals such as Age Monthly Review, Meanjin and Tirra Lirra between the years 1984 and 2003; they are arranged chronologically; two are edited transcripts of talks. They are all stand-alone pieces, nevertheless, viewed as a whole, they present a fascinating insight of what it means to Murnane to be a writer. There are other books by writers out there looking at their craft and if you’re a newbie seeking insight this is most certainly not the one you should tackle first, second or even third unless you find yourself writing stuff that doesn’t seem to fit in anywhere and yet you can’t give it up no matter how non-commercial you realise it is. If that’s the case, read my full article on my blog here.
November 28, 2014
My piece entitled "Reading Gerald Murnane's Landscapes with Proust" takes this volume of Murnane's essays as its starting point.
Read it (and much, much more on and by Murnane from the likes of Teju Cole, Scott Esposito, Emmett Stinson, Tristan Foster, Matthew Jakubowski, and others) in Music & Literature Magazine's third issue: order here.
Read it (and much, much more on and by Murnane from the likes of Teju Cole, Scott Esposito, Emmett Stinson, Tristan Foster, Matthew Jakubowski, and others) in Music & Literature Magazine's third issue: order here.
January 25, 2022
Murnane has this line, in the more straightforwardly autobiographical essay "The Breathing Author," about how he believes that "all art, including all music, aspires to the condition of horse-racing" (189). (Very humorously, this essay comes immediately after another text in which he reports undertaking an I. A. Richards-style experiment by circulating an anonymised page from a bestselling Australian novel amongst a group of editors and inviting them to make suggestions about grammar and sentence structure, which invitation they eagerly take up, thereby proving a point about how thrown off we all are by printing the names of authors on covers). It is endlessly surprising to me how he is able to say such incredible things about the importance of horse-racing to his life and yet not spend much vaster quantities of his time in print talking about horse-racing. He mostly, in fact, does not talk about horse-racing, which means that, even though he has clearly (and very rightly, properly) taken Robert Bly's advice about trusting one's obsessions (writing advice that Murnane repeats here and elsewhere), he does not usually seem like an obsessive. But I just cannot imagine reading a great piece of fiction and then having the experience that Murnane describes of immediately visualising some climactic moment amongst sprinting horses. It is totally unfamiliar to me, something that I cannot begin to relate to. But to repeat myself, there is a lot of great, wise, unique, and memorable material in here that is not about horse-racing. But when an essay or a novel by Murnane contains horse-racing material, you would not need to see the name on the cover to recognise the artist.
July 30, 2022
If I were to choose only one word to describe Murnane's best short stories, the most precise word I can think of is 'perfection'. Some such short stories are in this book. I only wish I read some more of his earlier books first, as in this book, where he discusses his experiences reading Proust and Kerouac, his learning the Hungarian language in hid mid-50's, and why he writes what he writes, there's a good deal of reminiscing about his previous works.
He's a radical. He's also funny, in a way that elicits a smile my mind and mouth alike. In 'Why I Write What I Write' Murnane writes "The contour of our thought is a magical phrase for me", a sentiment of his for which I have zero doubt, for he goes on to display that magic over and over again. I also really like Benjamin H. Ogden's blurb on the back cover: "An image in Murnane's prose has the quality of an image in coloured glass: One both sees the image and sees through the image simultaneously." I'd like to read more to be sure, but I think he's my favourite living author alongside Don DeLillo.
He's a radical. He's also funny, in a way that elicits a smile my mind and mouth alike. In 'Why I Write What I Write' Murnane writes "The contour of our thought is a magical phrase for me", a sentiment of his for which I have zero doubt, for he goes on to display that magic over and over again. I also really like Benjamin H. Ogden's blurb on the back cover: "An image in Murnane's prose has the quality of an image in coloured glass: One both sees the image and sees through the image simultaneously." I'd like to read more to be sure, but I think he's my favourite living author alongside Don DeLillo.
July 9, 2020
No idea what all the fuss is about. Perhaps I should try his fiction instead.
April 14, 2025
Gerald Murnane is very dear to me. I first read Tamarisk Row sometime in the late 1980s and everything about it endeared me to its author. The story of an adolescent with strange habits could be any adolescent with strange habits; though specifically, the world of the invented racing colours matches the world of invented sports leagues, competitions and even team colours that I indulged in.
When I started to notice here on GR that more people were reading him overseas, I was puzzled at the same time as delighted. I thought he was misunderstood and unread here in Australia, forgotten, then gradually revived by his two publishers, one who held the old material, another who dared to publish his new material. Now he’s read everywhere and a perennial Nobel Laureate in waiting. IMHO, he’s much more interesting than Han Kang who won last year. The reason I say this is primarily because he is preoccupied with the idea of writing and perfecting sentences in order to find a way to convey the unique consciousness that lies behind them. What comes through in the essays here is his devotion to his craft and his single-mindedness. He has a simple formula for writing from the essay The Typescript Stops Here
What I call true fiction is fiction written by men and women not to tell the stories of their lives but to describe the images in their minds (some of which happen to be images of men and women who want to tell the truth about their lives.)
It's hard to tell the personal from the fictional in Murnane. But I think this captures the enigmatic nature of writing. Even when we know the fictional is dependent on the personal, here we have a book of non-fiction, or essays, that follows almost identically the methods of using the personal, or what is in the mind’s eye as images. Or the chasing down of memories based on those images, or any other journey through a personal set of experiences. Ie, we are reading what he writes about in a work of fiction.
In my review of Last Letter to a Reader I speculated that Gerald Murnane, writing about re-reading each of his books, has in fact playfully written a work of fiction, the latest, purportedly the last (not the first time, either) we will ever read from the author.
I re-read two of the essays in this collection recently after reading the review of Border Districts by GR friend, Jeroen Vandenbossche, who rightly draws comparisons between Murnane and Marcel Proust. I knew that Murnane had written on Proust somewhere, so I went off to find it. And in this collection, the title essay is an essay about Proust. Of sorts. I hadn’t reviewed this book previously, having read it ten years ago before I took an interest in posting reviews on here.
This beautiful passage sums up nicely the streams of Murnane’s thinking about writing and how he saw Proust writing:
Somewhere in a la recherche au temps perdu, I seem to remember, is a short passage about the buzzing of flies on warm mornings… I did not recall my having previously read about the buzzing of flies in Proust’s texts when the large fly buzzed in the grass near my ear in the late summer of 1973. What I recalled at that moment was one of those parcels of a few moments seemingly lost time that the narrator of A la recherche au temps perdu warns us never deliberately to go in search of. The parcel came to me, of course, not as a quantity of something called time, whatever that may be, but as a knot of feelings and sensations that I had long before experienced and had not since recalled.
Anyone who has read Proust will recognise immediately the experience of reading Proust in that passage. But also the new experience of reading Murnane.
What I found fun and funny in the title ‘essay’ about Proust is the way Murnane uses his working method to draw out images into sentences, connecting more sentences and images and so on, is how he talks about his own life through the Proustian quest of memory. When he does this he roams around the suburbs of Melbourne and rural towns where he lived. I enjoy the simple act of places I have known well elevated to a Combray or Paris. But I mostly enjoy the way Murnane draws his points of connection from the present where he thinks about all manner of things to the past and the way language serendipitously binds those images. From the Latin for wall, MUR, we get point of connection to his father swimming across a precarious inlet to write his name on a sandstone cliff face above the water line. That the sandstone had eroded over time, eventually collapsed, but before that he had seen that the erosion on the cliff wall had left simply MUR. While nearby this seaside bay was another bay named Murnane Bay. Our observations and thoughts travel across all sorts of landscapes, events and images of our lives, drawing them together by the connective tissue of our consciousness through language.
The essay The Typescript Stops Here , also interested me very much because it touches on the personal. Murnane writes about his time as a reader back in 1988 for the eminent Australian literary journal, Meanjin, based here in Melbourne. He has some interesting things to say about what aspiring writers could think about so as not to bore him with ‘uninteresting’ prose.
When I prepare to read a work of fiction, I look forward to learning something that the author could not have told me by another means… that is true in a way that no other piece of scientific, biographical, autobiographical or philosophical writing can be true.
The year after, in 1989, around the time this essay was published in Meanjin, I met him at the launch of a film made about his love of racing. Had I known he read for Meanjin I may have managed to become one of those uninteresting prose writers he mentioned earlier submitting to him. I was very young and unformed and didn’t dare send anything in. Though I did manage to publish several works in that same eminent journal ten years later. In that brief conversation, he appeared taciturn but listened and spoke with a wide-eyed look and a contended if ironic smile. I managed to get him to sign my copy of his novel Landscape with Landscape that I was reading at the time and kept in my bag for weeks while attending post graduate studies. I could go further in a very Murnane way and write that I was with a woman, a fellow student – she was studying film, who grabbed my copy to get him to sign and now annoyingly my copy has her name and mine on it with his signature. She had never read any of his work, and turned out to be unpleasant to know. That signature, that dualism, by a long stretch, leads me back to another essay about the idea of the narrator and Marcel Proust. Proust has in The Search for Lost Time, created a dualistic narrative function. (I know, the dualism metaphor is stretched). It is very much like Murnane’s idea of describing images in the mind which may also be people telling the truth about their lives. My little story is the kind of little image that becomes the image at the beginning of a story, or any connecting point with another image that will then add another and another. In the end, whether reading fiction or non-fiction by Murnane, we all simply read extraordinary sentences that take the personal and turn it into some narrative that holds a kernel of some truth to the narrator. It has always fascinated me that truth is the constant that underpins fiction – a known falsity.
Murnane sums up this idea of truth through the notion that in order to write good, honest sentences that could not be expressed in any other way required the author to defer to their “better selves”. This better self is the authorial character that narrates, or voices the work in its true form. This better self really has to do the hard work of ensuring that honesty in narration and writing exists.
It's possible that this is the dualistic, bifurcating nature of the author/narrator that we see in his work. The personal is taken over by this better self and away from the autobiographical into another plane, ie a work of fiction. It’s what Proust did early in In Search of Lost Time when the narrator describes a half wake half sleep state listening to distant trains or something and a narrator seems to split off from the self.
When I started to notice here on GR that more people were reading him overseas, I was puzzled at the same time as delighted. I thought he was misunderstood and unread here in Australia, forgotten, then gradually revived by his two publishers, one who held the old material, another who dared to publish his new material. Now he’s read everywhere and a perennial Nobel Laureate in waiting. IMHO, he’s much more interesting than Han Kang who won last year. The reason I say this is primarily because he is preoccupied with the idea of writing and perfecting sentences in order to find a way to convey the unique consciousness that lies behind them. What comes through in the essays here is his devotion to his craft and his single-mindedness. He has a simple formula for writing from the essay The Typescript Stops Here
What I call true fiction is fiction written by men and women not to tell the stories of their lives but to describe the images in their minds (some of which happen to be images of men and women who want to tell the truth about their lives.)
It's hard to tell the personal from the fictional in Murnane. But I think this captures the enigmatic nature of writing. Even when we know the fictional is dependent on the personal, here we have a book of non-fiction, or essays, that follows almost identically the methods of using the personal, or what is in the mind’s eye as images. Or the chasing down of memories based on those images, or any other journey through a personal set of experiences. Ie, we are reading what he writes about in a work of fiction.
In my review of Last Letter to a Reader I speculated that Gerald Murnane, writing about re-reading each of his books, has in fact playfully written a work of fiction, the latest, purportedly the last (not the first time, either) we will ever read from the author.
I re-read two of the essays in this collection recently after reading the review of Border Districts by GR friend, Jeroen Vandenbossche, who rightly draws comparisons between Murnane and Marcel Proust. I knew that Murnane had written on Proust somewhere, so I went off to find it. And in this collection, the title essay is an essay about Proust. Of sorts. I hadn’t reviewed this book previously, having read it ten years ago before I took an interest in posting reviews on here.
This beautiful passage sums up nicely the streams of Murnane’s thinking about writing and how he saw Proust writing:
Somewhere in a la recherche au temps perdu, I seem to remember, is a short passage about the buzzing of flies on warm mornings… I did not recall my having previously read about the buzzing of flies in Proust’s texts when the large fly buzzed in the grass near my ear in the late summer of 1973. What I recalled at that moment was one of those parcels of a few moments seemingly lost time that the narrator of A la recherche au temps perdu warns us never deliberately to go in search of. The parcel came to me, of course, not as a quantity of something called time, whatever that may be, but as a knot of feelings and sensations that I had long before experienced and had not since recalled.
Anyone who has read Proust will recognise immediately the experience of reading Proust in that passage. But also the new experience of reading Murnane.
What I found fun and funny in the title ‘essay’ about Proust is the way Murnane uses his working method to draw out images into sentences, connecting more sentences and images and so on, is how he talks about his own life through the Proustian quest of memory. When he does this he roams around the suburbs of Melbourne and rural towns where he lived. I enjoy the simple act of places I have known well elevated to a Combray or Paris. But I mostly enjoy the way Murnane draws his points of connection from the present where he thinks about all manner of things to the past and the way language serendipitously binds those images. From the Latin for wall, MUR, we get point of connection to his father swimming across a precarious inlet to write his name on a sandstone cliff face above the water line. That the sandstone had eroded over time, eventually collapsed, but before that he had seen that the erosion on the cliff wall had left simply MUR. While nearby this seaside bay was another bay named Murnane Bay. Our observations and thoughts travel across all sorts of landscapes, events and images of our lives, drawing them together by the connective tissue of our consciousness through language.
The essay The Typescript Stops Here , also interested me very much because it touches on the personal. Murnane writes about his time as a reader back in 1988 for the eminent Australian literary journal, Meanjin, based here in Melbourne. He has some interesting things to say about what aspiring writers could think about so as not to bore him with ‘uninteresting’ prose.
When I prepare to read a work of fiction, I look forward to learning something that the author could not have told me by another means… that is true in a way that no other piece of scientific, biographical, autobiographical or philosophical writing can be true.
The year after, in 1989, around the time this essay was published in Meanjin, I met him at the launch of a film made about his love of racing. Had I known he read for Meanjin I may have managed to become one of those uninteresting prose writers he mentioned earlier submitting to him. I was very young and unformed and didn’t dare send anything in. Though I did manage to publish several works in that same eminent journal ten years later. In that brief conversation, he appeared taciturn but listened and spoke with a wide-eyed look and a contended if ironic smile. I managed to get him to sign my copy of his novel Landscape with Landscape that I was reading at the time and kept in my bag for weeks while attending post graduate studies. I could go further in a very Murnane way and write that I was with a woman, a fellow student – she was studying film, who grabbed my copy to get him to sign and now annoyingly my copy has her name and mine on it with his signature. She had never read any of his work, and turned out to be unpleasant to know. That signature, that dualism, by a long stretch, leads me back to another essay about the idea of the narrator and Marcel Proust. Proust has in The Search for Lost Time, created a dualistic narrative function. (I know, the dualism metaphor is stretched). It is very much like Murnane’s idea of describing images in the mind which may also be people telling the truth about their lives. My little story is the kind of little image that becomes the image at the beginning of a story, or any connecting point with another image that will then add another and another. In the end, whether reading fiction or non-fiction by Murnane, we all simply read extraordinary sentences that take the personal and turn it into some narrative that holds a kernel of some truth to the narrator. It has always fascinated me that truth is the constant that underpins fiction – a known falsity.
Murnane sums up this idea of truth through the notion that in order to write good, honest sentences that could not be expressed in any other way required the author to defer to their “better selves”. This better self is the authorial character that narrates, or voices the work in its true form. This better self really has to do the hard work of ensuring that honesty in narration and writing exists.
It's possible that this is the dualistic, bifurcating nature of the author/narrator that we see in his work. The personal is taken over by this better self and away from the autobiographical into another plane, ie a work of fiction. It’s what Proust did early in In Search of Lost Time when the narrator describes a half wake half sleep state listening to distant trains or something and a narrator seems to split off from the self.
April 22, 2024
This is my second Gerald Murnane after The Plains and I’ve already picked up the rest of his books. I first heard about this Australian writer from this New York Times Profile
There is nobody like Gerald Murnane. He is singular. He reminds me more of David Lynch than any author I’ve read. The best words I can use to describe his writing is discursive and dream-like. He compulsively writes about the same obsessions repeatedly: horse racing, marbles, stained glass windows, Hungary, and the Australian plains.
I think he uses these repeating motifs to approach other subjects that he’s less comfortable addressing directly. The essay Stream System in this collection is a good example of this. He starts off the essay talking about stream systems, which are bodies of water (smaller than rivers) that collect fresh water runoff from the land to an Ocean. They are the thin blue lines you see on some maps, but Murnane is quick to correct that they are in fact yellow brown not blue. He is obsessed by details like that. He keeps moving from subject to subject and eventually starts talking about how he regrets his relationship with his late brother, who was intellectually challenged. He realizes that he was “never a friend” to his brother. Murnane wouldn’t have been comfortable starting an essay with that. He had to get to this epiphany his unique way.
Murnane’s work is filled with interesting observations. My favorite is his argument that people reveal just as much about themselves when they say what they can’t or have never done than what they have done or want to do. Murnane has never been on an airplane or left Australia, claims to have never put on a pair of sunglasses or “voluntarily immersed” himself in any sea or stream. He has never owned a television set or surfed the internet.
I think there is a lot of truth to this observation about people.
There is nobody like Gerald Murnane. He is singular. He reminds me more of David Lynch than any author I’ve read. The best words I can use to describe his writing is discursive and dream-like. He compulsively writes about the same obsessions repeatedly: horse racing, marbles, stained glass windows, Hungary, and the Australian plains.
I think he uses these repeating motifs to approach other subjects that he’s less comfortable addressing directly. The essay Stream System in this collection is a good example of this. He starts off the essay talking about stream systems, which are bodies of water (smaller than rivers) that collect fresh water runoff from the land to an Ocean. They are the thin blue lines you see on some maps, but Murnane is quick to correct that they are in fact yellow brown not blue. He is obsessed by details like that. He keeps moving from subject to subject and eventually starts talking about how he regrets his relationship with his late brother, who was intellectually challenged. He realizes that he was “never a friend” to his brother. Murnane wouldn’t have been comfortable starting an essay with that. He had to get to this epiphany his unique way.
Murnane’s work is filled with interesting observations. My favorite is his argument that people reveal just as much about themselves when they say what they can’t or have never done than what they have done or want to do. Murnane has never been on an airplane or left Australia, claims to have never put on a pair of sunglasses or “voluntarily immersed” himself in any sea or stream. He has never owned a television set or surfed the internet.
I think there is a lot of truth to this observation about people.
April 23, 2011
This is the only one of Gerald Murnane's books I have finished, despite having others on my bookshelves for many years. I think because this is a series of essays they seemed more manageable to me. I also found it very readable because many of the essays are autobiographical, and when I was a child Gerald Murnane was 'Uncle Gerry' to me. He was a friend of my fathers, and I last saw him at my fathers funeral in 2004. In person Murnane does not seem quite as eccentric as I realise he is when I read him. His writing reminds me of books written by the Bronte's (he says Wuthering Heights is his favourite book), in that he is consumed by landscapes, but has never travelled. He is very well read, but doesn't own a television or go to the movies. So when he writes, he writes like he lives in a very remote place, a world of his own, and he writes in a beautiful, old fashioned, thoughtful way.
Read
July 24, 2022"...I was staring at what was in front of me when I should have been watching out for things at the edge of my vision."
Murnane is a peculiar kind of cartographer, teasing out imagined patterns and then layering these--one upon another--to map the "spaces-within-spaces."
Murnane is a peculiar kind of cartographer, teasing out imagined patterns and then layering these--one upon another--to map the "spaces-within-spaces."
February 14, 2025
My first Murnane and certainly not my last. Oh man do I love this rambling fount of inspiration. I could, in fact, listen to him ramble all day because there is more than just a repetition of imagery from his childhood or declarations over again of the things he has not done, or rhyming actions as evocative as Proust's madeleine (a literary rubberband Murnane overwhelmingly appreciates), there is a compelling wisdom in these essays born of Murnane's natural inclination towards the defining persona register of an essay. Murnane writes to us as someone might write to us in a letter. A letter, not an email and it is a refreshing if nostalgic distinction.
Here is why I love these essays. Read this paragraph from the piece titled Stream System:
When my father told me this he picked up the page of
the newspaper and tapped at a place on the bare chest of the
young woman, a little distance above the top of her evening
dress. He tapped with his knuckle in the way that he might
have tapped at a door that stood closed in front of him.
This morning when I remembered my father's tapping
with his knuckle at the bare chest of the young woman,
I thought of the top part of the evening dress as being the
body of pale blue labelled STREAM SYSTEM. I then saw in
my mind my father tapping with his knuckle at the face of
his father and also tapping at the yellow-brown grass where
the dead rats had once lain before my father had ordered
the patients to collect them in kerosene tins and to dump
them in the swampy ground that was denoted, many years
afterwards, by the words STREAM SYSTEM.
That hallmark cadence, the way he uses images as associative rhymes to induce the reader into a moment of connection and understanding. More than any other writer I have come across, Murnane has mastered the art of 1. Telling his readers what has happened, then, most importantly, 2. Telling his readers what it is like to have the knowledge of what happened and further, to undertake the task of opening this knowledge to others. He quotes literary critic Warner Berthoff as having given him this framework but the consequences of this structure are borne out actively in Murnane's work. They are what makes him so much more than an episode of James Burke's Connections, they elevate his project into the realm of contribution.
5 enthusiastic stars. Ignore the haters. This is a masterful autodidact you need to know.
Here is why I love these essays. Read this paragraph from the piece titled Stream System:
When my father told me this he picked up the page of
the newspaper and tapped at a place on the bare chest of the
young woman, a little distance above the top of her evening
dress. He tapped with his knuckle in the way that he might
have tapped at a door that stood closed in front of him.
This morning when I remembered my father's tapping
with his knuckle at the bare chest of the young woman,
I thought of the top part of the evening dress as being the
body of pale blue labelled STREAM SYSTEM. I then saw in
my mind my father tapping with his knuckle at the face of
his father and also tapping at the yellow-brown grass where
the dead rats had once lain before my father had ordered
the patients to collect them in kerosene tins and to dump
them in the swampy ground that was denoted, many years
afterwards, by the words STREAM SYSTEM.
That hallmark cadence, the way he uses images as associative rhymes to induce the reader into a moment of connection and understanding. More than any other writer I have come across, Murnane has mastered the art of 1. Telling his readers what has happened, then, most importantly, 2. Telling his readers what it is like to have the knowledge of what happened and further, to undertake the task of opening this knowledge to others. He quotes literary critic Warner Berthoff as having given him this framework but the consequences of this structure are borne out actively in Murnane's work. They are what makes him so much more than an episode of James Burke's Connections, they elevate his project into the realm of contribution.
5 enthusiastic stars. Ignore the haters. This is a masterful autodidact you need to know.
March 23, 2022
My introduction to Gerald Murnane was his debut novel Tamarisk Row, which I loved for the way it depicted childhood imagination and the sense of strangeness hidden within the everyday. Murnane’s 2005 essay collection Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs came as part of my And Other Stories subscription, and it has proven an ideal follow-up to Tamarisk Row. I’ve valued it for the chance to spend time in the author’s world.
The essays in this collection gave me some insight into how Murnane perceives the world. For example, the young protagonist of Tamarisk Row would imagine whole worlds in the abstract patterns of light through glass. It came as no surprise to discover that, when Murnane played horse-racing games with marbles, he would focus on the patterns created out of each small movement. He also mentions a liking of charts and diagrams: some of his essays feel like diagrams put into words, as they circle back over images and memories.
Murnane’s writing often seems to return to landscapes, but landscapes of the mind, imagined grasslands or plains. As he puts it in ‘Birds of the Puszta‘:
Murnane’s work keeps evoking for me a sense of “lost kingdoms”, imaginative spaces hidden just out of sight. When I finished Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, I had been changed by it: when I looked around at the world, something felt different.
The essays in this collection gave me some insight into how Murnane perceives the world. For example, the young protagonist of Tamarisk Row would imagine whole worlds in the abstract patterns of light through glass. It came as no surprise to discover that, when Murnane played horse-racing games with marbles, he would focus on the patterns created out of each small movement. He also mentions a liking of charts and diagrams: some of his essays feel like diagrams put into words, as they circle back over images and memories.
Murnane’s writing often seems to return to landscapes, but landscapes of the mind, imagined grasslands or plains. As he puts it in ‘Birds of the Puszta‘:
Plains looked simple but were not so. The grass leaning in the wind was all that could be seen of plains, but under the grass were insects and spiders and frogs and snakes – and ground-dwelling birds. I thought of plains whenever I wanted to think of something unremarkable at first sight but concealing much of meaning. And yet plains deserved, perhaps, not to be inspected closely. A pipit, crouched over its eggs in the shadow of a tussock, was the colour of dull grass. I was a boy who delighted in finding what was meant to remain hidden, but I was also a boy who liked to think of lost kingdoms.
Murnane’s work keeps evoking for me a sense of “lost kingdoms”, imaginative spaces hidden just out of sight. When I finished Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, I had been changed by it: when I looked around at the world, something felt different.
May 31, 2019
I'll be honest, when I first picked up this book it was a powerful sleep aid, and dipping into The Plains had a similar effect on me. I'm not sure why I found it so much more engaging after a two-week hiatus, but the last four-fifths of the book gave me no such issue at all. It's unusual to encounter a writer quite like Gerald Murnane - true to the advice he included to his students, he certainly lets his obsessions flow through his writing (it's horse racing, it's just.. always horse racing). The essays vary wildly in topic and form, but all carry the hallmarks of Murnane's fiction, lots of seemingly disjointed images introduced sporadically, which are eventually pulled into a unified whole. Depending on the reader (and apparently the headspace the reader is in), this can either be interesting or off-putting. All that said, I'd never read much from Australian writers before (in this case an Australian writer writing about being, becoming, and living as an Australian writer), so this served as a unique introduction to that sphere - Murnane does name plenty of other written works for the motivated to track down and further expand their context. Over all I'd recommend this book primarily to people interested in fiction as a craft, not necessarily looking to read a good story, but to those interested in the inner workings of the process of composing fiction. Once I came around to that framing, the book was much more enjoyable.
February 14, 2020
I was sent this, as a subscriber, by the publisher, and it's the sort of book I'd never pick up myself (this being in part why I subscribe, to be surprised). A series of essays by an author I, and I'm ashamed to admit this, have never heard of, let alone read.
It takes time to connect with the style, being somewhat academic and reserved, and yet the more you read, the further you're drawn into the mind and experience of a fascinating man. By the time I reached The Breathing Author, the penultimate piece in the book, I was delighted by it, and that piece alone is worth the cover price.
Great writing, fiction or otherwise, should open a window onto the world that allows you to see it in a new way. This very much does that.
It takes time to connect with the style, being somewhat academic and reserved, and yet the more you read, the further you're drawn into the mind and experience of a fascinating man. By the time I reached The Breathing Author, the penultimate piece in the book, I was delighted by it, and that piece alone is worth the cover price.
Great writing, fiction or otherwise, should open a window onto the world that allows you to see it in a new way. This very much does that.
September 25, 2023
I like alot of what Murnane is doing with connecting images and ideas together. Whether ‘essays’ is the best description for what he does seems a bit reductive, but I definitely enjoy his style; it feels fresh and I’m curious to read some of his fiction. I just don’t particularly care for alot of the subject matter and in particular don’t share any of his love for horses and horse racing. Though, I did appreciate his ability to tie it to almost anything. The selections that I enjoyed, I really enjoyed.
My favourite pieces in this collection were
Some books are to be dropped into wells, others into fish ponds
Secret Writing
The Angel’s Son
My favourite pieces in this collection were
Some books are to be dropped into wells, others into fish ponds
Secret Writing
The Angel’s Son
February 6, 2020
I have enjoyed most books sent by And Other Stories, but this is not one of them. Mr. Murnane tells us he writes fiction in order to educate the reader as to the images in his mind. He does so in his idiosyncratic style that, while perhaps original, has the repetitive quality of an obsessive compulsive and yet scattered mind. The kindest perspective is to view the book as a study of a semi-autistic “regard” on the world. At times it reads like the incantation of a hypnotist, and it did have sleep-inducing effects on me. I found it a self-absorbed account that is humourless and dull.
December 13, 2023
Murnane berättar om hur han berättar om hur han ser på de bilder han berättar om som han ser i sitt eget huvud, bilder som oftast är bilder av gräs, fält, kvinnor och tävlingshästar. Det är oftast perfekt, det är oftast fullkomligt perfekt, men efter ett tag infinner sig också en viss mättnad. Det är också, kanske på gott och ont, en väldigt världsfrånvänd värld, bilderna är perfekt beskrivna, men de borde inte egentligen vara av intresse för någon annan av Murnane, själv, delvis är det som att titta i en tråkig främlings gamla tråkiga fotoalbum.
January 31, 2020
I bought this yesterday and breezed through it. It is perhaps Murnane's most "readable" work, perhaps because his style of observation really lends itself to the essayistic form. He even admits this in the foreword: "I should have left it to discerning editors to publish all my pieces of writing as essays."
June 12, 2022
My first Gerald Murnane book that I just now re-read. It blew me away with its uniqueness and I was thinking about it all the time and wanted to come back to this voice, his observations and ideas. I am looking forward to day he dies and his archive with unpublished and annotated works will be released 😜. Until then I will read everything else he came out with.
November 12, 2018
One of the greatest books I will have ever read. So grateful to have read it.
March 1, 2020
I’m not sure I’d you can shelve books from the app so:
Essays; Australian; Living-author;
Lit Crit; non-fiction
Essays; Australian; Living-author;
Lit Crit; non-fiction
May 16, 2020
Some essays were really fun and recognizable, but there was a lot of repetition in the subjects which bored me a little. It was an interesting read, but not one I'd return to.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 36 reviews