Una vida en las carreras

by Gerald Murnane, Carles Andreu (Translator)

«Hay muchas personas que parecen creer que lo que les pasa por la mente es una especie de película, la repetición de cosas que ya han sucedido, o de cosas que tal vez sucedan en el futuro. Y si bien es posible que algunos vean películas en su cabeza, la mayoría de secuencias que acuden a mi mente se parecen más a dibujos animados, tiras cómicas o cuadros surrealistas. A menudo los sonidos de una retransmisión ecuestre me traen a la mente imágenes de lo que veía durante los primeros años en que oí esos mismos sonidos. Me refiero a los años que van de 1944 a 1948, cuando vivía en una casita de madera en Neale Street, en Bendigo.»

En estas memorias únicas y fascinantes, Gerald Murnane cuenta su historia a través de una obsesión: las carreras de caballos. A pesar de no haber montado nunca a caballo ni haber visto una carrera, de niño no podía dejar de mirar las fotos de las carreras en los periódicos y le hechizaban tanto los colores de los uniformes como los nombres de los caballos que oía en la radio. Murnane descubrió en las carreras algo que no le ofrecían ámbitos como el de la religión o la filosofía: la puerta de entrada al mundo de la imaginación.

Gerald Murnane (Coburg, Melbourne, 1939), considerado uno de los autores australianos más innovadores, es aficionado a las carreras de caballos y no ha viajado nunca en avión. Exseminarista (1957) y maestro de primaria (1960-1968), se licenció en humanidades en la Universidad de Melbourne (1969) y, tras pasar unos años como profesor de enseñanza secundaria, desde 1980 dio clases de escritura creativa en distintas universidades. Su obra, de difícil clasificación, se sitúa siempre entre el relato autobiográfico, la ficción y el ensayo. Algunos de sus libros son Tamarisk Row (1974), A Lifetime on Clouds (1976), Las llanuras (1982), Landscape with Landscape (1985), Inland (1988), Barley Patch (2009), A History of Books (2012) y A Million Windows (2014). Murnane ha recibido, entre otros premios, el Patrick White Award (1999), el Melbourne Prize for Literature (2009) y el Award for Innovation in Writing del Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature (2010).

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Literature, Australia, Biography, Biography Memoir, Autobiography

276 pages, Paperback

First published September 23, 2015

About the author

Murnane's first two books, Tamarisk Row (1974) and A Lifetime on Clouds (1976), seem to be semi-autobiographical accounts of his childhood and adolescence. Both are composed largely of very long but grammatical sentences.

In 1982, he attained his mature style with The Plains, a short novel about a young filmmaker who travels to a fictive country far within Australia, where his failure to make a film is perhaps his most profound achievement. The novel is both a metaphysical parable about appearance and reality, and a parodic examination of traditions and cultural horizons. The novel depicts an abstracted Australia, akin to something out of mythology or fable. The novel was followed by: Landscape With Landscape (1985), Inland (1988), Velvet Waters (1990), and Emerald Blue (1995). A book of essays, Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, appeared in 2005, and a new work of fiction, Barley Patch, was released in 2009. All of these books are concerned with the relation between memory, image, and landscape, and frequently with the relation between fiction and non-fiction.

Murnane is mainly known within Australia. A seminar was held on his work at the University of Newcastle in 2001. Murnane does, however, also have a following in other countries, especially Sweden and the United States, where The Plains was published in 1985 and reprinted in 2004 (New Issues Poetry & Prose), and where Dalkey Archive Press has recently issued Barley Patch and will be reprinting Inland in 2012. In 2011, The Plains' was translated into French and published in France by P.O.L, and in 2012 will be published in Hungarian. In July/August 2017, The Plains was the number 1 book recommendation of South West German Radio (SWR2). His works have been translated into Italian (Velvet Waters as Una Melodia), German (The Plains as Die Ebenen, Border Districts as Grenzbezirke, Landscape With Landscape as Landschaft mit Landschaft, all publ. Suhrkamp Verlag), Spanish (The Plains as Las llanuras, and Something for the Pain as Una vida en las carreras, all published by Editorial Minúscula), Catalan (The Plains as Les planes, also published by Editorial Minúscula), Swedish (Inland as Inlandet, The Plains as Slätterna, Velvet Waters as Sammetsvatten and Barley Patch as Korntäppa) and Serbian (The Plains as Ravnice; Inland as Unutrašnjost, both published by Blum izdavaštvo 2025).

Reviews

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

A couple of weeks ago a friend of mine read an article in the New York something or other that said Murnane is probably the best writer you’ve never heard of and might one day win the Nobel Prize for literature. My friend knew that Murnane taught me in my undergraduate degree and that I’m very fond of his writing. He said that he was going to have to read at least one book by him now to see what all the excitement is about and would I recommend him something. The two books I invariably recommend when this happens are ‘A Lifetime on Clouds’ and ‘Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs’. But I’d bought this one a while ago (and others too, which I haven’t gotten around to reading yet either) and so I thought I should move this to the top of the list read this now.

Murnane is obsessed with horse racing – in fact, if you need to know just one thing about him, that is the thing you need to know. And he says, repeatedly, that this is a book about horse racing. And the one thing you should always ALWAYS know about writers is that you should never NEVER believe what they say to you when they tell you what their book is about. When they do, their book is NEVER about what they say it is about. Never. This book is called ‘Something for the Pain’. He explains how this is related to horse racing fairly early in the book. Even so, this book is about pain much, much more than it is about horse racing. It might even become the book I recommend people read when they ask me for one of Murnane’s to start with from now on.

I think in ‘Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs’ he says that he regrets that he ever told people that some of his works were fiction and some were essays or non-fiction. That the world isn’t as easy to divide into those two opposites and that anyway he is able to be much more honest in some fictionalised works than in any non-fiction. I think the process of producing fiction – and I think all stories we tell are ultimately ‘fiction’, even when they are as true as we can make them – is deeply interesting and reading everything as if it were fiction (what some people might call ‘critically’) is a skill that reading fiction trains us into.

If I was to say what I take this book to really be about, I would undoubtedly say it is an extended love letter to his dead wife. As such, it is stunningly beautiful, and its beauty lies mostly in its understatement, in fact, in his near inability to write about her although she is there throughout. I have no doubt many people could read this book and not even see his relationship with his wife as much of a theme to the book at all. But I can’t begin to tell you how moving I found it. It is stunningly beautiful, painfully so.

Now, this is a book about horse racing, and I’m not going to totally ignore that in this review. The first thing I need to mention is that I rarely, if ever, go to a race track, despite driving passed Caulfield virtually every day of the work week for the past five years. Caulfield race course has a number of other associations for me – given I grew up relatively close to it and my father was, for most of my life, a keen backer of horses. Nevertheless, despite these associations (which you might think should dominate my relationship with the course), a couple of years ago I had to go there to wait for my daughter to finish an exam. I stood waiting for her at the entrance and found myself thinking of how many times Murnane must have walked here, even though I haven’t seen him since 1990 when he was sitting on the stage as I graduated. He was the only person on the stage I knew and he looked over as I walked across the stage and we smiled at each other and nodded. There is a statue at the entrance of the Caulfield race course and I think now that it is to Bert Bryant – but now that I’ve written that, I think it might actually be to Bert Cummings, oh, shit, I’m utterly confirming my complete ignorance and that really wasn’t my intent. Anyway,the point I was trying to make was that even I have heard of Bert Bryant before, he’s a famous race caller, and so I was surprised at how much Murnane disliked him.

Murnane has spent a remarkable amount of time creating imaginary worlds in which ideal horse races occur. It is, he says, his religion. Like him, I do not watch television (I’m not as obsessive in not watching TV, but close, as I also see it as a huge waste of time) nor do I see many films (for a different reason to him, I find them far too immediate) – however, while I sometimes think my obsessions with education and sociology are a bit like his obsessions with horse racing, and racing colours and so on, and despite the fact I worked for a number of years as an archivist, I think he would have made a much better archivist than I ever did. In many ways, I think he has been the archivist of his own life. He isn’t only the person I immediately think of when I am at a race course, I also invariably say to people that he taught me to write. He is also the person I think of when I think of Socrates saying ‘an unexamined life is not worth living’.

I think this might be a much more accessible book than some of his others, and so a good place to start if you do wish to start reading him – but, like I said, there is a sublime subtext to this one (sublime in the sense of being overwhelming in its power in a way that is inversely proportional to how it is also understated).

[Eylül Görmüş · Rating 4 out of 5]

Avustralyalı yazar Gerald Murnane ile tanışma kitabım oldu "Acı İçin Bir Şey" ve sahiden de epeyce iyi tanışmış olduk zira kendisinden okuduğum ilk şey anıları oldu: hipodrom çevresinde dönen anıları.

Taşrada büyüyen, at yarışlarına kafayı takmış bir yazar kendisi. Babasından devraldığı at yarışı tutkusu tüm hayatını şekillendirmiş, o da bir gün hayatını at yarışları ve atlar üzerinden yazmaya karar vermiş; hayatındaki her büyük kırılma noktasına eşlik eden bir at hikayesi var zira. Atların isimlerinden üzerlerine taktıkları renkli kuşaklarına dek her şeyden büyülenen böyle bir adam için daha iyi bir fikir olamazmış bence. Anı yazmanın bu kadar özgün bir biçimiyle daha önce karşılaşmamıştım.

Sonuçta geri dönüp hayatına at yarışları üzerinden bakıyor. Benim gibi atlara özel bir ilgi duymayan biri için bile çok keyif verici bir okumaydı, çünkü evet, her şey atlara bağlanıyor ama bir yandan da Murnane'e dair çok şey öğreniyoruz. Kadınlarla, içkiyle, yazmakla, hayatla ilişkisi... Utangaçlığı, muzipliği, dertleri.

Yazarın dilini, ironik üslubunu, neşesini ve alaycılığını çok sevdim ben. Kendisinin kurmacalarını okumayı merakla bekliyorum, muhtemelen o zaman daha da çok seveceğim kendisini.

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

quite nice little memoir about murnane's obsession with horse racing, although it is a little jarring to have him writing without the separation that exists in most of his books between murnane the actual guy and the narrator of a murnane book(fiction or otherwise). it feels just a little more casual and familiar, which is a bit strange

[Blair · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's Murnane, so it's good. He's probably Australia's greatest and most interesting writer. But this memoir is quite different from his other work, especially the recent "fictions." It's quite prosaic and plain in style. It doesn't give off that off-kilter "otherness" that his other books do. And it's all about his lifelong love of horse racing. He tells us very little about the other people in his life: we find out absolutely nothing about his siblings or his mother or his children. We get more on his father (because of his strong connection with horse racing and betting) and a late chapter talks about his wife's illness and death in a way that is simultaneously moving and profoundly dispassionate. Instead it gives us quite about about Murnane's inner world in a way that's consistent with the kind of accounts we see of images in his fiction. This is an account of a man who has barely left the state of Victoria and who spends most of his spare time thinking about horse races (and even spending thousands of hours making up imaginary horse races in imaginary countries), so it's not filled with lots of exciting events that he's experienced. It is, nevertheless, quite fascinating. His reflections are full of interest and for the Murnane fan there are some mentions that shed light on his novels, including Tamarisk Row, The Plains and Barley Patch. If you haven't read Murnane's work before then this is not the place to start (read The Plains), but it's not to be ignored.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

If it ever transpires that Gerald Murnane wins the Nobel Prize for Literature, and there is the usual stampede to read the winner’s books, I think that newbies to Murnane’s writing might be somewhat disconcerted were they to come across this book first. Something for the Pain is interesting to say the least, but it is not a bit like his other writing. The new reader of Murnane might well congratulate the Nobel judges on choosing an ‘accessible’ author, or they might ask ‘so what’s all the fuss about, why is this author getting a Nobel?’

I’ve never really known how to categorise or tag Murnane’s fictions, but have used the term conceptual literature (because other people do) to describe the strange haunting image-worlds he creates, but this memoir is grounded in reality. Unlike The Plains (1982); Inland (1988); A History of Books (2012) and A Million Windows (2014) (and see a Sensational Snippet) Something for the Pain is deceptively easy reading. Although the reader spends a lot of time in the arcane world of horse-racing, it’s not like wandering through image-houses with image-persons in dream-landscapes as one does when reading Murnane’s fictions, and although he takes the reader through selective aspects of his own personal history as he did in A History of Books, Murnane seems not to demand as much of his readers in this memoir.

To read the rest of my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.com/2016/01/15/so...

[Justin Evans · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought "A Memoir of the Turf" was something the publisher had thrown on the cover, since almost all of Murnane work can be considered "memoir" in some way, even though nobody anywhere ever means his kind of fiction when they say "memoir." But why not ride the gravy train, eh? See if you can suck in a few unwary punters, who think they're getting a book about a guy's life-long love affair with the track, but are really getting a late work of a modernist genius?

Except no, this is a book about a guy's life-long love affair with the track, and involves roughly nothing that would not fit in any standard memoir. Since I've read much of Murnane's other work, I was interested to learn some facts about him, to hear about his relationship with his wife, and to get some good anecdotes about pissing in sinks. Of course, the prose is wonderful, but it's wonderful in an uninteresting way: it's just perfectly easy to read.

Well, it seem strange to say you're disappointed with an amusing, eccentric, nostalgic book about horse-racing, written by one of the strangest men writing in the English language. It's nice to know the next time I want to read some Ackerley, I can re-read this instead. And there are just enough reminders of the astonishing Murnane that I can kid myself into thinking I'm using my brain.

Paul Eluard: "There is another world, but it is in this one."

[Text Publishing · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘Murnane’s books are strange and wonderful and nearly impossible to describe in a sentence or two…His later works are essayistic meditations on his own past, a personal mythology as attuned to the epic ordinariness of lost time as Proust, except with Murnane it’s horse races, a boyhood marble collection, Catholic sexual hang-ups and life as a househusband in the suburban Melbourne of the 1970s.’
New York Times

‘Murnane is a careful stylist and a slyly comic writer with large ideas.’
Robyn Cresswell, Paris Review

‘Murnane is quite simply one of the finest writers we have produced.’
Peter Craven

‘Unquestionably one of the most original writers working in Australia today.’
Australian

‘Something for the Pain is Gerald Murnane at his best. His meticulous exploration of his lifelong obsession with horse racing is by turns hilarious, moving and profound. If Australian writing were a horse race, Murnane would be the winner by three and a half lengths.’
Andy Griffiths

‘A marvellous book about horse racing, one of the best this country has produced. It is full of fast and loose stories and colourful characters…and lots of laughs.’
Weekend Australian

‘Fascinating…Totally intriguing, utterly hilarious.’
Gideon Haigh

‘A memoir of horse racing that speaks of triumphs and tragedies, of the infinite shades of friendship and romance, of the precision and persistence of memory, and—in its characteristically calm, direct prose as much as its contents—of virtue.’
Times Literary Supplement, Best Books of 2015

‘A perennial stayer in the Nobel Stakes.’
Australian Financial Review, Best Books of 2015

‘A treat—a rare glimpse into the mythology of a grand sport.’
Gerard Whateley

‘Murnane’s fastidious compositional style is matched perfectly with his comic genius.’
Gregory Day, Sydney Morning Herald, Best Books of 2015

‘This book, this little volume, is an absolute gem. It’s literary, lucid, full of love for horses and racing and full of the strange highly-ordered madness of Murnane, full of a selfless disclosure. It’s marvellous. Funny, moving, beautiful. A brilliant book.’
Jonathan Green, Radio National Books and Arts, Best Books of 2015

‘Murnane recounts his life through his abiding obsession with horse racing. But you don’t have to care about horse racing—it’s the quality of the obsessed mind that matters.’
Ben Lerner, New Yorker, Books We Loved in 2015

‘Yes, this is about Murnane’s lifelong obsession with horse-racing, but it’s so much more than that. It’s a memoir that illuminates his deliberately unusual life and his exquisite fiction.’
Australian, Best Books of 2015

‘This book is that rare thing (as, evidently, is its author): a true original…Hilarious, moving, unique: a step inside one man’s passion, a key to his rich imaginative life. If you read nothing else this summer, read Something for the Pain.’
Saturday Paper, Best Books of 2015

[Carol Alvarez · Rating 5 out of 5]

La tradición por las carreras de caballos forma parte de la fisonomía de la cultura australiana y Gerald Murnane, uno de sus autores más prestigiosos, es un devoto aficionado, hasta el punto que él mismo no tiene empacho en hacer de su obsesión por el deporte una obra biográfica y, por qué no, un canto al amor por los detalles. Con Una vida en las carreras, publicada por la editorial Minúscula con traducción de Carles Andreu, Murnane reconstruye esos retazos de historia personal que dejan una huella en la memoria de uno y la vez lo definen, por el valor que le da. Los colores de la ropa de los jockeys, por ejemplo, son un tema recurrente en la fijación del autor, que cree entender como una forma de compensar su falta del sentido del olfato. Las combinaciones de tonalidades y las figuras geométricas que se dibujan en las camisetas le llevan a coleccionar libros con los uniformes y a soñar con ellos o incluso a apostar en un sentido u otro. Es difícil no pensar que el interés de Murnane por las carreras está estrechamente ligado a su infancia y cómo los devenires de su familia estuvieron marcados por la afición de su padre por las apuestas, con resultados terribles para la economía familiar en alguna ocasión. Pero hay más que eso en la novela. El pequeño Gerald, llamado así en honor a un caballo que perteneció a su padre, ve la magia que envuelve la competición, los corredores de apuestas en el hipódromo, legales dentro e ilegales en las afueras. en unos tiempos en que Australia era un país en que la fiebre por este deporte podía con todo. Murnane vaga en sus recuerdos, saltando de la adolescencia a sus primeros tiempos como profesor y luego editor, para volver a la infancia, con un único hilo conductor, el de la pasión que se antoja inexplicable por estos animales. Leerle es sumergirse en la Bendigo de los años cincuenta, en los hipódromos de Melbourne, en la vida de estudiante enganchado a las retransmisiones de radio de las carreras, a las canciones del Hit parade de la época y sobre todo, a la emoción de esos minutos breves tras los que sólo habrá un ganador.

Gerald Murnane tiene también traducido al castellano Las llanuras en la editorial Minúscula, y es un autor que no deja indiferente por el calado de sus reflexiones y su curiosa forma de entender su entorno.

[Ros · Rating 5 out of 5]

Knowing nothing about horse racing and not being interested in betting on the results, I saw this as an opportunity to gain some insight. What a surprise awaited me. It was not what I expected at all, but it managed to sneak up on me with its honesty, its layout and the author's understanding of the characters who inhabit this environment. It totally charmed me so that I was reluctant to lay the book aside after I had read the final word. Highly recommended for those who love horse racing and those who have a curiosity about the many and varied people who inhabit our world.

[naturaespecies · Rating 3 out of 5]

Se hace un poquito pesado.

[Rüçhan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Yazarla tanışma kitabı olarak Düzlükler'i seçmiştim. Çok yanlış bir kararmış. Düzlükler'in akmayan ve insanı içine almayan havasının aksine bu kitap son derece akıcı. Ama bunda da bir sorun var ki; at yarışlarına özel bir ilgi duymuyorsanız bu kitap da sizi bir yerden sonra sıkabilir. Ben altmetinde Avustralya toplumuna dair pek çok bilgi kırıntısı bulabildiğim için sevdim -ki okumalarımda amacım zaten bu tür bilgilerle bir toplumu tanımak. Kapak, çeviri ve editörlük kusursuzdu. Dedalus Yayınlarıyla ilk tanışmamdı. Olumlu bir izlenim oldu.

[John Julius · Rating 5 out of 5]

Is Gerald Murnane a genius? This memoir made me think he might be. I compare it to another excellent book on horse racing Laughing in the Hills. Check out the full discussion on Youtube: https://youtu.be/cjKv6V960QM

[Leonardo Rivas · Rating 4 out of 5]

La pasión por las carreras de caballos es un motivo suficiente para que alguien escriba sus memorias sobre esa otra vida que tuvo, además de reflexionar de forma puntual sobre la escritura y la literatura con sus medios paralelos a las vidas fuera de la página. Una prosa fluida, ame a y bastante metareflexiva. Una lectura entrañables.

[Bill Nickeas · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a horse racing lover and someone who grew up near Warrnambool, this book ticks many boxes for me. But the great tales of his love of horse racing set alongside his life really make this a book for punters and nostalgia buffs to treasure.

[Chris Johnston · Rating 5 out of 5]

magnificent

[Pat · Rating 5 out of 5]

A delight to read - it’s probably the most sincere and earnest glimpse of a passion/vocation I’ve come across.

[David O'Connell · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Simon Kearney · Rating 4 out of 5]

About two thirds the way through Gerald Murnane's book Something for the Pain I find myself listening to Beethoven's Fantasia for Piano, Chorus and Orchestra on YouTube. Murnane describes the last few minutes as "an exact evocation of the last furlongs of a gruelling race". I wonder if it is the mixture of voices, piano and orchestra in battle and harmony that evoke such a response. I also wonder what Murnane would make of me reading his book on a kindle, quickly whipping out my phone and looking for the music as I grab my iPad to write this, in Singapore. He'd certainly approve of the critical examination of his musical suggestion, to see if it works for me. The other stuff, I'm not sure about.

We haven't got to technology in the book yet but I doubt he's got a smart phone, let alone a kindle or an iPad. He doesn't travel, ever, away from his favoured part of regional Victoria.

While I'm looking up to see if there's a word to describe someone who doesn't travel I find plenty of advice to women not to date guys who don't travel. God I hate how judgemental the world has become.

The word is Hestian, after Hestia, the Greek goddess of hearth and home. But it doesn't really describe Murnane whose racing life is anything but home bound. If anything, the track is his home.

Something for the Pain is Murnane's memoir of his racing life. If my old man were a writer he'd write like Murnane.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoy all aspects of the horse racing industry - sixty years ago my uncle owned a reasonably successful horse called Bengal Bay (green and purple squares). Murnane seems a singular man but his musings make for a most interesting read - from colours, to betting systems, trainers, jockeys, meticulously planned plunges, press coverage and his extensive archives. Very readable for those of us who are attracted to the sport of kings.

[Sue · Rating 4 out of 5]

Clever, wry, fascinating memoir from an erudite writer whose obsession is the turf. For my full review, please see: http://whisperinggums.com/2016/02/18/...

[Carey Handfield]

A great book, A very interesting memoir about Gerald Murnane and his obsession with horse racing