Tamarisk Row

by Gerald Murnane

First published in 1974, and out of print for almost twenty years, Tamarisk Row is Gerald Murnane's first novel, and in many respects his masterpiece, an unsparing evocation of a Catholic childhood in a Victorian country town in the late 1940s. Clement Killeaton transforms his father's obsession with gambling, his mother's piety, the cruelty of his fellow pupils and the mysterious but forbidden attractions of sex, into an imagined world centred on horse-racing, played in the dusty backyard of his home, across the landscapes of the district, and the continent of Australia. Out of the child's boredom and fear and fascination, Murnane's lyrical prose opens perspectives charged with yearning and illumination, offering in the process a truly original view of mid-twentieth-century Australia.
[Back-cover blurb]

Genres: Fiction, Australia, Novels, 20th Century, Literary Fiction, Literature, Classics

188 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1974

About the author

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

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

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

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Short chapters of Tamarisk Row are young boy’s impressions of his family, nature, life in the town and his classmates.
Boy’s catholic family lives in poverty because his father is an incorrigible gambler betting on horseracing but the boy is full of fantasies about horses, racecourses, the world of grownups and girls…

Only the imponderable expanse of its treeless grasses is huge enough to encompass the months-long trek towards a hint of foothills, which is what he sees before him whenever he vows to go on loving Barbara Keenan. Almost every day at school he catches sight of the clean pink skin above her knees that are marred by no scabs or sores from falling on gravel footpaths and schoolgrounds, yet still he refuses to wonder about her thighs and pants and sets his eyes instead on a line of violet just above the farthest horizon.

Boy’s day to day life comprises troubles at home, lonely games, catholic school, religion, school bullying, attempts to penetrate into the world of girls, children’s town legends…

One morning when some of the boys at St Boniface’s school are talking about Blue Nancy and someone tells how he saw her the other night creeping out of the same confessional where the skeleton of the dead woman used to be, and someone else says that Blue Nancy probably had something to do with murdering the dead girl, and the others wait for someone to say that she certainly did and that he knows the true story of it, a boy named Alfie Brancatella, who seldom smiles or sees the point of any joke or tells a story that anyone is willing to listen to, announces solemnly that he knows all about the girl who nearly died in the confessional because she is a friend of his auntie.

And of course like all the children the boy has his secrets, his innermost dreams and he possesses his own treasure… And his marbles are his racehorses…

The only marbles that he takes to school are a few inferior kinds which he tries to swap for some that attract him in other boys’ collections. He wonders how some boys can lose half a dozen choice marbles during a single playtime and not seem worried about it. He goes home to spread out his own treasured ones on the mat and whisper their racing names to himself.

Rich imagination may cause some little troubles but it always makes living much richer.

[Fionnuala]

This is Gerald Murnane's first fiction, set in his childhood hometown of Bendigo which he fictionalises as 'Bassett', and where everything the main character experiences is described in horse-racing terms whether it's a game of marbles, sitting school exams, participating in sport's events, or rearing poultry...

That was how I began this review last week, but because I felt I had nothing more to say about Gerald Murnane's fictions, having reviewed so many of them lately, and because I'm not good at writing standard reviews, I wrote nothing further.

Today I thought the best thing I could do is post a quote in lieu of a review so I leafed through the book backwards (it comes easier to me to do it like that (and I may therefore have missed a better quote (but this is not about picking the best horse in the field after all))) and so I put my money on the following long sentence which I'd marked with lots of my particular 'enthusiasm' marks (they're a bit like ! crossed with *).
Rereading the quote, I could see that it provided an interesting insight into the mind of the main character of Tamarisk Row, a child aged from six to about ten during the course of the narrative, and who has a tendency to endow the oddest things, pebbles or marbles or even the rippled surfaces of the stained glass panel of his parents' front door, with their own life and adventures. The sentence I'm going to quote occurs while the child is peering through the sun-lit front door panel shortly before his parents plan to move away from Basset :
But as the very last of the sunset reaches across Bassett to the places where he once hoped to mark the progress of journeys greater than he would ever be expected to make, it seems to Clement Killeaten that somewhere in all that translucent continent there must be still a few creatures who could recall a time when someone, not the God who is supposed to have given them all their shapes and who would probably inspect their colours again one day, but some other huge watchful figure, looked at them in a certain light as if he yearned for them to begin the most permanent, far-reaching journeys so that he could delight for ages afterwards in all the complex patterns that their lives would represent and the strange intricate creases and lines that their journeys would stamp on them, and still hoped that he still remembered that once on a certain afternoon in his own country he did see them all in their separate shapes and try to comprehend their thousands of overlapping and interwoven journeys and the stories of their lives and might be still waiting for a time to come when he would hold his head at a certain angle in a certain light and welcome them into a country like his own.

I understood the 'other huge watchful figure' to be Clement Killeaton's imagined adult self who might one day in the future look back on the world-creating powers of his childhood self and the many adventures his 'creature' creations had experienced.

Before I posted the quote, I thought I'd remind myself of what the older Gerald Murnane says about his younger self's book in his Last Letter to a Reader (2022) which I've been reading alongside his fictions. In 'Last Letter', he reviews each of his books chronologically, and I'd read the chapter on 'Tamarisk Row' weeks ago because it's the first chapter, being his first published work, dating from the early 1970s.
So, rereading that short first chapter now, I find a small reference to the passage about Clement peering through the panel of coloured glass on the west-facing front door! It was mentioned in connection with Murnane recognizing that his younger writer self had caught the boy's vision well, and I felt happy for the boy character whose wish that his creative world might be revisited by his adult self had been realised—admittedly at an authorly remove—but realised all the same.
………………
Edit: The sentence I'd have chosen if I'd flipped a bit further back in the book (which I've now done) and which I'd marked emphatically 'for review' while reading, was this one:
At night he sits looking up at the electric light bulb with a marble held close to his eye trying to explore all the wine- or flame- or honey- or blood- or ocean- or lake- or stained-glass-coloured-skies or plains where winds or clouds or ranges of hills or curls of smoke are trapped forever and to decide what secret tunnels or caves or valleys or walled cities or thickets or abandoned laneways might never be explored because they lie deep inside it close to its very essence where its truest colors would envelop any traveller who reached there trying to discover what has lain for so many years in the heart of the glass that people have carried about without thinking from place to place and what it is to be inside a place that all other people see only from the outside.

A fine quote that matches the first one evenly, I feel. If the two were horses they'd be neck and neck at the finish line.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

This masterpiece was actually Murnane’s first novel. It describes a harsh world with school bullies, a father who loses everything on the horses, and sexual awakening, through the eyes of a child. Clement grows up in rural Victoria (Australia) and loves to escape into his own inner world, where he recreates manageable, game-play, miniature versions of reality. Murnane’s style is already fully developed: beautifully lyrical and sometimes almost stream-of-consciousness-like, but at the same time succinct and of great clarity. It is such a shame that Murnane is not appreciated more, even in his native Australia.

[Alwynne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Acclaimed, but not-so-widely read, author Gerald Murnane’s debut novel’s a semi-autobiographical account of a Catholic family in small-town Australia in the years after WW2. The story’s primarily told from the perspective of nine-year-old Clement Killeaton whose father, Augustine, is obsessed with horse racing and gambling - his greatest desire’s to own his own prize-winning horse, and his thwarted yearnings dominate his family’s existence. Clement’s named after one of his father’s favourite racehorses – as was Murnane – and longs to be part of his father’s world, even drawing out his own track for imaginary races in the dirt close to their house. But, what for Clement is a fantasy bringing him closer to his father, is something that's a source of conflict with his mother who blames Augustine’s obsession for their blighted life. The town itself brings Clement into contact with a range of local eccentrics, who crop up in the array of short, vignette-style chapters. A structure that reflects Murnane’s interest in reproducing “mental images” a sort-of record of individual perceptions and memories of encounters and experiences, all part of his concept of “true fiction.”

It's an impressively-crafted piece. Some scenes reminded me of Dylan Thomas writing about Wales or Laurie Lee portraying his country childhood, there’s a barely-suppressed poetic quality to much of the writing here; and a mix of the mundane and the slightly sinister. Murnane’s sentences are often long and intricate which slowed down my reading, forcing me to focus on his words, his style and imagery, all of which are key since his plot’s minimal and atmosphere and mood are paramount. Murnane’s narrative conveys his rich appreciation of Australian landscapes, represented through a plethora of wonderfully-evocative, descriptive passages. All of which I really liked, what was less appealing were the details of the minutiae of the track, and Augustine’s interactions based around it. I’m not a fan of the sport in general, for ethical reasons, but I found it hard to sustain interest in those sections on any other level. The episodes centred on Clement and the town were by far my favourites: his joy at finding a stunning marble left behind by another boy, his attempts to relate to the world of adults. But overall, a memorable piece that makes me eager to explore Murnane’s vision and writing further.

Thanks to Edelweiss Plus and publisher And Other Stories for an ARC

Rating: 3.5

[zed · Rating 5 out of 5]

Written in the third person the reader gets a magnificent child’s eye view of his world that covers, among other things, birds, colours, horse-racing, school, sexual awakening, religion, family life and more. At times so totally lyrical in delivery but then so stream of consciousness. But it just works! Imagine being able to write with such a childlike view of your life but making it relevant to an adult reader. I am in awe. I don’t pretend that this review can do this magnificent book justice.

This is my first Gerald Murnane book but it will not be my last.

[Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Has to be one of the great debuts. Brilliantly realised voice (which seems to be half roving-child consciousness, half the world as he feels it articulating all the things he can’t), uncanny, weirdly funny and unlike anything I’ve read. While reading this I felt very much as I did with Helen DeWitt’s Lightning Rods and Joy Williams’ stories: like I’d found a very specific but very recognisable version of the world.

“One night when all the marbles are spread out on the mat in the lounge-room, the amethyst- and white-streaked one named Tupper after a professional runner at Bassett Easter Fair meeting and Winterset after a famous racehorse in Melbourne rolls away and disappears down a hole in the corner of the floorboards. Clement cries until his parents notice him. He asks will they lift up the boards or find a way under the house for him, but they tell him not to make such a fuss about one old marble. Clement does not forget Tupper Winterset. Often at night he thinks of the soft dust gradually sifting down onto his purplish lakes, whose depths no light now enters, and the white arcs of his shores that perhaps no-one will ever hold up to his eyes and dream of crossing and of all the years when the house still rests solidly on its foundations and he, Clement, grows up and goes away and the new family living there never suspects that Tupper Winterset is somewhere beneath them and of a time when the house falls down at last and a new one is built and of a day, perhaps long after the second or even the third house has fallen when someone finds Tupper Winterset and makes up a story about him which is very different from the stories that Clement once told about him and discovers deep inside him colours quite different from those that Clement discovers and gives him a name very different from Tupper Winterset, which was not his real name anyway just as white and amethyst were probably not his true colours and the story that Clement believed of how and where he was first made was not the true story.”

[Hugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is Gerald Murnane's 1974 first novel, and was published in the UK by And Other Stories in 2019 along with his much more recent Border Districts which I read at the time. As in Border Districts there is probably an element of autofiction, but this book is very different.

It tells the story of the 1940s childhood of Clement Killeaton in the rural backwater of Bassett, Victoria, through a series of episodes of memory rather than a simple narrative thread. His father Augustine is a dreamer and gambler who believes he can train a racehorse that will make his fortune, and the book sees these dreams unravel and his debts grow almost in slow motion. His mother is a strict Catholic, and this provides another of the key themes. Clement is caught up in his father's dreams, and spends much of his time playing solitary racing games with marbles that his mother has prohibited. As in the more recent book the style is distinctive and not always easy to follow, but the whole is quite a moving evocation of the place and time.

[notgettingenough · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'd forgotten that horse racing and gambling on it were once such an endemic part of Australian life. My own upbringing, like the protagonist's in this story, was RC and poor. Like his mother, mine was virulently anti-gambling. And like his father, mine was addicted to 'the races', as they were always called. In the case of my father, this was despite the stories he would tell of those around him, including his own brothers, being unable to afford warm coats in winter because all their money went on feeding the bookies. The difference, however, was that my mother wouldn't let my father do it 'for work', in that way Augustine justifies his relentless losses, and so almost all my father's bets were purely theoretical....in that way Augustine's are when he 'stops'.

Thank heavens my mother held her ground on this. She herself had experienced anguish at the hands of the 'industry'. Her very decent father suddenly died when she was at the end of primary school, forcing my grandmother to make ends meet for her four daughters and herself by opening a fruit and veg shop. Unfortunately her very decent dead husband had a brother who was quite the opposite. He ran an SP booking racket using my grandma's shop as the front. Eventually it was raided and there was a most upright, decent, God-fearing sort of woman up before the courts, taking the blame for her brother-in-law. Perhaps the memory of this was partly to account for my mother's attitudes, but in any case, she would also have been well aware of what happens to the families of those who decide that they are brighter than the trainers and the bookies and the big punters with their scams.

I never lived in small town rural Australia, but every Australian has been through them, they have felt the glazed heat, understood what the local pool means, seen the still smallness of such places. The aloneness that creates the rich imaginary life of small children like Clement. Because others drink with the consequent brutal behaviour as well as bet, his father Augustine sees the extreme poverty through which he puts his family as somehow more acceptable, superior perhaps. However sorry we feel for Clement, we know there is far worse, within the walls of the story and without.

Murnane has both the knowledge that comes of his own fascination with the horses and the understanding, I suppose born from a capacity to stand outside himself, to see it for what it is. Again, it was incredibly evocative for me. There is a moment when Augustine is regretting not the amount he has lost - that is never a source of regret for compulsive gamblers - but the amount he has won. It brought to mine my friend B. with whom I was flatting. We were part of a community which saw itself as a group of pro betters, this was back before computers made ordinary people able to compete. My friends were all numbers people. Some of them were dedicated professional winners. But some, and B. was one, were mere addicts. B. always made sure he paid his rent and his health insurance, but other than that, it was all for the horses. Or rather, for the people who won from people like him. One work day (as the horse betters saw Saturdays) I heard he'd won a lot of money, it was around 30K. I called him and said the kind of things you say at such a moment. But he was sad, just like Augustine was sad with such a win. Addicts think not of what they did win, but of what they didn't. It was the one they should have had the house on. It was the first time I really felt pity for B. He couldn't win, even if he won.

This world of horse betting is dying in Australia. Partly this is because there are so many ways to part addicts with their money these days. But it's also because horse racing is seen as bad for the animals involved. Gone is the culture of Melbourne Cup day, a day which unofficially served as a national holiday throughout the land. My mother, harking back to the period when this book was set, recalled the big hall at Wayville in which school and university exams were held. At the time the race started, pens were downed, the radio put on, and for ten minutes all in the hall were transported to a different place. Murnane has preserved an Australia which is dying, not only because of the horse races, but because drinking has changed, isolation has changed, attitudes have changed.

Some years back the NYT predicted a Nobel prize for him and I can understand why. By the time I was a few dozen pages into Tamarisk Row, I went back to Imprints and bought another eight by him that they had in stock. I haven't started my next yet because I found this one deeply painful. Not only because of the horse racing, but also because it dragged up memories of the brutality of Roman Catholicism as we children experienced it in that period. Oh, and we can add gender relations into the mix as well. But above all its precise exquisiteness hurt like needles being placed in just the right positions.

Maybe it's a book to love, rather than to like. But don't let that put you off reading it.

[Hux · Rating 3 out of 5]

I generally like to read at least two books by an author before making any concrete judgements about them. Having read The Plains, I found it to be frankly bloated and self-indulgent, a book where the prose was overdone and often ludicrous, to a laughable degree, endless nested sentences that, when more closely scrutinised, revealed themselves to be meaningless drivel (albeit deliberately at times). The whole thing felt overwrought and performative and, a few moments here and there aside, I was not impressed by it.

So here is my second stab at Murnane. And this was very... different. So much so that it's difficult to come to any hard conclusions regarding his writing especially since here, it's not remotely the same prose at all (possibly due to this being his first book) and I'm pleased to note (because it seems to be increasingly rare) that his style has clearly changed over the years. Either that or he simply chooses to write in different styles each time (hard to tell since I've only read two of his books). But this was nothing like The Plains where the writing was a swirling madness of overdone lyrical sentences, this being more blunt and hard edged, often a little detached and cold. But the fact remains I liked it a lot more than The Plains (not that this one doesn't still have issues).

The book begins after the war with a man named Augustine Killeaton who is interested in horse racing and, more specifically, in gambling. Augustine even manages to buy his own horse (Clementia) and has a big first win before the horse is sadly put to death. This win almost sustains Augustine for the next several years of his life, becomes a beacon of hope for a future fantasy which, in and of itself, is rather pathetic. The first third of the book essentially focuses on him leading you to believe that it's his story. But once he's older and married, and has a son named Clementine, the son, and his own version of the fantasy world, becomes the primary focus of the novel. Clementine creates his own brand of reality in the back garden using marbles to create an imaginary environment of small farms and race courses. Alongside these loner-like behaviours, he also becomes interested in girls and what might be between their legs. There are tangents upon which several threads are attached (a school bully called Barry Launder, the violent neighbour Mr Glasscock, the Australian landscape as an ongoing theme) but no real plot to consider, only the curious upbringing and formative experiences of Clementine against the backdrop of his family life. 

I can't say that I loved it but there was something here that definitely appealed to me (certainly more than The Plains). But it's strange because where The Plains was overly flowery, this, as I said, is blunt and cold, an entirely different style of language. It's more interesting but still didn't necessarily speak to me. There's a lot of ambiguity and oddness to it (close third person narration but which isn't omniscient etc) which I'm tempted to interpret as first novel naivety. Nonetheless, I'm always ready to praise any writer who's willing to try something different and doesn't just stick to one voice, one style, one isolated note for the rest of his career (even if, as the case appears to be, Murnane does stick to the same themes of Australia and desolate landscapes). This was a clunky novel at times but with some genuinely impressive qualities. As such, I am intrigued to turn reading two of Murnane's books into reading three at some point. 

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tamarisk Row was Murnane’s first novel, published in 1974 by Heinemann, a publishing house obviously more adventurous then than they are now. In the Foreword to the edition I am reading Murnane has some mild reproaches for Heinemann’s editor who insisted on a revision he didn’t like, but hey, I think that this unnamed editor deserves a Courage in Publishing Award for taking a risk on an unknown author with a most idiosyncratic style. After a long period out-of-print, Tamarisk Row is now readily available, thanks to Giramondo Publishing under the apparently more empathetic editorship of Ivor Indyk. It is he who is credited by the US-based Dalkey Archive with encouraging Murnane to embark on ‘a new period of creativity in the twenty-first century … which has brought him a wider readership’.

I can’t remember where I read that Tamarisk Row is Murnane’s most ‘accessible’ fiction. On the surface it’s a semi-autobiographical novel evoking a 1940s childhood in country Victoria. Episodes in the young life of Clement Killeaton provide an illusion of realism as he describes his father’s gambling addiction and his frustrated mother’s solace in piety. The casual cruelty of children towards anyone who is different is evoked in episodes that reveal the loneliness of this child of a different sensibility; and his confusion about girls, sex and religion is revealed in the context of muscular Catholicism. The third person narration resembles a child’s limited perspective: his acute observations, his immature preoccupations and his very detailed pseudo-memories all imply naïvete because it’s written in the simple present tense mimicking a child’s way of speaking.

But the child’s pervasive perspective is a charming decoy.
To read the rest of my review please visit
http://anzlitlovers.com/2012/09/14/ta...

[Marcello S · Rating 5 out of 5]

Clement è un ragazzino solitario e sensibile che colleziona e cataloga biglie, tenta di conoscere delle coetanee da cui è attratto e spesso si rifugia nel suo mondo interiore dove ricrea versioni in miniatura della realtà. Ha un padre che scommette ossessivamente sulle corse di cavalli – che sono l’argomento principale del libro - e una madre molto credente che disapprova ma tollera lo stile di vita del marito. Libro che parte in maniera abbastanza convenzionale, quasi elementare, ma che evolve in un susseguirsi di fuochi d’artificio stilistici da lasciarti stordito. La gestione di alcune parti non assomiglia a niente altro che abbia letto. Esordio di Murnane, a cui l’autore ha lavorato per anni; pubblicato nel 1974, già 35enne. Superiore al più noto Le pianure, finisce senza problemi tra le migliori letture dell’anno.

[86/100] 
 
Dall’intervista di Vanni Santoni su La Lettura:
VS: Lei è famoso per la sua «staticità»: non prende l'aereo e per la maggior parte della sua vita non ha mai lasciato l'Australia.
GM: Ho viaggiato quanto bastava per i miei scopi. Ho visitato i distretti occidentali e sud-occidentali del mio stato, Victoria, quindi posso dire di aver visitato circa l'1% dell'Australia. Questi "viaggi", se vogliamo arrivare a chiamarli così, mi hanno fornito gli argomenti per i miei libri. Andare più lontano sarebbe stata solo una distrazione.

[Justin Evans · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, don't read this after you've read other Murnane, would be my suggestion.

On the other hand, it would be a good introduction to his fictional world, a world that contains windows, adolescent sexuality, imagination, literature, Catholicism, rural Victoria, and nothing else. He's hoed those rows a lot sine Tamarisk Row, and hoed them better. His prose is better in other places (clearer in Liftime..., more interestingly complex in the Plains or Inland). The ideas are less pretentious in other places, too (the 'Author's Note' here is unbearable, and misleading: this is just straightforward fictionalized autobiography). Let's not even mention the use of the present tense.

So, I suspect, TR is mostly interesting in a 'history of the author' kind of way. And that's reason enough to read it. Murnane, I suspect, is best thought of as the Proust of imagination (keeping in mind that I don't actually think Proust is the Proust of memory). The interplay between what we really want, what we have, and what we imagine about things we don't have plays out wonderfully in each of the four Murnanes I've read, including here. And here, at least, it isn't complicated with meta-literary worries, which are far less interesting than the imagination itself.

[M. Sarki · Rating 2 out of 5]

http://msarki.tumblr.com/post/7831243...

I have been stalled in my reading of this book, actually I have abandoned it because I find this one a complete bore. But still, I was inspired by it to write something else about Gerald Murnane. Murnane has made quite a splash of late with Barley Patch and stating his reasons at the front for quitting writing fiction for fourteen years. He was asking the question, why write?

Among the many reasons a scholar may choose to point out why a writer writes, the one that impresses me the most, and seems most true, is to find, or have, meaning in one's life. My favorite writers always speak of discovery being the one reward within the pages they compose each day. Of course, discovery could very well make a work the order of high art and not at all as interesting to the person reading it as it was to the author behind it. But again, that is a matter that relies on the author's personality coming through and on to the page. And then it becomes whether or not he or she is somebody we wish to know better or perhaps get intimate with. It is never an easy task considering or discussing why a writer writes. But it is rare when I do continue reading an author I do not personally like, though there have been enough instances where I have relaxed my position because the author flat knocked me out. But to sustain my interest in reading a typically unsavory author depends on interesting subject matter, for no matter how well I think a writer writes if the subject holds no interest for me I flee sooner rather than later. Two conflicting but similar examples I might offer are Geoff Dyer and David Shields. Geoff Dyer is a writer I am not personally drawn to but he writes well and about interesting subjects. David Shields I personally cannot stand and his writing bores me to death though there is some merit to it. Both of these writers have a certain tendency toward creepiness, but Shields trumps Dyer every time in the creep-meter ratings and that is the main reason I abhor him as a person.

A new writer I was late in being introduced to this past year of 2013 has been the Aussie poster child Gerald Murnane. Though having spent most of his writing life basically unknown outside his country, of late he has enjoyed a rather strong emergence in both Great Britain and the United States. Many of his books are still either hard to find or out of print, but slowly the titles are being reintroduced to the masses with some measure of success. I found Murnane a delight to read and my introduction to him began with his small masterpiece titled The Plains. Cut from a much larger work, this book explores landscape and all things literary in ways I had not yet been subjected to in my more than forty years of serious reading. As I worked my way haphazardly through his entire oeuvre it became apparent to me that here was either a person of extreme genius or one of a seriously ill mind still able to write somewhat coherently, though for some it would be argued as too far a stretch on his making sense. There are periods in his books in which that is certainly the case, but Murnane always seems to be able to reconnect the dots, get the train back on the track, and continue barreling full bore across the flat lands. Though seeming to be autobiographical most of the time, Murnane claims that everything he writes is fiction.

The fact that Gerald Murnane is willing, and most eager, to investigate his own memory or images leftover from these memories, makes his writing extremely interesting to a person such as myself. But Murnane adds the qualifier that his memory is not to be trusted and for that reason alone his work is fiction no matter what, or who says otherwise.

On the page Murnane takes enormous indulgences in his beer drinking as well as in his daydreaming over what he might accomplish with the naked other sex. It feels to me that these are mere smoke screens as he attempts to disparage himself with these purported wanton desires for matters of the flesh and flagons of beer that provide for him the escape these behaviors promise from this world he is subjected to live in. And as he attempts to unleash his basest animal behavior upon us he offers dazzling signals from on literary high in order to further confuse the general reader and reduce those who remain into readers who discern and might possibly navigate a way through a labyrinth Murnane insists on calling fiction. But I don't classify what Murnane writes as fiction. In fact, I believe the author is showing us his mind and the frightening way in which it works. There are not many writers who can open their lids and show us what is inside. But Murnane somehow manages to. While reading him there are many instances when it seems to me his words have been blown or shot from a loose cannon positioned from a wholly different risen plain than the one we may have thought he was standing on. His novel Inland is a prime example of his potentially insane thinking that offers us a final proof that he cannot be trusted even with his truth. But it certainly is a fun time for those of us still willing to try.

A film that could provide a parallel look to those of us interested and perhaps an opportunity to actually "get" Murnane while he is still alive, is the brilliant documentary on Ray Johnson titled How to Draw a Bunny. What is similar to both of these performance artists could very well be discovered in their vastly organized archives and the enormous bodies of work that will most likely survive their mutual drowning in their compiling of it.

http://www.amazon.com/How-Draw-Bunny-...

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

I find Gerald Murnane's work fascinating, and I wasn't disappointed with Tamarisk Row. This was his first novel, published in 1974, but I read a 2008 edition which Murnane has re-edited, placing the last chapter of the book at the end where he originally intended it, instead of how his editor pesuaded him to do it in 1974. Tamarisk Row is the author's portrait of an artist at the age of ten, and tells the story of a boy named Clement, giving weight to both the real events of the story and Clement's imaginings. The title refers to an imagined farm as well as an imagined racehorse being raised by the imagined people populating the farm, and this is only a small part of the world Clement has created for himself in his back yard. As the novel progresses, so does Clement's imagination as well as Murnane's prose so by the second half of the book we have some paragraph long sentences describing Clement's perceptions, and I love it. But what I value is Murnane's way of revisiting the same themes, using the same motifs, constantly refine his voice, and in this first novel it is all there, from marbles an stained glass racing silks and open plains.

[Paul Dembina · Rating 5 out of 5]

My word this chap knows how to write a sentence. I'll be reading more of his work I think.

[Kevin Tole · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am reading this, the new 2019 edition published by the very worthy andotherstories house (www.andotherstories.org) which has a short introduction by Murnane himself. I'm not often given to reading or recounting the blurb on the backs of books but this time it is worth it both for the synopsis and the comments.

Clement Killeaton transforms his father's gambling, his mother's piety, his fellow pupil's cruelty and the mysterious but forbidden attractions of sex into an imagined world centred on horse-racing played out in the dusty backyard of his home, across the landscapes of the district, and the continent of Australia. An unsparing evocation of Catholic childhood in a country town in the late 1940s, 'Tamarisk Row's' lyrical prose is charged with yearning, boredom, fear and fascination of boyhood.
First published in Australia in 1974, and previously unpublished in the UK, Tamarisk Row is Gerald Murnane's debut novel, and in many respects his masterpiece.

I'm not sure I'd go along with the "masterpiece" blat having read The Plains but apart from that , it's an excellent summation of the book.

'(For Murnane,) access to the other world - a world distinct from and in many ways better than our own - is gained by neither good works nor by grace but by giving the self up to fiction.'
J.M. Coetzee, New York Review of Books

'Murnane's sentences are little dialectics of boredom and beauty, flatness and depth. They combine a matter-of-factness, often approaching coldness, with an intricate lyricism.'
Ben Lerner, New Yorker.

These are insightful comments with which I fully agree. To be recognised in a first novel by both Coetzee and Lerner is no mean achievement.

The foreword to this edition written in 2007 points out his struggle with writing, of 5 years of false starts till he saw how the work should pan out and knew he could complete it, followed by another five years to write and get it published. Murnane does not believe in reading fiction as if it is a statement upon the 'real world'. It is the ability to let other worlds be explored which bear no relationship to persons or places in the real world. The Narrator, the third person, the implied author looking out from a million miles away from the reader. "How much should I claim to know," (as the author). The technique he uses in Tamarisk Row he terms 'considered narration'.

The place and time are quickly set and what follows is neatly covered by the synopsis above from the back of the book. What draws you in is Murnane's evocative use of prose. We look for and want more. The layers of scenes in the phrases he uses such that each sentence is like a series of multiple clauses but in which each of the postulates given to us in each phrase needs to be held in hand as it will provide information we might need later. Reading Murnane has to be done carefully - as carefully as each sentence was written and constructed. Murnane DEMANDS a careful, intelligent and interested reader. The prose is not tricksy or full of complicated non-everyday words but there are clauses to clauses, all written in perfectly understandable English which need to be held in the frame. Some might see Murnane's prose as dry and unfeeling, as arid as the land of the tamarisk. But others will see it awash with information and nuance to be gleaned and stored offering us potential insights like lures or baits for conquest.

It gradually builds into this tale of Augustine and Clement Killeaton, of Bassett where they live, of Catholic upbringing, of racing and betting. Needless to say, as a great archivist and racegoer, Murnane gets the feel and taste of racing and the world of race horses spot on without having to describe the minutiae of The Race. It is precise and relentless. We learn that Augustine (Gus) is an Assistant Farm Manager at the local mental hospital but that his debts and winnings really come from his passion in horse racing and his role as a skelper for other punters and bookies. The debts gradually build up. Racing permeates the mind and imagination of the child with his made up games in the dusty yard but it might as well be the actuality of the race in the mind of the father with its imagery of colours, and training and jockeys and owners and results and archives.

In Clement, the son's world, we enter into the mind and upbringing of a young Catholic boy and his tinkering with the world of sex. Clement's world is deeply creative and rich in imagination, where scenes from books are played out in his games and where his imagination is free to construct vivid scenarios. It is this blend of imagination and reality that Murnane writes that keeps us on our toes, that shape shifts and presents a melange of truth and dare and truly presents a warm rounded feeling of family security despite the debt which gradually accrues through failed bets as we read. This is typical of the prose:-

One evening it happens again that a creature, whose radiance has persisted through many lands and whose journey has taken it across levelled hills and buried valleys where it alone might have paused and wondered about the true history of those deceptively empty places, keeps the boy watching and holding and urging it almost aloud through pale-green insidious mists past tranquil hinterlands until, as it nears the land that may not really be a land where he has wanted it to go, he sees it waver and flicker and has to narrow his eyes and tilt his head but he cannot see it across those last slopes or cliffs and loses sight of it, so that he will never know if it is lost forever in some capricious wilderness that was never its true destination or whether, like a few others that he has watched on other afternoons, it has turned back after all towards lands that it will still remember, and if so whether he may one day catch sight of it in a strangely altered shape arriving back in places among places that resemble those where he first discovered it and trying to enact again some of those first great journeys that now no longer have any purpose.

I don't know anyone who could write a sentence so dense and full of meaning as to be verging on the poetic with meaning beyond itself.

At times it is like a child's book - an elucidation of a child's secrets. And at other times it feels like someone so hooked on a subject riffing / rapping in prose on that subject. Every word is important but it seems like every word is ordinary, everyday, non-spectacular, non-special but all put together to make a magical special effect

Murnane is a master. I sincerely hope he does win the Nobel Laureate.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tamarisk Row is the story of a young boy growing up in Australia. He is a solitary-type and prefers to immerse himself in an imaginary world rather than mingle with kids his own age. His father is a compulsive gambler and because of this the world of horse racing becomes central to the boy's fantasies which feature a complex web of images involving calendars, colours, grasslands, creeks and rivers, Catholic rituals, priests' houses, horse races and racking skills, marbles, stones, freckles, books and libraries, and tunnels and secret places, that have all been used repeatedly and with remarkable consistency by Murnane in his subsequent fiction. It has been called "one of the very best books about childhood and the world as the child finds it."

So, should you read this book? Well, why would I write about 7000+ words in an article on my blog if I thought it was just esoterica? Despite a propensity for longer sentences than are really necessary no matter how grammatically correct they might be, Tamarisk Row is actually quite an accessible novel, a moving and believable, portrait of a family muddling their way through hard times and of the bond between son and father that never wavers despite Gus’s frequent absences to pursue his dream.

[Gregory Duke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Indescribable magic of the imagination, cognition refashioned into embodied metaphor that, through the visceral ambiguity of language and fiction, becomes just as real as the concrete detailing of a Catholic boyhood in Australia in the early-/mid-twentieth century. Few novels so completely realize the connection and disconnection between a father and son, the complex interiorities of both the stress-addled and neurotic adult mind and the prepubescently/inquisitively sexual and almost limitless mind of a child. So much almost untenable beauty in these blocky, dense paragraphs. Simple sentences concatenate with multiclausals that, regardless of their extension, do not operate as confessions but rather as often translucent recollections/dreams/projections/excavations of the indelible segments of conscious experience. A definitively late-modernist dig into cerebral life. Yet there is so much nature, so much physicality. Somehow fragmented yet holistic.

[Jack · Rating 5 out of 5]

At times its as if the book paints childhood through brushstokes of prose; narratives that dissolve and materialise into and out of the fantastical eyes of a child. Grapsing and colourful and tragic and inspired.
The text takes me beyond the polarities of adulthood, and met me somewhere - out there- in the past, yet, firmly here.

[Christopher Robinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very strong, very striking debut novel from Gerald Murnane. Its depiction of childhood, young boyhood in particular, was hilarious and disturbing and very, very believable. I loved the long, winding sentences and was heartened to see him working in that vein so early on, as I so greatly admired it in his later works like The Plains and A Million Windows. Less refined than those later, stronger works, but still quite brilliant in its own right. Highly recommended, will definitely reread.

[michal k-c · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really easy to lose track of how long and carefully constructed each of the sentences are here — if you’re into diagramming sentences (I am) this novel is a goldmine.
Catholic gambling father is a cool type of guy to be. Effective if occasionally long-winded Bildungsroman about the secret lives of adults and children.

[Julie]

10/10

[Shawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the best books I have ever read. I wouldn't place it quite as high as my top-of-the-top list (Moby Dick, Shakespeare, Pride and Prejudice, To the Lighthouse) but I would rank it pretty close. Murnane has such a unique and fully-realized vision; there is really nothing else like it that I know of. I am not a literary scholar so I don't have command of the taxonomy for this kind of writing, but from what I understand, this book falls into the genre of metafiction or autofiction, where the author is writing about his own fictional imagination and presenting it fictively, but where it is primarily autobiographical and reflective. Much of the work is also philosophical although not espoused as such because it's conveyed through a very personal lens. This first novel is also not the usual awkward attempt at something the author only masters in later writings. After having read a number of his other books already, I can say that Murnane's style is already completely developed here, and perhaps even a bit more accessible than in later books such as The Plains. Unlike his later books, the characters in Tamarisk Row have names and the story does follow some conventional narrative. Instead of chapters the book is broken up into short episodic vignettes with wry or ironic subject headings that function as a kind of commentary from the author. What is most unique and special about Murnane's writing in this book is how extensively he brings you into the world of his imagination, and the grace with which he shares his own vision of where his imagination is able to take him.

[Christina · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5

“a thousand tightly bunched horses that will show the long story of a boy’s struggle to become a good Catholic and save his soul in the end, specks and blotches of sickly brown and dark-grey well up and spread like weeping sores.”

Little Catholic Clement, lonely and deeply imaginative, in a 1940s Australian suburb is desperate to see a girl naked, taught by bitch nuns, surrounded by savage boys, by clueless or drunk adults. His thoughts get muddled with his dad’s obsession with certain breeds of chickens and a fixation on horse racing, which keeps the family in debt. Clement’s life is part strange dreamlike imaginings, part brutal bodily reality, carnal urges, all mixed up with Catholic imagery. The sentences often go on and on, bend this way, then take a turn around a corner, but they are extraordinary. An unusual wonder of a book that captures the often strange inner worlds and secret lives of children, the little spaces they create for themselves in the realities they must inhabit.

[Belinda Rule · Rating 4 out of 5]

More a series of prose poems than a novel, which need to be read one at a time. Amazing evocation of the structure and logic of childhood fantasy and imagination - I had the feeling that I was reading things I had never read before but that were intensely familiar. The imagination in question is super mid-century patriarchal, which makes it quite unpleasant to read as a woman.

[Jack · Rating 5 out of 5]

Murnane's writing is like listening to opera or watching a mathematician fill a huge whiteboard with equations—I recognise its beauty, acutely aware a significant part of the experience is lost on me. I don't really understand Murnane's philosophy of writing and why he does what he does. I'm not 100% sure what it is he's trying to accomplish.

I feel it's a very ugly way to put it, but there's something very autistic about his prose—not in the contemporary slanging of the word, so casually thrown around as if remembering a lot of Simpsons quotes qualifies for neurodiversity, but in the clinical and cruel understanding of the word from the middle of the 20th century. A truly unique and hermetic understanding of its surroundings, something that the world around it tried and ultimately failed to correct. Not something quirky or celebrated as a 'superpower', but a way of living that was a vague embarrassment amongst family and the community.

I might not be articulating this as well as I want, but all of the above is intended to be complementary. Tamarisk Row is probably the strangest and most affecting depiction of a dull boy's dull life. If I could wave a magic wand and award a Nobel, it would go straight to Murnane. This book was out of print for decades.

If I could wave another wand, or the same wand, as I imagine it has a couple of charges left, I'd whip up a series of whirlwinds, and anyone currently reading Lolita would have their books swept up in a gust, and find Tamarisk Row gently descending upon them.

A big thing I've seen bandied about in online discourse is how men don't read fiction any more. This is probably because most people in publishing have fathers who have communication skills, a historical anomaly, so editors and literary agents don't see the bestselling potential of the "books you read to try and understand your dad" genre. Murnane could well be the next Stephen King were this rich vein tapped.

No, I don't really give a shit about horse racing or marbles or the totalising psychological impact of Catholicism. But I think I know what you mean, dad. I think I kind of know what you mean.

[Ron Roelandt · Rating 2 out of 5]

I bellissimi colori delle biglie, di cui una trovata, Tamarisk Row. Colori che sfumano nei colori delle maglie dei fantini, l'outsider che torna da una posizione perduta e diventa il favorito, Tamarisk Row. Il mondo di un ragazzo di una decina d'anni, confini vaghi tra realtà e fantasia. Il padre di Clement scommette sui cavalli e con questo influisce l'intera vita del giovane Killeaton. Il cortile diventa un ipodromo nella sua fantasia, i primi passi nel campo dell’amore vanno nella direzione delle figlie di alcuni dei tanti creditori di suo padre. Per il resto Clemente ha poche possibilità di vedere altri bambini, sua madre non vuole che giochi con loro, la vergogna. Un bambino percepisce quel mondo, ma non ha mai imparato a ribellarsi ad esso. La madre iper protettiva ("Non aprire a nessuno quando io non ci sono, Clement."), Il padre dipendente dal gioco d'azzardo ("Questo sarà sicuramente il grande colpo" "), nonostante sono e rimangono sacri per il ragazzino. Sacri, come i santi che incontra in chiesa e a scuola, il suo unico collegamento con il mondo esterno.

"Tamarisk Row" è il romanzo con cui Gerald Murnane fece il suo debutto nel 1974. Murnane è diventato quello che alcuni chiamano il più grande scrittore australiano. Gran parte della sua fama deriva dal fatto che non ha mai lasciato l'Australia. Eh? È un merito? Dico.
Il mondo che si crea Clement Killeaton è interessante, come lo descrive Gerald Murnane. Un po 'come un giornalista radiofonico alle corse di cavalli. Frasi lunghe, frasi lunghissime, in cui passano i tre quarti del campo dei cavalli con tutta la loro storia. Prima che arrivi il punto. In alcuni casi, finalmente. Almeno per me.

●●○○○ (2,5/5)

Per la recensione completa: https://ronfa.blogspot.com/2021/02/ta...

[Daniel KML · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is Gerald Murnane’s debut, written when he was thirty-five years old. I don't know why I had expected a more conventional work, but all the seeds that would mark Murnane’s later fiction are already present — his style, the very long compound sentences, each comprising a main clause and numerous subordinate clauses, and his system of images connecting the various leitmotifs he preferred, such as marbles, horse racing, and the vastness of plains.

Tamarsik Row could essentially be defined as a bildungsroman, as the main character, Clement Killeaton, is a boy between six and twelve years old undergoing a kind of moral and psychological development. His father is addicted to horse racing, his mother struggles with the family’s life of perpetual poverty, and little Clement spends his days playing in the backyard, devising dreamy scenarios of horse races and idyllic landscapes. Gerald Murnane writes like no other writer, narrating the story as if one were seeing it through the light refracted by the reflections of a richly ornamented marble. Having said that, I believe Tamarisk Row also represents the bildungsroman of Murnane’s fictional personage — or, in his own words, as stated in the foreword to the novel’s most recent edition:

I have my own term for the sort of narration that I used in Tamarisk Row. I call it considered narration. It might be said of some works of fiction that they bring to life certain characters. I would hope that the text of Tamarisk Row could be said to have brought to life the fictional personage responsible for it: the narrator through whose mind the text is reflected.

A fictional personage I have been extremely happy to follow.

[Luke Savva · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have never read anything like this.

By his own admission the author as a kid used to be obsessed with horse racing and this is what must be responsible for the relentless galloping inflections within his prose.

Also by his own admission there is little in the way of plot in Tamarisk Row but this observation, I think, does a disservice to the tender father and son chapters and the luminous schoolyard scenes which, by my reckoning, outstrip even those of Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks.

The author's introduction to the And Other Stories edition gives insight into how he finally approached at the age of thirty-five this, his first novel, thinking it more vital to explore the kind of mind that would conceive of this kind of fiction. The result is a veritable delirium, childlike fantasy overlaid upon the Australian landscape, the topography of one blurring with the topography of the other.

And as final chapters go, this one left me dizzied and breathless.

[Jack Alexander Lawrence · Rating 4 out of 5]

A geometric topography of the impenetrable transparency that dwells in the multiply refracted heart of the crystal we call memory, the flexing, endless, airless horizon that delimits the plains of place, pain and perseveration.

Rather than just the semi-autobiographical story of a young boy, we get an insight into the unfolding mind of the narrator, as they reflect on Clement's childhood.

From what I've heard, Murnane only gets more abstracted as his work gets further away from his debut, so I'm looking forward to taking the plunge.