WLF Prize 2022 - Gerald Murnane

[Liam]

But did you like it?

 

[Leseratte]

I don´t know if this question is for me. I usually prefer authors who tell an engrossing story, where I can get involved with plot and characters, things Murnane´s narratives refuse. Dickens, in this sense the absolute opposite of Murnane, has been a favorite with me for many many years.
But I think Murnane's sort of narrative is innovative in it´s own sort of way, more in the direction of Clarice Lispector, were you have a very narcissistic narrator feeling his way through being and storytelling, and a narrative intensely bend on itself.

 

[Liam]

^I think that it is a very apt description of what Murnane is trying to achieve in his fiction, yes

 

[Leseratte]

You made my day, now!

 

[Liam]

I love the phrase "feeling his way through storytelling," and I think it is exactly what Murnane is doing in his work, most especially in the book you've just read (which happens to be my favorite): Landscape with Landscape!

 

[Ludus]

Just finished The Interior of Gaaldine, a fantastic work of fiction about Murnane not writing any more fiction that is followed by three newer pieces of fiction.

 

[Leseratte]

Are you reading the whole Murnane works at a heap, @ Ludus?

 

[Ludus]

Are you reading the whole Murnane works at a heap, @ Ludus?

I am reading Stream System in order. Gaaldine, according to my investigations, is the fiction that closes Emerald Blue, the collection collected in the book of collected fiction Stream System, which is also the name of a piece of fiction collected in Velvet Waters, a book of fiction collected in the collection mentioned at the beggining of this paragraph.

(As you can see, I catched the Murnonavirus.)

 

[Leseratte]

I see!

I think I´ve got it too, but maybe in a more moderate degree. It´s quite refreshing to know that when one reads certain pieces of his fiction, one is into different collections at the same time.

 

[TheFriendCatcher]

Just finished Landscape with Landscape. There seem to be recurrent patterns like a similar kind of narrator, who is or wants to be a writer, drinks a lot, is obsessed about a landscape and in a smaler degree about a woman. But this summing up hardly does him justice...

Like Liam, this is my favorite book of his and the recurrent patterns are very important as to why. I've never seen this mentioned much (although I've also never seen the book itself mentioned much anywhere) but what seems to be going on is exaggeration through repetition. The motifs that carry through the stories recur, of course, but the qualities of each seem to mutate steadily with each iteration. Because of that, I've always considered to be an exercise in exploring the relationship between the creative act and the material of the "real world" where creativity draws its inspiration.

In my reading, the first story is the most mimetic -- closest to the source -- with each further iteration basically incorporating the reality of the previous story as the springboard for its environment. It's almost like a meta game of telephone or, more fancily, an extended exercise in mise-en-abyme. The title I think points to this: what we're seeing is endless iterations of the same landscape embedded within each other, with the source landscape getting more obscure the deeper we go.

I mean, I could be way off-base –- it has been about a decade since I last read it and I don't have my copy at-hand to check on any of the details –- but this has been my sense of what he's done here and why I cherish it as a really great work of literature.

 

[Leseratte]

The motifs that carry through the stories recur, of course, but the qualities of each seem to mutate steadily with each iteration. Because of that, I've always considered to be an exercise in exploring the relationship between the creative act and the material of the "real world" where creativity draws its inspiration.

In my reading, the first story is the most mimetic -- closest to the source -- with each further iteration basically incorporating the reality of the previous story as the springboard for its environment. It's almost like a meta game of telephone or, more fancily, an extended exercise in mise-en-abyme. The title I think points to this: what we're seeing is endless iterations of the same landscape embedded within each other, with the source landscape getting more obscure the deeper we go.

Enjoyed your summary. I can only agree with you.

 

[Liam]

^A deep and beautiful description, my friend, of what Murnane attempts to do in the book. I couldn't have put it better myself

 

[Ludus]

Just finished Stream System, the whole thing. What an unforgettable book. But I don't know if I want to keep reading Murnane. In his best he is incomparable, but in his worst he is exasperating. I suffered through the longer pieces of this collection, and that leads me to believe that I won't enjoy his novels that much. That being said, some stories in this collection got into my favorites list, and I'm most certainly going to read them again soon, even if I doubt I'll reread the whole book.

 

[Leseratte]

Just finished Stream System, the whole thing. What an unforgettable book. But I don't know if I want to keep reading Murnane. In his best he is incomparable, but in his worst he is exasperating. I suffered through the longer pieces of this collection, and that leads me to believe that I won't enjoy his novels that much. That being said, some stories in this collection got into my favorites list, and I'm most certainly going to read them again soon, even if I doubt I'll reread the whole book.

I have the feeling that Murnane's fiction is a system in itself, like Lispector´s, which is also not easy to tackle. I got interested, I want to go on reading him, but richly interspred with other works of fiction.

 

[namelesshere]

Great profile of Murnane here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/01/the-reclusive-giant-of-australian-fiction

 

[namelesshere]

Finished The Plains this week... my word, what a book. Very hard to describe my reaction to it - I can recognise it's a brilliant piece of writing on creativity, imagination, landscape, belonging, the drive to own a landscape... incredibly, incredibly impressive to pack so much into so few pages, but I don't know if I"enjoyed" it (certainly not in the same way I enjoyed Tamarisk Row or Border Districts).

 

[Liam]

The one GM book I never see anybody talk about is A Million Windows,

I have it in my TBR pile, but with the new semester starting in less than a week I don't think I'll have any time to read for pleasure until, basically, next summer, ?

 

[alik-vit]

......the new semester....

Please, don't say this word! Don't say it! Not this one!!!

 

[Ben Jackson]

Finished The Plains this week... my word, what a book. Very hard to describe my reaction to it - I can recognise it's a brilliant piece of writing on creativity, imagination, landscape, belonging, the drive to own a landscape... incredibly, incredibly impressive to pack so much into so few pages, but I don't know if I"enjoyed" it (certainly not in the same way I enjoyed Tamarisk Row or Border Districts).

That's one book I have not read yet. I love your thoughts concerning this work.

 

[Ben Jackson]

This is my appraisal on Gerald Murnane, the final candidate I'm going to write.

A perfect definition of a great writer/musician or artist is that he/she grows, exploring the world with different, flexible approach to illumine the factors constituting existence. Since we are discussing Literature, I'll list some of these writers.

Writers like Samuel Beckett, for example, has three dimensions or phases: Modernist epoch which culminates in Murphy, his first celebrated work, Existential epoch which culminates in Waiting for Godot and Krapp's Last Tape, Post-Modernist epoch which culminate in Watt. Same can be spoken for Henry James, the first period which culminate in Portrait of a Lady in 1881, the second phase which culminates in The Bostonians, and the final phase, the modernist which produces Golden Bowl (the work of his I've read) and The Ambassadors, and Shakespeare: Comedy (As You Like It), Tragedy (Hamlet, Julius Caesar, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet), Tragic-Comedy (The Tempest). While some other writers works can be divided into two branches. Works of Soyinka, for example, can be divided into two phases: the more accessible works like Jero Plays and Lion and the Jewel, and the more philosophical works with abstruse language and style, like Madmen and Specialists, Death and the King's Horseman, A Dance of the Forests and his novel The Interpreters, Graham Greene, which works are categoried under environs of political/espionage: The Quiet American, The Comedians, or philosophical/theologian perspective: The End of the Affair, Brighton Rock, or Mahfouz, which works grouped under social/realist narrative: Palace Walk, Karnak Cafe, or philosophical, Journey of Ibn Fattouma.

In the case of Gerald Murnane, his works can be divided into two: the Proustian and Patrick White (Tamarisk Row, The Plains) and Beckett and Borges (Border Districts, Barley Patch). His works, written in long skeins of ruminative prose with marvelous insight and depth, are essayistic meditations of his memory, tracing the ordrinariness of lost time narrated beautifully in an Australian landscape (the influence of Proust and Patrick White, works set in Melbourne), fusing it with verisimilitude of recurring abstractions (horse races, stained glass windows) which he uses to capture, perfectly and dexterously, the Lost time. The major theme in his writing is the impermeance of memory, and, in his second phase which began with Barely Patch (the White and Proustian first period culminating in The Plains, a work I've not read yet but have read the reviews from members of this forum), exploration and views on his writing and life as a house husband, drawing from his personal experience, sometimes through metafictional technique (Borges and Beckett's influences becoming more visible in this period).

A writer of few works all written with superb insight, depth and power, Murnane is an incredible writer who, I must compare, to other giants of modern fiction: Kraszhnarhokai, Kadare and Cormac McCarthy, to list just a few names.