Didn´t read as much of each as I wanted to but here is my ranking. My great difficulty was choosing between Murnane and Jaeggy.
1- Gerald Murnane- (Landscape with Landscape (1985); part of The Plains (1982); currently reading A Lifetime on Clouds(1976)).I think, he is certainly the most original and innovative of the three writers. Murnane has the talent of converting his personal obsessions into high literature. The one that is most apparent is the deep interest in landscapes of a writer, that paradoxically never cared about travelling, specially not outside Australia. More than real landscapes, his ones, even when based on minutely represented scenarios of his homeland are the territories and metaterritories of his imagination. Other obsessions I noted sex, booze, the confrontation with the act of writing itself.
Having read Landscape with Landscape, which seems to contain his major themes, my relationship with his writings was rather cerebral until I lit on A Lifetime on Clouds. It's his second book, a coming to age novel, which centers around a youthful sex maniac. The theme is developed with so much empathy and humor, that Adrian Sherd easily qualifies for the most cutest and innocent sex maniac ever. And one must remember that the book was written in the seventies, the years of the sexual revolution, so it´s straightforwardness at the time would be more unusual than today. It sheds also a light on the whole of Murnane´s writings. Failing as an writer must for him been equivalent to failing as a man, which explain much of the despair that permeates his fiction (greetings from uncle Freud).
2- Fleur Jaeggy ( Sweet Days of Discipline (1989); S. S. Proleterka (2001); some of the stories of I Am the Brother of XX (2014).
Fleur Jaeggy has a unique voice and a particular sensibility for presenting the loneliness and the voids of human relationships. Her protagonists, who never seem in want of money or material goods, seem to be steeped in a cold atmosphere, where their hunger for love and an own identity is never satisfied. This is still intensified as the author in several stories uses freely the vocabulary and the metaphors of dead and decay common to the German Expressionism, to illustrate the situation and the environment of her entombed characters.
In spite of interesting and moving with the general sadness that pervades it, I found her oeuvre somewhat uneven and repetitive (and I have read only part of it). SS Proleterka might have been a sequel to, or a chapter of Sweet Days of Discipline. And the author seems to achieve more profundity when she uses first person narrator.
3-Xavier Marias- Thus Bad Begins (2014). Didn´t click with him. My impressions are based on only one book. While recognizing his importance as an post war author who didn´t allow that the atrocities of the Spanish civilian war and the Franco period would be forgotten, the Spain conjured in Thus Bad Begins seems to my mind rather obsolete for an 2014 novel. On the other hand one can´t forget how intensely post war Spain resisted the modern trends, specially those coming from America. The portrayal of the social groups is also rather superficial and sexist.
