Kirjahaku

Stories from a mind-bending Australian master, "a genius on the level of Beckett" (Teju Cole) Never before available to readers in this hemisphere, these stories--originally published from 1985 to 2012--offer an irresistible compendium of the work of one of contemporary fiction's greatest magicians. While the Australian master Gerald Murnane's reputation rests largely on his longer works of fiction, his short stories stand among the most brilliant and idiosyncratic uses of the form since Borges, Beckett, and Nabokov. Brutal, comic, obscene, and crystalline, Stream System runs from the haunting "Land Deal," which imagines the colonization of Australia and the ultimate vengeance of its indigenous people as a series of nested dreams; to "Finger Web," which tells a quietly terrifying, fractal tale of the scars of war and the roots of misogyny; to "The Interior of Gaaldine," which finds its anxious protagonist stranded beyond the limits of fiction itself. No one else writes like Murnane, and there are few other authors alive still capable of changing how--and why--we read.

A bittersweet farewell to the world and the word by the Australian master "The mind is a place best viewed from borderlands . . ." Border Districts, purportedly the Australian master Gerald Murnane's final work of fiction, is a hypnotic, precise, and self-lacerating "report" on a life led as an avid reader, fumbling lover, "student of mental imagery," and devout believer--but a believer not in the commonplaces of religion, but rather in the luminescence of memory and its handmaiden, literature. In Border Districts, a man moves from a capital city to a remote town in the border country, where he intends to spend the last years of his life. It is time, he thinks, to review the spoils of a lifetime of seeing, a lifetime of reading. Which sights, which people, which books, fictional characters, turns of phrase, and lines of verse will survive into the twilight? A dark-haired woman with a wistful expression? An ancestral house in the grasslands? The colors in translucent panes of glass, in marbles and goldfish and racing silks? Feeling an increasing urgency to put his mental landscape in order, the man sets to work cataloging this treasure, little knowing where his "report" will lead and what secrets will be brought to light. Border Districts is a jewel of a farewell from one of the greatest living writers of English prose.

A kaleidoscopic meditation on the glories and pitfalls of storytelling. "The house of fiction," wrote Henry James, "has . . . not one window, but a million." Gerald Murnane takes these words as his starting point, and asks: Who, exactly, are that house's residents, and what do they see from their respective rooms? Focusing on the importance of trust and the ever-present risk of betrayal in writing as in life, these nested stories explore the fraught relationships between author and reader, child and parent, boyfriend and girlfriend, husband and wife. Murnane's fiction is woven from images -- the reflections of the setting sun on distant windowpanes, seemingly limitless grasslands, a procession of dark-haired women, a clearing in a forest, the colors indigo and silver-grey, and the mysterious death of a young woman -- which build to an emotional climax that is all the more powerful for the intricacy of its patterning.

Clement Killeaton transforms his father's gambling, his mother's piety, his fellow pupils' cruelty and the mysterious but forbidden attractions of sex into an imagined world centred on horse-racing and played out in the dusty backyard of his home, across the landscapes of the district, and the continent of Australia. An unsparing evocation of a Catholic childhood in a country town in the late 1940s, Tamarisk Row's lyrical prose is charged with the 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.

A man moves from a capital city to a remote town in the border country, where he intends to spend the last years of his life. It is time, he thinks, to review the spoils of a lifetime of seeing, a lifetime of reading. Which sights, people, books, fictional characters, turns of phrase and lines of verse will survive into the twilight? Feeling an increasing urgency to put his mental landscape in order, the man sets to work cataloguing his memories, little knowing what secrets they will yield and where his `report' will lead.Border Districts is a jewel of a farewell from one of the greatest living writers of English prose. Winner of the Australian 2018 Prime Minister's Literary Award and shortlisted for the 2018 Miles Franklin Award, this is Murnane's first work to be published in the UK in thirty years.

Originally published between 1985 and 2012, these stories offer an enthralling introduction to the work of one of contemporary fiction's greatest magicians, and a map of Gerald Murnane's evolution as a writer. Spare, transparent and profane, This career-spanning volume ranges from 'Finger Web', a fractal tale of the scars of war and the roots of misogyny, to 'Land Deal', which imagines Australia's colonisation and the ultimate vengeance of its indigenous people as a series of nested dreams, to 'The Interior of Gaaldine', a story which finds its anxious protagonist stranded beyond the limits of fiction itself, and which points the way toward Murnane's later works, from Barley Patch to Border Districts. With potent style and determined vision, Murnane creates sensitive portraits of intimate relationships - with parents, uncles and aunts, and particularly children - and probes each situation for anxiety and embarrassment, shame or delight. Murnane treats emotions and thoughts as he does minor objects: he shines light through them and makes them new, remaking the vessel of literature as he goes.

'Someone has written that all art aspires to the condition of music. My experience is that all art, including all music, aspires to the condition of horse-racing.' This collection of essays leads the reader into the searching and wildly fertile imagination of Gerald Murnane, one of the masters of contemporary Australian writing, author of the classics Border Districts and Tamarisk Row, and winner of the Patrick White Literary Award. He writes of himself: as a boy making racehorses of his marbles, an obsession shared with Jack Kerouac; as a writer, working his first ten years in secret; as a reader, trying to understand the mystery of the right sentence by way of Virginia Woolf and Robert Frost; as a teacher, exploring the endless ways in which words can express the contours of our thoughts. From these vantage points Murnane sees the worlds of significance that lie within, or just beyond, the everyday details of Australian life. Carrying the reader with him across the valleys, plains and grasslands of his mind, this singular author creates an immersive landscape in which every word has its own space, shape and weight.

In the first days of spring in his eighty-second year, Gerald Murnane – perhaps the greatest living writer of English prose – began a project that would round off his strange career as a novelist. He would read all of his books in turn and prepare a report on each. His original intention was to lodge the reports in two of his legendary filing cabinets: in the Chronological Archive, which documents his life as a whole, and the Literary Archive, which is devoted to everything he has written. As the reports grew, however, they themselves took on the form of a book, a book as beguiling and hallucinatory, in its way, as the works on which they were meant to report. These miniature memoirs or stories lead the reader through the capacious territory Murnane refers to as his mind: they dwell on the circumstances that gave rise to his writing, on images and associations, on Murnane’s own theories of fiction, and then memories of a deeply personal kind. The final essay is, of course, on Last Letter to a Reader itself: it considers the elation and exhilaration that accompany the act of writing, and offers a moving finale to what must surely be Murnane’s last work, as death approaches.

Inland is a work which gathers in emotional power as it moves across the grasslands of its narrator’s imagination – from Szolnok County on the great plains of Hungary where a man writes in the library of his manor house, to the Institute of Prairie Studies in Tripp County, South Dakota, where the editor of the journal Hinterland receives his writing, to the narrator’s own native district in Melbourne County, between Moonee Ponds and the Merri, where he recalls the constant displacements of his childhood. ‘No thing in the world is one thing,’ he declares; ‘some places are many more than one place.’ These overlapping worlds are bound by recurring motifs – fish pond, fig-tree, child-woman, the colours white, red and green – and by deep feelings of intimacy and betrayal, which are brought to full expression as the book moves to its close.

Published in Australia in 2009, Barley Patch was Murnane's first book in fourteen years, written after a period in which he had thought he would never write fiction again. The book begins with the question, ‘Must I write?’ What follows is both a chronicle of the images that have endured in the author’s mind and an exploration of their nature. The clarity of the images is extraordinary, as is their range, from Mandrake the Magician to the bachelor uncle kicked in the ‘stones’ as a child, from a cousin’s doll’s house to the mysterious woman who lets her hair down, from the soldier beetle who winks messages from God to the racehorses that run forever in the author’s mind.The narrator lays bare the acts of writing and imagining, finally giving us a glimpse of the mythical place where the characters of fiction dwell before they come into existence in books. With something of the spirit of Italo Calvino and Georges Perec, this is a cornerstone of Murnane's unclassifiable project, for which he is a deserving Nobel Prize candidate.‘A genius.’ Teju Cole

Landscape with Landscape was Gerald Murnane’s fourth book, after The Plains, and his first collection of short fiction. When it was first published, thirty years ago, it was cruelly reviewed. ‘I feel sorry for my fourth-eldest, which of all my book-children was the most brutally treated in its early years,’ Murnane writes in his foreword to this new edition. In hindsight it can be seen to contain some of his best writing, and to offer a wide-ranging exploration of the different landscapes which make up the imagination of this extraordinary Australian writer. Five of the six loosely connected stories also trace a journey through the suburbs of Melbourne in the 1960s, as the writer negotiates the conflicting demands of Catholicism and sex, self-consciousness and intimacy, alcohol and literature. The sixth story, ‘The Battle of Acosta Nu’, is remarkable for its depth of emotion, as it imagines a Paraguayan man imagining a country called Australia, while his son sickens and dies before his eyes.

On their vast estates, the landowning families of the plains have preserved a rich and distinctive culture. Obsessed with their own habitat and history, they hire artisans, writers and historians to record in minute detail every aspect of their lives, and the nature of their land. A young film-maker arrives on the plains, hoping to make his own contribution to the elaboration of this history. In a private library he begins to take notes for a film, and chooses the daughter of his patron for a leading role. Twenty years later, he begins to tell his haunting story of life on the plains.

Klassikar frå Australia.For tjue år sidan, då eg fyrste gong kom til slettene, heldt eg augo opne. Eg såg etter alt i landskapet som kunne tyda på ei opphøgd meining bak det som kunne sjåast.Slettene av Gerald Murnane er ein klassikar. Det er ei underleg historie om eit alternativt Australia folkesett av velståande og lærde. Dei bur på staselege eigedomar og tek seg av kunstnarar, forfattarar og filosofar. Hovudpersonen er ein ambisiøs filmskapar. Han reiser til det indre Australia i håp om å fanga sjølve essensen av innlandet og seia noko om forholdet mellom innbyggjarane og landskapet. Slettene skildrar livet til innbyggjarane og deira uvanlege levevis. Det er ein gåtefull klassikar om eit alternativt Australia.

“For tyve år siden da jeg først ankom til sletterne, holdt jeg øjnene åbne. Jeg ledte efter alt det i landskabet der kunne tyde på en mere kompleks mening bag det ydre skin.” Sletterne fortæller den sælsomme historie om et alternativt Australien befolket af velhavende og lærde mennesker, der bor på herskabelige landejendomme og fungerer som mæcener for kunstnere og filosoffer. Hovedpersonen, en håbefuld filmskaber, rejser til området i håbet om at indfange dets essens. Med udgangspunkt i traditionen for den utopiske roman beskriver Sletterne – med varierende grad af ironi – sletteboernes liv og deres usædvanlige levevis. Det er et fængslende værk, som både er en lignelse, fabel, allegori, analogi og mytologi. Og morsom. Sletterne er i dag blevet en klassiker. Gerald Murnane (f. 1939) er australsk forfatter. Han debuterede i 1974 og har siden skrevet en række bøger. Gerald Murnane har i mange år været den litterære connaisseurs hemmelighed, men nyder i dag anerkendelse som en af vores tids store forfattere. The New York Times skrev således, at han ”er utvivlsomt en af de mest originale forfattere, som skriver på engelsk i dag.” Sletterne er hans første bog på dansk.

I Grænseområder flytter en mand fra en hovedstad til en fjerntliggende by, hvor han har til hensigt at tilbringe de sidste år af sit liv. Som undersøger af mentale billedverdener haster det nu sent i livet med at bringe hans mentale landskab i orden. Han samler sine tanker omkring landskaber, huse, forfattere, bøger, religion og erindringen. Det bliver til en præcis og opslidende beretning. Hvor vil beretningens katalogisering føre hen, hvilke hemmeligheder vil komme frem i lyset, og hvad vil overleve i tusmørket.Om Forfatteren: Gerald Murnane (f. 1939) er australsk forfatter. Han debuterede i 1974 og har siden skrevet en række bøger. Gerald Murnane har i mange år været den litterære connaisseurs hemmelighed, men nyder i dag anerkendelse som en af vores tids store forfattere. På dansk er tidligere udkommet Sletterne (Forlaget THP).

Till de bördiga slätterna i det inre av Australien anländer en filmare för att dokumentera sina uppdragsgivares, de lokala jordägarnas och tillika mecenaternas rika och till synes oöverblickbara historia och levnadsomständigheter. Under tjugo års tid skall han som en bland många konstnärer, filosofer och författare spekulera kring banden mellan bebyggarna och det platta, gräsbevuxna landskapet. Det utvecklar sig till en praktisk övning i minneskonst, tillkommen i ett bibliotek som ett försök att närma sig en bortvänd, gäckande kvinna ett stycke litterär heraldik, värdigt en Proust eller en Calvino.