“In the beginning was the image.” Just like in his best-known novel, the early The Plains (1982), this recent story (2017) by Gerald Murnane begins wi“In the beginning was the image.” Just like in his best-known novel, the early The Plains (1982), this recent story (2017) by Gerald Murnane begins with the arrival of the protagonist in an (Australian) rural area. We do not get to know the precise location, and it turns out not to be really relevant, because it soon becomes clear that we must interpret 'Border Districts' primarily in a metaphorical sense. The narrator treats us to continuous observations and memories, an endless stream, both in the present and in the past. The man appears to be obsessed with the imaginary world, which even seems more real than the real one, and which is often evoked by reading books, by rays of light or by memories of earlier times. You can safely call this book a shorter variant of “A la recherche du temps”, and the sometimes widely drawn-out sentences also automatically remind you of Proust. Murnane has turned it into a meandering and increasingly complex network of imaginations, which is intriguing, but in which as a reader you eventually become completely lost. It seems as if reality has become completely imaginative, and perhaps that is exactly what Murnane intended....more
For fans of postmodern novels with a meta-evocation of the act of writing, this must be the cream of the crop. Murnane hides behind a few personae (foFor fans of postmodern novels with a meta-evocation of the act of writing, this must be the cream of the crop. Murnane hides behind a few personae (following Pessoa?) to do what he loves: writing at a table, looking out of the window and staring at the grasslands, successively in Hungary, South Dakota and Australia. It seems as if this book starts over every 30 pages, each time with the sentence “I'm writing…”. It gives an elliptical effect, which is fascinating, but in time also annoys (at least to me). Fortunately, there are the humorous elements, such as the 'Institute of Prairie Studies', or the writer who calls himself a 'scientist of grasslands', and the author regularly is playing tricks on us. More qualified readers probably would detect quite a lot of meta-layers in this book; unfortunately most of them ware lost on me. As mentioned, this is postmodernist stuff. While I was quite taken with The Plains, I'm starting to think Murnane might be a one-trick pony. And from the rare interviews with him, I gather that he thinks so too. Or could that be another trick of his?...more
“I wondered whether all my investigations so far had been mere glances at the deceptive surfaces of plains.” Holy moly, what was that? Anyone who think“I wondered whether all my investigations so far had been mere glances at the deceptive surfaces of plains.” Holy moly, what was that? Anyone who thinks that with this book he/she is embarking on a literary exploration of the Australian interior (the writer's homeland) is going to be thoroughly deceived. You end up in a surrealistic story, with a storyteller fascinated by the unique character of the (Australian) interior and its inhabitants (for the sake of clarity, not the aborigines, clearly the white colonizers). In particular, the storyteller is a filmmaker who plans to shoot a groundbreaking film to uncover the true character of that interior once and for all.
So the story seems to start fairly straightforward, especially since our filmmaker overwhelms us with all kinds of precise details about his arrival - 20 years earlier - in a town deep in the interior. But instead of descriptions of the plains, the narrator mainly focuses on the endless discussions of the "plainsmen" when they try to express what distinguishes them from others. It turns out that these plainsmen are not ordinary people, but a motley collection of aristocratic landowners, artists, architects, archivists and so on, who are constantly at odds with each other and found their own movements, and sometimes even violent conflicts erupt. There’s an odd 19th century feel attached to this setting.
After a while, you realize that Murnane's plains is actually a fictional space, and for lack of a more prosaic image, for the sake of simplicity, I’m going to call that fictional space "reality". Here, Murnane masterfully plays with the different connected and opposite meanings of words like "the plains", "the interior" and "plain". In other words, he offers a pastiche of people's intense, but ultimately fruitless attempts to grasp the core reality around them, by unfolding a thousand possible imaginations. It's a typical postmodernist viewpoint.
Our filmmaker-storyteller endlessly zooms in on the different views on the "plains", in a rather high pitched intellectual style. He uses very sophisticated sentences that you often have to reread two or three times to understand just a little bit of what it is about, although the real meaning does not seem so important. Here’s a – rather simple - example: “Anyone surrounded from childhood by an abundance of level land must dream alternately of exploring two landscapes — one continually visible but never accessible and the other always invisible even though one crossed and recrossed it daily. ” It's the succession of lots of sentences like this one that also makes this story into a 'plains' of its own, where sense and meaning are lost in the endless variation of words.
Another feature: this thin book contains a striking number of scenes in which the narrator or others observe things from behind glass: the plains itself, or the wife of a landowner, who is reading in the library and in turn stares out through a glass window. Incumbent light (from the plains of course, but sometimes also simply the reflection on the wine glasses) is repeatedly cited as an important situation-element. Windows and glass here function as a kind of deforming membrane through which we necessarily have to look at things, but can never grasp them. With all this the importance of the momentary, the uniqueness of the moment of time and the hyper-subjective of each experience, of perception is emphasized, and therefore also the fleeting, intangible and unreachable nature of reality. Another postmodernist stance.
I can imagine that, reading this review, you get a slightly confused feeling. Well, that is exactly the experience you have as a reader of Murnane's booklet, both during the read and afterwards. You wonder what exactly it was you read and what its message was, and even after you finished it, you aren't sure. It is plainfully masterful how Murnane gets us out of balance in that way and confronts us with a reality that ultimately is unfathomable. I can understand that for a lot of people, this is a rather upsetting and unsatisfying reading experience, but it is a succinct one if you're open for it. (rating 3.5 stars)...more
There is quite a bit of meat on the bone, here. The Australian Nobel Prize winner Patrick White (1912-1990) presents four protagonists: the excentric There is quite a bit of meat on the bone, here. The Australian Nobel Prize winner Patrick White (1912-1990) presents four protagonists: the excentric millionaire's daughter Mary Mare, the wandering Jew Mordecai Himmelfarb, the half-aboriginal Alf Gubbo and the angelic housekeeper Ruth Godbold. They live in a suburb of Sydney, Australia, and have each had their own special life trajectory. They are nonconformist 'misfits', so-called socially maladjusted people; that is, they are viewed as such by the bourgeois community (here personified by the malicious Mrs Jolley and Mrs Falck). But appearances are deceiving.
White takes quite some time to outline their background and life story and delves deep into their psyche, which is quite battered for each of them: Mary has always been spit out by her parents as 'too ordinary', Mordecai wandered through the Holocaust as a kind of outsider, Alf was raped by a protestant pastor and Ruth had to face an abusive husband. They see themselves as unworthy sinners, suffering to a greater or lesser extent from an inferiority syndrome. But White sheds quite a different light on them.
Through secondary characters and all kinds of developments, the novel takes on a truly Dickensian allure (sometimes just as over-the-edge elaborate), but White adds his own accents: his irony and satire are ubiquitous, and regularly the magical, the spiritual and even the mystical seem to take over the narrative. His writing style regularly misleads us, as in this passage, where Himmelfarb at night walks back to his city, an episode in WW2: “The winter evening was drawing in as he approached the darker masses of the town, which had already begun to receive its nightly visitation. The knots and loops, the little, exquisite puffs of white hung on the deepening distances of the sky, all the way to its orange rim. The riot of fireworks was on. Ordinarily solid, black buildings were shown to have other, more transcendental qualities, in that they would open up, disclosing fountains of hidden fire. Much was inverted, that hitherto had been accepted as sound and immutable. Two silver fish were flaming downward, out of their cobalt sea, into the land.” Yes, this poetic, almost pastoral scene in fact is a description of a brutal bombing of a German town by Allied Forces.
And the Chariot? Well, it is briefly touched upon in each part, in such a way that you can sense it’s something important, crucial to the story. White consciously leaves it to the reader to fill in its meaning, but it’s another original find of his, the combination of an antique (The Chariot of Apollo) and a biblical (Ezekiel) image. White seems to suggest, no, clearly indicates that his four protagonists are the Riders of the Chariot, because they 'see' more than ordinary people, they are Enlightened (shades of light, and especially that of white, play a prominent role in White's descriptions), they are half or whole saints themselves, who transcend the banal, and are clearly on the right side, representing the pinnacle of humanity. The bourgeois, conventional, materialistic world is the opponent force, anti-human and downright evil. So, ultimately, this novel is a variation on the theme of the battle between good and evil, but in a very original form.
To the reader of today this novel may be quite demanding. Not only because of the sometimes very strange (mystical) passages, and because of the story structure that seems a bit too constructed. At times I found White stressed too much how saintlike his 4 Riders of the Chariot are (especially Mrs Godbold). But the extraordinary style, the humor, and the spiritual imagery make this into an impressive novel, and a delight to read....more
Coetzee's take in this book is a bit sarcastic: he presents us a world famous, celebrated writer with the initials J.C., who belittles himself, questiCoetzee's take in this book is a bit sarcastic: he presents us a world famous, celebrated writer with the initials J.C., who belittles himself, questions his merit, and indicates how futile his literary work actually is. Automatically you have the impression Coetzee is writing about himself.
This diary starts with a series of short essays on all kinds of issues, often international politics and human rights. Of course, we soon have the impression that here the author himself (Coetzee) speaks, hidden behind the very transparent alter ego J.C., an aged South African writer, a bit sick and lonely, for some years living in Australia (as Coetzee is), and disillusioned in the politics of that new country as those of his motherland. We hear the voice of what you can call 'liberal reasonableness', JC himself favors the term anarchism.
Coetzee immediately adds a second and later also a third 'Melody-line', literally visible with a three-panel layout in the book. The second melody/layer seems to be quite trivial and describes the platonic relationship of JC with a Philippine beauty he has hired to type his a manuscript; initially the focus is on the rather pathetic obsession of the older man (she calls him Senor C.) for the charms of his secretary. In the third melody-line we hear the Philippine woman herself, and it appears that she consciously uses these charms. But at some point her focus turns to what the old man writes, she brings into words what that does with her (she finds it all rather pedantic actually) and she gradually develops sympathy for the pathetic old man. She urges him even to shift the angle of his writing to a more introspective stance and to write more about life and literature. That leads to a breakup with her own boyfriend, an intelligent but downright rude Australian who disparages the author with arguments that also seem to contain some truth.
The three melodies together form a very complex, rich book that you can access from different angles. Intriguing, yet not quite successful. Especially the second and third melody-line constantly feel underdeveloped; one yearns to have more details on the (emotional) interaction between JC and the woman. It seems that Coetzee only uses this storyline as a teaser, to indicate what evolution takes place in the head of the author, doubting himself and his work, shifting his attention from the ‘serious’ world of politics and ethics to that of life, death and literature. In this way the short, dry essays ('opinions') keep dominating this book, at the expense of the real story line. And that is a pity. No, this Coetzee is an ingenious composition, but it did not captivate me as much as his other work. (2.5 stars)...more
I had great expectations about this book, it is one of the favorites of my wife and for years it stood temptingly staring at me in our library. But I'I had great expectations about this book, it is one of the favorites of my wife and for years it stood temptingly staring at me in our library. But I'm afraid it turned out to be a disappointment. As in "In Patagonia" Chatwin reports about one of his journeys, a meandering quest, not in Fireland this time but in Australia where he went looking for the key to the Aboriginal-culture. This is a quite interesting topic of course, and the information he gives about the Songlines and everything that's related with them, is very intruiging and challenging. But Chatwin has made a very dull affair of his report, it is not more than a chronicle of his interviews with Aboriginals and other people. It could not charm me, especially because it was so self-centered: Bruce Chatwin is all around, and his seemingly easy way to gain the confidence of the Aboriginals wasn't really credible to me. And of course it doesn't help when you read in other reviews that he had the habit of inventing some of the stuff he wrote about (also in other books). Already before page 100 I noticed I began to read diagonally, and that is lethal. What a pity. But if I ever succeed in getting to Australia, perhaps I'll make another attempt....more
Wow, this was a surprising discovery! At first it seemed to be a classic adventure story about a sturdy German, named Voss, who was the first ever to Wow, this was a surprising discovery! At first it seemed to be a classic adventure story about a sturdy German, named Voss, who was the first ever to make the passage through Australia, from east to west, around 1840. This story is mixed with the platonic lovestory between this Voss-character and the headstrong lady Laura. But the book offers much more than this: it is a derisive portrait of society in Sydney (in the manner of Jane Austen), an accumulation of wisdom on life, death and love (in the manner of Henry James) and a quest for the dark side of reality (Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, of course). On top of that it offers a (first?) evocation of the dreamtime-world of the aboriginals, etc.
This is quite tough reading though: White mixes the storylines with lots of commentaries and especially the ending of the expedition is rather raw. Finally, this book is an illustration of the fact that it is almost impossible to grasp the real truth in history. A book to reread......more