Inland
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- £8.49
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- £8.49
Publisher Description
With Giramondo’s publication of Barley Patch and A History of Books, Gerald Murnane has attracted renewed interest as a brilliant writer and Nobel Prize contender. First published 25 years ago, Inland is one of Murnane’s most complex and rewarding works, a study of guilt, longing and regret rich in metaphysical insights. From his native district in the Melbourne suburb of Pascoe Vale, Murnane’s narrator imagines another world, in Szolnok county Hungary, and within that world another, in Ideal South Dakota, each haunted by the betrayal of a young girl, each driven by the possibility of restitution. Murnane’s mastery over language and his pressing towards the edges of what fiction can accomplish make this book a landmark in Australian literature.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Murnane's learned novel (after Barley Patch), published in his native Australia in 1988, goes a long way toward capturing why he's been dubbed the Australian Italo Calvino. Like the Italian postmodernist, Murnane is a writer of deceptive simplicity, whose work is, first and foremost, about itself. In this case, a writer, ensconced in "the library of a manor-house" in a Hungarian village he prefers to leave unnamed, works in his native "heavy-hearted Magyar" language. At first, he seems to be writing to his editor, a woman who lives in South Dakota ("in the town of Ideal"), but he soon concedes or realizes that no such woman exists. She is like the book he's writing, an endless project filling endless pages a creation of his pen who is, anyway, soon replaced by the memory of "the girl from Bendigo Street," among other imaginative flights. Our nameless narrator reads and writes and discovers that the page is truer than life. "The only signs I am sure of are signs in words," he concludes. So will a certain type of philosophically inclined reader with a penchant for existentialism and the paradoxically contrasting depth of literature.
