The Plains
Text Classics
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the Patrick White Literary Award, 1999. Introduction by Wayne Macauley.
There is no book in Australian literature like The Plains. In the two decades since its first publication, this haunting novel has earned its status as a classic.
A nameless young man arrives on the plains and begins to document the strange and rich culture of the plains families. As his story unfolds, the novel becomes, in the words of Murray Bail, ‘a mirage of landscape, memory, love and literature itself’.
Gerald Murnane was born in Melbourne in 1939. He has left Victoria only a handful of times and has never been on an aeroplane. His first novel, Tamarisk Row, was published in 1974, and was followed by seven other works of fiction, most recently, Barley Patch. He has also published a collection of essays, Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs (2005). In 1999, Gerald Murnane won the Patrick White Award. In 2009 he won the Melbourne Prize for Literature.
Wayne Macauley is the author of three novels, Blueprints for a Barbed-Wire Canoe (2004), Caravan Story (2007) and The Cook (2011), and the short fiction collection Other Stories (2010). He lives in Melbourne.
textclassics.com.au
‘Murnane is quite simply one of the finest writers we have produced.’ Peter Craven
‘A distinguished, distinctive, unforgettable novel.' Shirley Hazzard
‘Gerald Murnane is unquestionably one of the most original writers working in Australia today and The Plains is a fascinating and rewarding book…The writing is extraordinarily good, spare, austere, strong, often oddly moving.’ Australian
‘A piece of imaginative writing so remarkably sustained that it is a subject for meditation rather than a mere reading…In the depths and surfaces of this extraordinary fable you will see your inner self eerily reflected again and again.’ Sydney Morning Herald
‘Known for its sharp yet defamiliarizing take on the landscape and an aesthetic of purity historically associated with it, The Plains is uniformly described as a masterpiece of Australian literature. Look closer, though, and it's a haunting nineteenth-century novel of colonial violence captured inside the machine's test-pattern image—a distant, unassuming house on the plains.’ BOMB
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
It's not just a dog's life it's a pig-cow-rat's life. In this deftly executed allegorical novel, Beig (Lost Weddings) gives an episodic, animal-centered account of the life of a young woman in rural Germany between the two world wars. Brief chapters "Horse," "Cat," "Pig," etc. recount the protagonist's less-than-idyllic encounters with the natural world. At birth, Hermine resembles a mutant horse; at school, she finds herself unable to write the assigned essay "Hurray, We're Slaughtering!" As a young teacher, she inadvertently causes the injury of a pupil during a spirited game based on a bear hunt, and she maims a badger with her motorbike. Disowned by her family for killing their pet goose, she is even scolded by her husband: "No one can have an animal with you around." Granted, "some days Hermine liked well enough," but most days she loses her battle with the bestiary. Beig, who began writing in her late 50s, gives shape to her story by charting Hermine's growing awareness of an inner life that distinguishes her from the inhabitants of the animal kingdom and makes subtle reference to the tumult of 20th-century German history. Surrounded by slaughter, Beig suggests, we find comfort in our ability to reflect. This earthy, unsentimental novel is the perfect holiday gift for nihilists with a sense of humor.
