The Plains: Text Classics

Strange, The Plains

The strangest book I’ve ever read. The story is about . . . what? I was going to say “what, exactly? “ but “exactly” is all wrong. Any description would likely be far off the mark, and require many caveats / qualifiers etc. I had a hard time finishing it but, fortunately, it is quite short, albeit a lot of work. Here’s a description attempt. There is a very loose plot of sorts with a setting, characters, linear time kind of, etc., but none of the things that happened really happened. The things that happen are metaphors for something or an allegory of something . . . but God knows what. A man wants to make a film about the plains of Australia and he’s an outsider. He finds a town in the plains, I think, peopled with it seems, mostly men, who live in the plains and engage in incomprehensible philosophical musings on “the plains.” They talk about art, landscapes, light, time, reality — I think. These interactions occur in town in a bar, where everyone seems to sit for days drinking and pontificating. The filmmaker is around all this, waiting to be “interviewed” so that one of the rich townsmen will take him on as a kind of project, to finance and endorse his film. The filmmaker goes to a rich plainsmen’s house and there spends years trying to understand the plains. There’s a library in the house and he and a woman are there a lot at the same time but they don’t interact. I think it’s the rich home owner’s wife. The rich homeowner also has a granddaughter who the filmmaker becomes drawn to, and in one of the only lucid parts of the book, is aware he should be careful about staring intently at this girl. The book ends without the filmmaker doing any filming (surprise, surprise, he takes lots of notes) and I have no idea how it ends or why.