The Plains - (Text Classics) by Gerald Murnane (Paperback)
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<p/><br></br><p><b> About the Book </b></p></br></br>A young man arrives on the plains to document the strange, rich culture of the landowning families. This quest becomes his life. Teju Cole calls Murnane 'a genius on the level of Beckett.'<p/><br></br><p><b> Book Synopsis </b></p></br></br>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.<p/><br></br><p><b> Review Quotes </b></p></br></br><br>"Reading Murnane, one cares less about what is happening in the story and more about what one is thinking about as one reads. The effect of his writing is to induce images in the reader's own mind, and to hold the reader inside a world in which the reader is at every turn encouraged to turn his or her attention to those fast flocking images."--New York Times<br><br>'A man travels to Australia's interior plains planning to make a film about the region's people and culture, but mostly he ruminates in this wry, evocative novel....Murnane touches on foibles and philosophy, plays with the makings of a fable or allegory, and all the while toys with tone, moving easily from earnest to deadpan to lightly ironic...A provocative, delightful, diverting must-reread.'--Kirkus Reviews [starred]; 'One of Australia's most important writers.'--Publishers Weekly 'A distinguished, distinctive, unforgettable novel.'--Shirley Hazzard; '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; 'Widely regarded as Australia's greatest living writer, Murnane has long cultivated an air of myth and geographical limit...One could fill a room with a conversation about him.'--Full Stop; '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;<br><p/><br></br><p><b> About the Author </b></p></br></br>Gerald Murnane was born in Melbourne in 1939. He has been a primary teacher, an editor and a university lecturer. His debut novel, Tamarisk Row (1974), was followed by eleven other works of fiction, including The Plains, A Million Windows and, most recently, Border Districts [shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award]. In 1999 Murnane won the Patrick White Award and in 2009 he won the Melbourne Prize for Literature. He lives in western Victoria.
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