Barley Patch - by Gerald Murnane (Paperback)

About the Book

The book begins with the question, "Must I write?" What follows is both a chronicle of the images that have endured in the author's mind and an exploration of their nature. The clarity of the images is extraordinary, as is their range, from Mandrake the Magician to the bachelor uncle kicked in the "stones" as a child, from a cousin's doll's house to the mysterious woman who lets her hair down, from the soldier beetle who winks messages from God to the racehorses that run forever in the author's mind. The narrator lays bare the acts of writing and imagining, finally giving us a glimpse of the mythical place where the characters of fiction dwell before they come into existence in books. With something of the spirit of Italo Calvino and Georges Perec, this is a cornerstone of Murnane's unclassifiable project, for which he is a deserving Nobel Prize candidate.

Book Synopsis

Published in Australia in 2009, Barley Patch was Murnane's first book in fourteen years, written after a period in which he had thought he would never write fiction again.

The book begins with the question, "Must I write?" What follows is both a chronicle of the images that have endured in the author's mind and an exploration of their nature. The clarity of the images is extraordinary, as is their range, from Mandrake the Magician to the bachelor uncle kicked in the "stones" as a child, from a cousin's doll's house to the mysterious woman who lets her hair down, from the soldier beetle who winks messages from God to the racehorses that run forever in the author's mind.

The narrator lays bare the acts of writing and imagining, finally giving us a glimpse of the mythical place where the characters of fiction dwell before they come into existence in books. With something of the spirit of Italo Calvino and Georges Perec, this is a cornerstone of Murnane's unclassifiable project, for which he is a deserving Nobel Prize candidate.

Review Quotes

'He is without question both the most original and most significant Australian author of the last 50 years, and one of the best writers Australia has produced.' Emmett Stinson, The Guardian
'Murnane is unlike anyone else, the sort of writer who demands to be read in a new way but, above all, demands to be read.' Brian Evenson, Chicago Review of Books
'This is capital L Literature, bursting with intent and ideas, but written as good Literature should be: pitching at street level, without affectation or arch, high-blown language. Barley Patch is a readily accessible test of the mind's elasticity that should be recognized as a unique, timeless, and utterly satisfying work.' James Rose, New York Journal of Books

Praise for Gerald Murnane

"The greatest living English-language writer most people have never heard of." --New York Times Magazine
"Murnane, in his unfailingly serious way, is very funny. We read and think about him ruminating on his reading and thinking about reading and thinking until the book rather gloriously threatens to swallow itself whole." --Lidija Haas, Harper's Magazine
"Fascinating. . . Relentlessly introspective but dependably playful." --Washington Post
"An image in Murnane's prose has the quality of an image in coloured glass: One both sees the image and sees through the image simultaneously." --Benjamin H. Ogden, New York Times

"A genius." --Teju Cole

"Murnane's fantasies are many-layered, and the narration weaves between these and his mundane life in thrillingly long, lyrical sentences." --Christian Lorentzen, London Review of Books
"Strange and luminous ... His books ... (are) really about the mind behind (their) characters: the singular, fascinating consciousness that gives them life." --Jon Day, The Guardian
"Murnane's is a vision that blesses and beatifies every detail." --Washington Post
"Murnane has proven, over four decades and some dozen books, to be one of [Australia's] most original and distinctive writers." --Paris Review
"Strange and wonderful and nearly impossible to describe." --New York Times
"Murnane's sentences are little dialectics of boredom and beauty, flatness and depth. They combine a matter-of-factness, often approaching coldness, with an intricate lyricism." --Ben Lerner, New Yorker

"An enigmatic author, possibly the best you've never heard of . . . His work insists on the reality of the inner world - perhaps even its primacy." --Melissa Harrison, Financial Times

'As with Proust, the specificities of the images he pursues and catalogues provide their own pleasure [but] the effect of his writing is less about the images themselves, and more about the way thought works in the human mind.' Chris Power, The Guardian

"[For Murnane, ] access to the other world - a world distinct from and in many ways better than our own - is gained neither by good works nor by grace but by giving the self up to fiction." --J. M. Coetzee, New York Review of Books
"Murnane's writing is carefully, thoughtfully worded, his deliberations seemingly open, even as there's obviously much more hidden care and attention behind it." --M.A.Orthofer
"As Murnane remarks, 'My writing was not an attempt to produce something called literature but an attempt to discover meaning', and his insistence on the artifice of written enterprise bears witness to a thoroughness and integrity that far outweigh the minor virtue--or minor vice--of readability." --Adrian Nathan West, Times Literary Supplement

"[The] Nobel Prize contender writes like a clockmaker: every sentence is a finely tooled cog, every book an exquisite machine." --Australian Book Review

About the Author

Gerald Murnane is the award-winning author of such acclaimed works of fiction as Border Districts, The Plains and Inland, and equally acclaimed non-fiction such as Last Letter to a Reader and the essay collection Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs. Murnane lives in Goroke, a remote village in western Victoria, Australia.