Landscape with Landscape - by Gerald Murnane (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Landscape with Landscape was Gerald Murnane's fourth book, after The Plains, and his first collection of short fiction. When it was first published, thirty years ago, it was cruelly reviewed. "I feel sorry for my fourth-eldest, which of all my book-children was the most brutally treated in its early years," Murnane writes in his foreword to this new edition. In hindsight it can be seen to contain some of his best writing, and to offer a wide-ranging exploration of the different landscapes which make up the imagination of this extraordinary Australian writer. Five of the six loosely connected stories also trace a journey through the suburbs of Melbourne in the 1960s, as the writer negotiates the conflicting demands of Catholicism and sex, self-consciousness and intimacy, alcohol and literature. The sixth story, 'The Battle of Acosta Nu', is remarkable for its depth of emotion, as it imagines a Paraguayan man imagining a country called Australia, while his son sickens and dies before his eyes.

Review Quotes

Praise for Gerald Murnane

"The emotional conviction...is so intense, the somber lyricism so moving, the intelligence behind the chiselled sentences so undeniable, that we suspend all disbelief."--J. M. Coetzee

"A genius." --Teju Cole

"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

"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

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.