Bøger af Gerald Murnane

Border Districts, purportedly the Australian master Gerald Murnane's final work of fiction, is a hypnotic, precise, self-lacerating `report' on a life led as an avid reader, fumbling lover, `student of mental imagery', and devout believer in the luminescence of memory and of literature.

Inland is a compact story or group of stories, each nested within another, nonetheless opening onto a seemingly endless fractal geography, where the interior of Australia, the Midwestern prairie, and the Hungarian Alfold merge, imitate, and enfold one another in the mind of a man sitting alone in a room full of books.

A bittersweet farewell to the world and the word by the Australian master"The mind is a place best viewed from borderlands . . ."Border Districts, purportedly the Australian master Gerald Murnane's final work of fiction, is a hypnotic, precise, and self-lacerating "report" on a life led as an avid reader, fumbling lover, "student of mental imagery," and devout believer-but a believer not in the commonplaces of religion, but rather in the luminescence of memory and its handmaiden, literature. In Border Districts, a man moves from a capital city to a remote town in the border country, where he intends to spend the last years of his life. It is time, he thinks, to review the spoils of a lifetime of seeing, a lifetime of reading. Which sights, which people, which books, fictional characters, turns of phrase, and lines of verse will survive into the twilight? A dark-haired woman with a wistful expression? An ancestral house in the grasslands? The colors in translucent panes of glass, in marbles and goldfish and racing silks? Feeling an increasing urgency to put his mental landscape in order, the man sets to work cataloging this treasure, little knowing where his "report" will lead and what secrets will be brought to light. Border Districts is a jewel of a farewell from one of the greatest living writers of English prose.

In the first days of spring in his eighty-second year, Gerald Murnane ‿ perhaps the greatest living writer of English prose ‿ began a project that would round off his strange career as a novelist. He would read all of his books in turn and prepare a report on each. His original intention was to lodge the reports in two of his legendary filing cabinets: in the Chronological Archive, which documents his life as a whole, and the Literary Archive, which is devoted to everything he has written. As the reports grew, however, they themselves took on the form of a book, a book as beguiling and hallucinatory, in its way, as the works on which they were meant to report. These miniature memoirs or stories lead the reader through the capacious territory Murnane refers to as his mind: they dwell on the circumstances that gave rise to his writing, on images and associations, on Murnane‿s own theories of fiction, and then memories of a deeply personal kind. The final essay is, of course, on Last Letter to a Reader itself: it considers the elation and exhilaration that accompany the act of writing, and offers a moving finale to what must surely be Murnane‿s last work, as death approaches.

I Grænseområder flytter en mand fra en hovedstad til en fjerntliggende by, hvor han har til hensigt at tilbringe de sidste år af sit liv. Som undersøger af mentale billedverdener haster det nu sent i livet med at bringe hans mentale landskab i orden. Han samler sine tanker omkring landskaber, huse, forfattere, bøger, religion og erindringen. Det bliver til en præcis og opslidende beretning. Hvor vil beretningens katalogisering føre hen, hvilke hemmeligheder vil komme frem i lyset, og hvad vil overleve i tusmørket.Om Forfatteren: Gerald Murnane (f. 1939) er australsk forfatter. Han debuterede i 1974 og har siden skrevet en række bøger. Gerald Murnane har i mange år været den litterære connaisseurs hemmelighed, men nyder i dag anerkendelse som en af vores tids store forfattere. På dansk er tidligere udkommet Sletterne (Forlaget THP).

“For tyve år siden da jeg først ankom til sletterne, holdt jeg øjnene åbne. Jeg ledte efter alt det i landskabet der kunne tyde på en mere kompleks mening bag det ydre skin.” Sletterne fortæller den sælsomme historie om et alternativt Australien befolket af velhavende og lærde mennesker, der bor på herskabelige landejendomme og fungerer som mæcener for kunstnere og filosoffer. Hovedpersonen, en håbefuld filmskaber, rejser til området i håbet om at indfange dets essens. Med udgangspunkt i traditionen for den utopiske roman beskriver Sletterne – med varierende grad af ironi – sletteboernes liv og deres usædvanlige levevis. Det er et fængslende værk, som både er en lignelse, fabel, allegori, analogi og mytologi. Og morsom. Sletterne er i dag blevet en klassiker. Gerald Murnane (f. 1939) er australsk forfatter. Han debuterede i 1974 og har siden skrevet en række bøger. Gerald Murnane har i mange år været den litterære connaisseurs hemmelighed, men nyder i dag anerkendelse som en af vores tids store forfattere. The New York Times skrev således, at han ”er utvivlsomt en af de mest originale forfattere, som skriver på engelsk i dag.” Sletterne er hans første bog på dansk.

Barley Patch takes as its subject the reasons an author might abandon fiction-or so he thinks-forever. Using the form of an oblique self-interrogation, it begins with the Beckettian question "e;Must I write?"e; and proceeds to expand from this small, personal query to fill in the details of a landscape entirely unique in world letters, a chronicle of the images from life and fiction that have endured and mingled in the author's mind, as well as the details (and details within details) that they contain. As interested, if not more so, in the characters from his books-finished or unfinished-as with the members of his family or his daily life, the narrator lays bare the act 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. In the spirit of Italo Calvino and Georges Perec, Barley Patch is like no other fiction being written today.

A masterful collection of essays from one of Australia's most searching and expert writers.

Never before available to readers in the UK, these brilliant and idiosyncratic short stories stand alongside the fictions of Borges, Beckett and Nabokov.

A lonely child of unusual sensibility inherits his father's love of horse-racing and his mother's Catholicism in this evocative, semi-autobiographical novel.