Джеральд Мёрнeйн: Австралийский писатель и ландшафты памяти.

Australian writer

Gerald Murnane (born 25 February 1939) is an Australian novelist, short story writer, poet and essayist. Perhaps best known for his 1982 novel The Plains, he has won acclaim for his distinctive prose and exploration of memory, identity, and the Australian landscape, often blurring fiction and autobiography in the process. The New York Times described Murnane in 2018 as "the greatest living English language writer most people have never heard of", and he is regularly tipped to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Murnane was born in Coburg, a suburb of Melbourne in the Australian state of Victoria. In 1969 the family moved to the Melbourne suburb of Macleod. After the death of his wife in 2009, Murnane moved to Goroke in country Victoria.

Murnane's first two books, Tamarisk Row (1974) and A Lifetime on Clouds (1976), seem to be semi autobiographical accounts of his childhood and adolescence. Both are composed largely of very long but grammatical sentences. In 1982, he attained his mature style with The Plains, a short novel about an unnamed filmmaker who travels to "inner Australia", where he endeavours to film the plains under the patronage of wealthy landowners. The novel has been termed a fable, parable or allegory. The novel is both a metaphysical parable about appearance and reality, and a parodic examination of traditions and cultural horizons. It has been suggested that the book's opening features a narrator expressing an outlook that is typical to Murnane's writing:Twenty years ago, when I first arrived on the plains, I kept my eyes open. I looked for anything in the landscape that seemed to hint at some elaborate meaning behind appearances.<blockquote>My journey to the plains was much less arduous than I afterwards described it. And I cannot even say that at a certain hour I knew I had left Australia. But I recall clearly a succession of days when the flat land around me seemed more and more a place that only I could interpret. In June 2018, his 2017 autobiographical novel Border Districts was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award. Although Murnane is primarily known within Australia, he does have a following in other countries, especially the US, Sweden and Germany. In July/August 2017, The Plains was the number 1 book recommendation of South West German Radio (SWR2). His works have been translated into Italian (Velvet Waters as Una Melodia), German (The Plains as Die Ebenen, Border Districts as Grenzbezirke, Landscape With Landscape as Landschaft mit Landschaft, all publ. Suhrkamp Verlag), Spanish (The Plains as Las llanuras, and Something for the Pain as Una vida en las carreras, all published by Editorial Minúscula), Catalan (The Plains as Les planes, also published by Editorial Minúscula), and Swedish (Inland as Inlandet, The Plains as Slätterna, Velvet Waters as Sammetsvatten and Barley Patch as Korntäppa). Tamarisk Row and Border Districts were published in the UK by And Other Stories in 2019.

Murnane is an avid follower of horse racing, which often serves as a metaphor in his work. A documentary, Words and Silk – The Real and Imaginary Worlds of Gerald Murnane (1989), directed by Philip Tyndall, examined Murnane's childhood, work, approach to the craft of writing, and interest in horse racing. Since his retirement to the town of Goroke, Murnane has enjoyed playing golf. He taught himself Hungarian after having read Gyula Illyés' People of the Puszta, as described in the essay "The Angel's Son: Why I Learned Hungarian Late in Life":I have read several times during my life that this or that person was so impressed by this or that translation of this or that work of literature that the person afterwards learned the original language in order to read the original text. I have always been suspicious of this sort of claim, but, the reader of this piece of writing need not doubt the truth of the following sentence. I was so impressed by the English version of Puszták népe that I afterwards learned the language of the original and, as of now, have read a goodly part of it. In June 2018 Murnane released a spoken word album, Words in Order. The centrepiece is a 1600 word palindrome written by Murnane, which he recites over a minimalist musical score. He also performs works by Thomas Hardy, Dezső Kosztolányi, DEVO and Killdozer.

(1974) Tamarisk Row. William Heinemann Australia, Melbourne. (1976) A Lifetime on Clouds. William Heinemann Australia, Melbourne. (1982) The Plains. Norstrilia Press, Melbourne. (1988) Inland. William Heinemann Australia, Melbourne. (1995) Emerald Blue. McPhee Gribble, Melbourne. (2009) Barley Patch. Giramondo Publishing Company, Sydney. (2012) A History of Books. Giramondo Publishing Company, Sydney. (2014) A Million Windows. Giramondo Publishing Company, Sydney. (2017) Border Districts. Giramondo Publishing Company, Sydney. (2019) A Season on Earth. Text Publishing, Melbourne. Unabridged edition of A Lifetime on Clouds

(1985) Landscape with Landscape. Norstrilia Press, Melbourne. (1990) Velvet Waters. McPhee Gribble, Melbourne. (2018) Collected Short Fiction. Giramondo Publishing Company, Sydney. Simultaneous release in the US as Stream System: The Collected Short Fiction of Gerald Murnane. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux.

(2005) Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs. Giramondo Publishing Company, Sydney. (2021) Last Letter to a Reader. Giramondo Publishing Company, Sydney.

(2019) Green Shadows and Other Poems. Giramondo Publishing Company, Sydney.

(2015) Something for the Pain: A Memoir of the Turf. Text Publishing, Melbourne.