Is it possible to fall in love with a correspondent based entirely on a fascination with his or her handwriting, with a map of the country they live in, with the syllables of their name? What about, then, a fictional character, in a book about a country one has never, and will never, visit? 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 Alföld merge, imitate, and enfold one another in the mind of a man sitting alone in a room full of books. Perhaps the greatest novel by Gerald Murnane, Australia’s reply to Proust and Calvino, and a Nobel favorite for several years running, Inland shows that one can as easily be an exile in one’s own interior as out in the wide world, and as easily feel the loss of people one has only imagined as those who have shared our lives in the flesh.
Author
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 a young filmmaker who travels to a fictive country far within Australia, where his failure to make a film is perhaps his most profound achievement. The novel is both a metaphysical parable about appearance and reality, and a parodic examination of traditions and cultural horizons. The novel depicts an abstracted Australia, akin to something out of mythology or fable. The novel was followed by: Landscape With Landscape (1985), Inland (1988), Velvet Waters (1990), and Emerald Blue (1995). A book of essays, Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, appeared in 2005, and a new work of fiction, Barley Patch, was released in 2009. All of these books are concerned with the relation between memory, image, and landscape, and frequently with the relation between fiction and non-fiction. Murnane is mainly known within Australia. A seminar was held on his work at the University of Newcastle in 2001. Murnane does, however, also have a following in other countries, especially Sweden and the United States, where The Plains was published in 1985 and reprinted in 2004 (New Issues Poetry & Prose), and where Dalkey Archive Press has recently issued Barley Patch and will be reprinting Inland in 2012. In 2011, The Plains' was translated into French and published in France by P.O.L, and in 2012 will be published in Hungarian.
