Barley Patch

by Gerald Murnane

Overview

Discover the Australian novelist ranked by Ladbrokes as a top-five contender for the 2010 Nobel Prize.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781916751149
Publisher:	And Other Stories Publishing
Publication date:	02/04/2025
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Gerald Murnane was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1939. He is the author of eight works of fiction, including "Barley Patch, Inland, The Plains", and Tamarisk Row, as well as a collection of essays, "Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs". Murnane has been a recipient of the Patrick White Award and the Melbourne Prize. "Barley Patch" won the 2010 Adelaide Festival Award for Innovation.

Editorial Reviews

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

From the Publisher

An obsessive, funny, wonderfully self-invented writer at the height of his powers.

Michael Heyward

[A] book about another, more perfect book never destined to be written . . . It is like a big, polished stone thrown into the babbling brook of ordinary novels.

The Australian

Murnane is quite simply one of the finest writers we have produced.

Peter Craven

Murnane examines the nature of reading and writing and the construction of truths and fictions. And somehow, without the use of metaphor or simile,
but simple transparency, he approaches the underside of these concepts, the heart of the matter, the magic of the thing that is storytelling.

Smiljana Glisovic - Readings

Why do we write? Why do we read? What is fiction? These questions haunt Murnane's inventive yet maddening stream-of-consciousness narrative. A man who may or may not be the author reflects on his reading life, where he was, and how he felt while deep in any one of thousands of novels. He reveals a penchant for inserting himself into a story until the line between reality and imagination is blurred. If our narrator is to be believed, his family moved from place to place as Dad gambled away his paychecks on horse races, Mom compensated through storytelling, and our young man grew into an adult more comfortable around books than people. Though a nonbeliever, he entered a monastery seeking the solitude to write fiction and poetry, a dalliance of short duration, but one that set him on the path to an impressive literary output. VERDICT Australian writer Murnane has received the Melbourne Prize and a Patrick White Award. His prose is alluringly evocative, his sense of humor sly and dry, but only some will have the patience to sift through the gimmickry that gives readers the uncomfortable feeling that the author is having them on.—Sally Bissell, Lee Cty. Lib., Ft. Myers, FL

Library Journal