From Virginia Woolf losing hairpins along Piccadilly, to Gerald Murnane of Inner, Outer and Other Australia, the sentence has the structure of home, endlessly run on even as it stands still.
Every few pages of The Plains, there's something, some or another thing that brings you to a halt.
"And then the door from the street was flung open and a new group of plainsmen came in from the dazzling sunlight with their afternoon's work done and settles themselves at the bar to resume their lifelong task of shaping from uneventful days in a flat landscape the substance of myth."
It's ghostly reading Gerald Murnane as a blow-in in Ireland. His scrutiny of the plains (he doesn't like the definite article in titles) which he doesn't know except through the prowess of his imagination, includes Ireland. For example, here is our narrator learning to assimilate in a bar:
"They were all in a condition that I had expected to reach myself after a few more pots of beer. They had lost little of their customary dignity. Perhaps they spoke a trifle too emphatically or gestured too readily. As I understood it from my own experiences with alcohol, they had drunk themselves sober."
We were in a pub overnight, in extremis, in North Kerry some years ago. We'd gone to look into a per cent for art project and happened on a funeral, stayed the night. 'I'm so drunk I'm coming round to being sober again,' said the daughter, thin, black-haired, late on in the evening. We saw her next morning, wigless and bereft.
I finished The Plains and started it again a few days later.
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