Stream of sentences: Gerald Murnane

In his introduction to the second edition of Tamarisk Row, Gerald Murnane sets to rights those readers who told him that the chapter 'The Gold Cup is run' is stream of consciousness. It is no such thing, he says.

What is now the last section of the book consists of five very long compound sentences, each comprising a main clause and numerous subordinate clauses, together with a description of part of a horse race.

He writes as a clockmaker, says J.M. Coetzee, a mapmaker, himself; he gives himself up to fiction. 

If you read Gerald Murnane at the right moment, his exactitude becomes dreamlike. There he is, giving himself up to a fiction of 1940s small town Australia, a boy age eight or ten, preoccupied by horse racing, racecourses, jockey colours, marbles, seeing up girls' pants behind tamarisk trees. 

The last time I read Gerald Murnane I was impatient with it. This time, more exténuée, I can keep restarting the race and the betting, Feel the flux of staying in one place. The depth charge. The adult writer reading and re-reading Proust.  

Proustian Australia is poignant. The broken pavé is a milkstone. Discuss. 

Gerald Murnane, William H. Gass

I began to get a heavy chilly feeling about a quarter of the way into Gerald Murnane's Tamarisk Row, and by the halfway point it was so bad I couldn't face these sentences: long, intricate, desolate, freezing at the height of summer.

This first novel from 1940s Australia is about horse-racing and boyhood, about racing marbles in the dust in place of horses, about a boy's preoccupation with catching a glimpse of girls' pants.

I read a lot of Patrick White in the seventies and eighties, and there's a chilly plainness in his novels too, as if this were the only way a sensitive Australian man could express the country he was born into, or out of.

Gerald Murnane writes sentences as vast and inhospitable as the land itself. The reining in of bleakness into sentences produces more bleakness.

J.M. Coetzee, who writes a puff on the back cover, is another chilly writer. Though I liked Foe, his reinvention of Daniel Defoe.

Just as I would not choose to read a novel that was in any way about football, I am dispirited by one which is about horse-racing.

By the end of the afternoon, a chance reference to William H. Gass in a review I read recently has sent me back to The Heart of the Heart of the Country.

A slow read of the long preface, lying in front of the fire on a sharp and windy afternoon, marking the most charming passages with a pencil, is what I need after Gerald Murnane.

Thus, obscurely and fortuitously, chance brought these stories forth from nowhere. Icicles once dripped solidly from my eaves, for instance. I thought them remarkable because they seemed to grow as a consequence of their own grief, and I wondered whether my feelings would freeze to me by the time they had traveled my length, and whether each of us wasn't just the size of our consciousness solidified;