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A review by matconnor
Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs by Gerald Murnane
5.0
This is my second Gerald Murnane after The Plains and I’ve already picked up the rest of his books. I first heard about this Australian writer from this New York Times Profile
There is nobody like Gerald Murnane. He is singular. He reminds me more of David Lynch than any author I’ve read. The best words I can use to describe his writing is discursive and dream-like. He compulsively writes about the same obsessions repeatedly: horse racing, marbles, stained glass windows, Hungary, and the Australian plains.
I think he uses these repeating motifs to approach other subjects that he’s less comfortable addressing directly. The essay Stream System in this collection is a good example of this. He starts off the essay talking about stream systems, which are bodies of water (smaller than rivers) that collect fresh water runoff from the land to an Ocean. They are the thin blue lines you see on some maps, but Murnane is quick to correct that they are in fact yellow brown not blue. He is obsessed by details like that. He keeps moving from subject to subject and eventually starts talking about how he regrets his relationship with his late brother, who was intellectually challenged. He realizes that he was “never a friend” to his brother. Murnane wouldn’t have been comfortable starting an essay with that. He had to get to this epiphany his unique way.
Murnane’s work is filled with interesting observations. My favorite is his argument that people reveal just as much about themselves when they say what they can’t or have never done than what they have done or want to do. Murnane has never been on an airplane or left Australia, claims to have never put on a pair of sunglasses or “voluntarily immersed” himself in any sea or stream. He has never owned a television set or surfed the internet.
I think there is a lot of truth to this observation about people.
There is nobody like Gerald Murnane. He is singular. He reminds me more of David Lynch than any author I’ve read. The best words I can use to describe his writing is discursive and dream-like. He compulsively writes about the same obsessions repeatedly: horse racing, marbles, stained glass windows, Hungary, and the Australian plains.
I think he uses these repeating motifs to approach other subjects that he’s less comfortable addressing directly. The essay Stream System in this collection is a good example of this. He starts off the essay talking about stream systems, which are bodies of water (smaller than rivers) that collect fresh water runoff from the land to an Ocean. They are the thin blue lines you see on some maps, but Murnane is quick to correct that they are in fact yellow brown not blue. He is obsessed by details like that. He keeps moving from subject to subject and eventually starts talking about how he regrets his relationship with his late brother, who was intellectually challenged. He realizes that he was “never a friend” to his brother. Murnane wouldn’t have been comfortable starting an essay with that. He had to get to this epiphany his unique way.
Murnane’s work is filled with interesting observations. My favorite is his argument that people reveal just as much about themselves when they say what they can’t or have never done than what they have done or want to do. Murnane has never been on an airplane or left Australia, claims to have never put on a pair of sunglasses or “voluntarily immersed” himself in any sea or stream. He has never owned a television set or surfed the internet.
I think there is a lot of truth to this observation about people.