Inland is a work which gathers in emotional power as it moves across the grasslands of its narrator’s imagination—from Szolnok County on the great plains of Hungary where a man writes in the library of his manor house, to the Institute of Prairie Studies in Tripp County, South Dakota, where the editor of the journal Hinterland receives his writing, to the narrator’s own native district in Melbourne County, between Moonee Ponds and the Merri, where he recalls the constant displacements of his childhood. “No thing in the world is one thing,” he declares; “some places are many more than one place.” These overlapping worlds are bound by recurring motifs—fish pond, fig-tree, child-woman, the colours white, red and green—and by deep feelings of intimacy and betrayal, which are brought to full expression as the book moves to its close.
ISBN-13: 9781913505820
Media Type: Paperback
Publisher: And Other Stories Publishing
Publication Date: 11-21-2023
Pages: 256
Product Dimensions: 5.10(w) x 7.80(h) x (d)
Gerald Murnane is the award-winning author of acclaimed works of fiction as Border Districts, The Plains and Inland, and equally acclaimed non-fiction such as Last Letter to a Reader and the essay collection Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs. Murnane lives in Goroke, a remote village in western Victoria, Australia.
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The writer of books took up my challenge. He pretended to be the man from Szolnok County. The night was too dark and too cold for staring through windows, but the writer of books stood in front of the glass doors of my bookshelves as though he was staring at images in the glass of the nearest field and a long line of poplar trees and even, perhaps, an image of the first field behind the poplars and an image of a sweep-arm well or of the place where an image of a well might have been. The man standing in front of the bookshelves said he was a simple man who had never written about anything that he had not seen and who saw only what was in front of his eyes. He had never seen ghosts of men and women or ghosts of libraries. He had never seen, nor would ever see, Tolna County or the Sio and the Sarviz trickling side by side before they meet at last. He had never seen, nor would ever see, Tripp County or the Dog Ear trickling north to meet the White. He had never seen, nor would ever see, Melbourne County or the Moonee Ponds and the Merri trickling. And yet he wanted to breathe with ecstasy, through the curtain of the falling rain, the scent of invisible yet enduring ghosts of places.
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