She will look into my face and I will have to speak to her. Yet I do not want the woman to look at me. There is a room full of books… In the room there is a table… And there is a man sitting at the table… The man writes… He doesn’t write a book… He just writes…

In 2011, The Plains' was translated into French and published in France by P.O.L, and in 2012 will be published in Hungarian. Murnane does, however, also have a following in other countries, especially Sweden and the United States, where The Plains was published in 1985 and reprinted in 2004 (New Issues Poetry & Prose), and where Dalkey Archive Press has recently issued Barley Patch and will be reprinting Inland in 2012. A seminar was held on his work at the University of Newcastle in 2001. Murnane is mainly known within Australia.

All of these books are concerned with the relation between memory, image, and landscape, and frequently with the relation between fiction and non-fiction. A book of essays, Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, appeared in 2005, and a new work of fiction, Barley Patch, was released in 2009. The novel was followed by: Landscape With Landscape (1985), Inland (1988), Velvet Waters (1990), and Emerald Blue (1995). The novel depicts an abstracted Australia, akin to something out of mythology or fable. The novel is both a metaphysical parable about appearance and reality, and a parodic examination of traditions and cultural horizons. In 1982, he attained his mature style with The Plains, a short novel about a young filmmaker who travels to a fictive country far within Australia, where his failure to make a film is perhaps his most profound achievement. Both are composed largely of very long but grammatical sentences. Murnane's first two books, Tamarisk Row (1974) and A Lifetime on Clouds (1976), seem to be semi-autobiographical accounts of his childhood and adolescence.

Inland by Gerald Murnane