Barley Patch

Praise for Gerald Murnane

“The emotional conviction…is so intense, the somber lyricism so moving, the intelligence behind the chiselled sentences so undeniable, that we suspend all disbelief.”—J. M. Coetzee

“An enigmatic author, possibly the best you’ve never heard of . . . His work insists on the reality of the inner world – perhaps even its primacy.” —Melissa Harrison, Financial Times

“Immediately arresting . . . Murnane’s writing exhibits what literature should: an insight into a way of seeing that is quite unlike our own.” —John Self, Irish Times

‘As with Proust, the specificities of the images he pursues and catalogues provide their own pleasure [but] the effect of his writing is less about the images themselves, and more about the way thought works in the human mind.’ Chris Power, The Guardian

“Murnane’s fantasies are many-layered, and the narration weaves between these and his mundane life in thrillingly long, lyrical sentences.” —Christian Lorentzen, London Review of Books

“Strange and luminous ... His books ... (are) really about the mind behind (their) characters: the singular, fascinating consciousness that gives them life.” —Jon Day, The Guardian

“A genius.” —Teju Cole

“Murnane’s is a vision that blesses and beatifies every detail.” —Washington Post

“To give over to [Border Districts’] demands, to its way of making the familiar strange, is to open oneself to the delicate power of its rhythms, the haunting depth of its images, and the irrefutable craftsmanship in every sentence.” —Sydney Morning Herald

“Murnane has proven, over four decades and some dozen books, to be one of [Australia’s] most original and distinctive writers.” —Paris Review

“Strange and wonderful and nearly impossible to describe.” —New York Times

“[For Murnane,] access to the other world – a world distinct from and in many ways better than our own – is gained neither by good works nor by grace but by giving the self up to fiction.” —J. M. Coetzee, New York Review of Books

“Murnane’s sentences are little dialectics of boredom and beauty, flatness and depth. They combine a matter-of-factness, often approaching coldness, with an intricate lyricism.” —Ben Lerner, New Yorker

“[The] Nobel Prize contender writes like a clockmaker: every sentence is a finely tooled cog, every book an exquisite machine.” —Australian Book Review

“The greatest living English-language writer most people have never heard of.” —New York Times Magazine

“Murnane, in his unfailingly serious way, is very funny. We read and think about him ruminating on his reading and thinking about reading and thinking until the book rather gloriously threatens to swallow itself whole.” —Lidija Haas, Harper's Magazine

“Fascinating. . . Relentlessly introspective but dependably playful.” —Washington Post

“An image in Murnane’s prose has the quality of an image in coloured glass: One both sees the image and sees through the image simultaneously.” —Benjamin H. Ogden, New York Times

“Murnane's writing is carefully, thoughtfully worded, his deliberations seemingly open, even as there's obviously much more hidden care and attention behind it.” —M.A.Orthofer

“As Murnane remarks, ‘My writing was not an attempt to produce something called literature but an attempt to discover meaning’, and his insistence on the artifice of written enterprise bears witness to a thoroughness and integrity that far outweigh the minor virtue—or minor vice—of readability.” —Adrian Nathan West, Times Literary Supplement

“Border Districts is a quieter, gentler book than its forebears, weighted, but not haunted, by Murnane’s Catholic upbringing and its echoes. It’s also a synesthetic book, heady with color.” —Beejay Silcox, Australian Book Review