Inland

A lovely meditation on childhood, first love, and geography; if you liked the early volumes of Proust (before he gets to the delicious society gossip), you might find something to like here. On the other hand, you might not. Where Proust is quite open about what he's doing, Murnane is very sneaky;

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where Proust is about people, Murnane is about (for want of a better term) constellations of sensation, whether those sensations are currently being experienced, being recalled, or being invented. Deleuze, for instance, would have loved this book. That's not to say that people who enjoy literature in, how should I put it?, a less idiosyncratic way won't find anything here. There is, eventually, plenty of traditional heart-string-tugging, that anyone who likes contemporary memoir would love (and it's much better done than any contemporary memoir I've seen).

But the opening chapter... rough. It's like Thomas Bernhard shorn of both his hatred and his sense of humor.

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It took me a while to get into this book. The narrator is very brittle and defensive, and seems to be trying to scare off the reader, and without much indication as to why the reader cares to continue reading. In addition the narrator is talking about places, but jumbles together Nebraska and

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Europe and Australia in ways that make the story even harder to get into. Eventually the context starts to emerge, and the ideas behind the novel start emerging, and it works, but this is definitely not the fast read it seemed it ought to have been. Once I got into it, this was a good book, though, and gave an interesting glimpse of life in Australia. The narrator seems off, maybe on the autistic spectrum or something, so his views of America and of just about everything else are oddly constrained, but in an amusing way. His ideas of the 'Balts', refugees from the Baltic region of Europe, while constructed from what people around him have said about them, were particularly amusing.

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For fans of postmodern novels with a meta-evocation of the act of writing, this must be the cream of the crop. Murnane hides behind a few personae (following Pessoa?) to do what he loves: writing at a table, looking out of the window and contemplating the grassland, successively in Hungary, South

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Dakota and Australia. It seems as if this book starts over every 30 pages, each time with the sentence “I'm writing…”. It gives an elliptical effect, which is fascinating, but also annoys (at least to me). Fortunately, there are the humorous elements, such as the Institute of Prairie Studies, or the writer who calls himself a 'scientist of grasslands'. As mentioned, postmodernists would love this. While I was quite taken with The Plains, I'm starting to think Murnane might be a one-trick pony. And from the rare interviews with him, I gather that he thinks so too.

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