Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs

by Gerald Murnane

Overview

Never before published in the United States, Gerald Murnane’s classic collection of literary and personal essays, Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, is the perfect introduction to, and gazetteer for, the imaginary worlds created by one of the greatest living writers working in English today.

Murnane writes of himself as a boy making racehorses of his marbles, a pastime and obsession shared with Jack Kerouac; as a writer, working his first ten years in secret; as a reader, trying to understand the mystery of writing a good sentence by way of Virginia Woolf and Robert Frost; and as a teacher, exploring the endless ways in which words can express the contours of our thoughts. From these and other vantage points, Murnane peers into the hidden landscapes that lie within, or just beyond, the everyday details of Australian life.

Carrying the reader with him across the valleys, plains, and grasslands of his mind, Murnane here gives us a guided tour through an immersive landscape in which every word has its own space, shape and weight.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781911508663
Publisher:	And Other Stories Publishing
Publication date:	05/03/2022
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.80(h) x (d)

About the Author

Gerald Murnane is the award-winning author of such acclaimed works of fiction as Border Districts, Inland, Barley Patch, and The Plains, as well as the memoir Something for the Pain. Murnane lives in the remote village of Goroke in the northwest of Victoria, near the border with South Australia.

Table of Contents

Meetings with Adam Lindsay Gordon 9

On the Road to Bendigo: Kerouac's Australian Life 16

Why I Write What I Write 29

Some Books Are to Be Dropped into Wells, Others into Fish Ponds 33

The Cursing of Ivan Veliki 45

Birds of the Puszta 50

Pure Ice 66

The Typescript Stops Here: Or, Who Does the Consultant Consult? 72

Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs 80

Stream System 104

Secret Writing 130

The Breathing Author 137

The Angel's Son: Why I Learned Hungarian Late in Life 165

Editorial Reviews

04/25/2022

Australian novelist Murnane (A Million Windows) explores memory, reading, and the craft of writing in this meditative collection of essays. In “The Breathing Author,” he describes how “one of my greatest pleasures as a writer of prose fiction has been to discover continually the endlessly varying shapes that a sentence may take.” That attention to style, as well as substance, shines throughout these pages. In “On the Road to Bendigo: Kerouac’s Australian Life,” he recounts the transformative experience of reading On the Road, calling it “a blow to the head that wipes out all memory of the recent past,” while in “Why I Write What I Write,” he explains that “After I’ve written each sentence I read it aloud. I listen to the sound of the sentence, and I don’t begin to write the next sentence unless I’m absolutely satisfied.” The most moving essay, “Stream System” starts with a depiction of two bodies of water on a map and winds through a Proustian journey into childhood and the later death of Murname’s younger brother. Fans of the author’s novels will likely get the most out of the entries that recount his inspirations and writing habits. But even readers new to his work will be entranced by these sharp thoughts. (May)

Publishers Weekly

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

“ Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs provides [an] introduction to Murnane’s singular method of rendering the invisible visible, both to himself and to his readers.” —Dan Shurley, 3:AM Magazine

From the Publisher