Tag Archives: Sam Tiratto

Barley Patch

Gerald Murnane
And Other Stories ($19.95)

by Sam Tiratto

Australian author Gerald Murnane isn’t known for sticking to convention. His books lack plot, characters, or setting; though often autobiographical, they hardly resemble memoir (too much left out) and could not be called autofiction (too much left in). He pokes fun at literary conventions with wry asides about writing “set, as the expression goes, in ancient Egypt,” for example, or that showing “vivid detail, as some or another reviewer might later put it.” Yet despite the astounding novelty of his 2009 novel, Barley Patch—which was Murnane’s first published work after an unexplained fourteen-year writing hiatus, and has only recently been republished in the U.S. and U.K.—it addresses a quite conventional question: Why do writers write?

By way of reply, and like almost all of Murnane’s writing, Barley Patch comprises a wide range of the author’s personal experiences and thoughts, mostly taking place in the Australian state of Victoria in the middle of the twentieth century. Many of the same images reoccur throughout Murnane’s long writing career; readers of works such as The Plains (1982), Inland (1988), or Border Districts (2017) might recognize a two-story house with a verandah overlooking grasslands, a solitary man reading the weekly horse racing reports, the sunlight through a piece of colored glass. Barley Patch is partly about the afterglow such images leave on our psyches as writers and readers, but Murnane makes it clear he’s not interested in analyzing his canon as such; he turns instead to the children’s literature of his youth, aiming to show that reading these stories provides the young reader-writer with a “network of images” that far outlast the narratives themselves—hence Murnane’s enthrallment to them even in his old age.

Throughout Barley Patch, Murnane curiously insists that he lacks an imagination. Perhaps this is because his “personages”—those aspects of his mind that take the place of “characters” in his unusual fiction—contain the imaginative element; the plot of the book, such as there is, revolves around the inner workings of its personages. “If the boy-man had possessed an imagination, as he surely did,” Murnane writes, “then he would have seen in his mind images of himself strolling with his new-found companions against backgrounds of beeches or of heather.” The terrific irony, of course, is that Barley Patch is a work of profound imagination, for Murnane takes what we assume is familiar to him and makes it unfamiliar by placing it in the minds of personages who aren’t him. Thus the houses are empty, the grasslands barren, the adults unknowable—yet life persists in these image-places, with the young writer fervently clacking upon a typewriter or scribbling a note, gazing out at a clump of trees along the horizon.

After reading about Thomas Merton, the chief personage in Barley Patch (like Murnane himself) gained the impression that priests, unmarried and celibate, had a lot of free time to read and write, so he set out on the path to priesthood. (The full explanation for Murnane eventually leaving the faith might be the subject of a future book, but one suspects it partly has to do with the calling interfering with his writing.) Earlier in the novel, he recalls knowing a man who spent all his time at the library reading newspapers to try to figure out the secret to betting on horse racing so that he could be freed from employment and follow whatever his “true task” might have been. The two get yoked together to answer the book’s focal question: the writer needs to write. It’s his true task.

But is the prolific Murnane any different from the man in the library, someone totally absorbed in a task of his own making? That he has been rumored to be a contender for the Nobel Prize suggests so, although he isn’t one to let the Swedish Academy make those kinds of decisions about literature. And of course, the man in the library is another personage, since horse racing is known to be Murnane’s greatest passion in life. “If God were to take his chance as an owner of racehorses,” he writes, “He would experience the gamut of human emotions.” It doesn’t take much imagination to picture a praying gambler, but the gambler in the novel goes beyond praying. He’s reading and picturing images of victory, writing a hopeful narrative on the sheet of newsprint. For a mind that lies somewhere between the mystic and the horse racing fanatic, prayer and writing are the same thing: The writer struggles to discover subject matter “in some far part of his mind” just as the mystic struggles to “glimpse God or heaven.”

And this is ultimately the grand invitation of Barley Patch. Murnane wants us to look into some small, dark place within ourselves, find what’s living there, and maybe even find a way to speak with it.

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The Third Realm

Karl Ove Knausgaard
Translated by Martin Aitken
Penguin Press ($32)

by Sam Tiratto

In Sigrid Undset’s historical epic Kristin Lavransdatter, the titular character has an apocalyptic vision while prostrate on the cold stone floor of a cathedral: Saint Olaf himself bursts forth from his shrine and raises an army of the dead to go greet the Lord in prayer; the skeletons don their original muscle and flesh and follow in Olaf’s “blood-stained footsteps” for their new and eternal life. Wracked by guilt and the exhaustion of motherhood, Kristin beseeches Saint Olaf to pray for her.

One hundred years after the publication of Undset’s famed trilogy, Karl Ove Knausgaard explores the origins and the possible effects of such a vision in his latest novel, The Third Realm. The book continues the variegated story of a mysterious celestial event in modern-day Norway set forth in his two previous novels: The Morning Star ends as the mystery arrives, its story focused on the generally unconnected lives of nine ordinary Norwegians; The Wolves of Eternity digs into semi-autobiography as a young man in Cold War-era Norway uncovers a family secret that involves a Russian woman whose mother fell in love with a Norwegian man. The trumpet sounds at the end of Wolves by placing us back in the present, in awe of the frightful event that is only just beginning.

As in the medieval world of Kristin Lavransdatter, evil stalks the land in The Third Realm. The devil, black metal, nihilism, and even the unstable inner self are recurring themes as the nine characters grapple with swiftly eroding senses of security in an increasingly frightening world. Determined readers of the two preceding books may start to find payoff when some of the characters posit that the bizarre shifts in their lives—accidents, medical miracles, horrifying news stories—may be related to the celestial event. Jarle, a brain researcher obsessed with the inner lives of the comatose, seeks meaning beyond mere coincidence when he notices inexplicable electrical signals from a “brain dead” patient. So too does the detective piecing together the mystery of a grisly murder first witnessed in The Morning Star. Could the celestial event have anything to do with it? Other characters laugh at the superstition, and some are gripped by fear; one, a minister, doubts her own faith. But all are unsettled.

Knausgaard is well known for his digressive style, but unlike the six-volume autobiographical My Struggle series, where philosophical tangents come from the author directly, here his extensive references come through his characters. As the series deepens this has the effect of making the characters feel less distinct and more like varying personas of one another, or perhaps different versions of Knausgaard himself. It is fitting that one of them, Jarle, should spend a few moments musing on Pessoa, “that champion of the meaningless”—like Pessoa’s heteronyms, Knausgaard’s fractal personalities reveal more about each other the further inward into themselves they look. 

The Third Realm does spend more time with the characters’ spouses and friends, and the unnamed Norwegian town in which the novels are set is starting to feel like a symbiotic web, a neural network; each new development in the characters’ lives sends ripples through the community of the unknown. Like Undset’s Kristin, each character is fighting doggedly to maintain a grip on themselves in the face of the alienation of society—as well as the chilling realization that Satan may really, truly wander Norway’s fjords and fells. The smell of sulfur lingers.

Knausgaard invites patience and contemplation in The Third Realm, its title itself an allusion to one character’s cosmology of humans’ relationship with the divine. The book may be to some a meditation, to others a dissertation, and to others still a digression. Where The Wolves of Eternity felt laser-focused on revelations about the nature of consciousness—replete with a full-length essay concerning death and the Russian cosmist Nikolai Fyodorov—this book seems to falter (or, perhaps more generously, replies with doubt) when it is asked to provide a clear philosophy. At times some characters feel perilously close to figuring it all out before getting distracted or second-guessing themselves. This dallying makes for poor suspense, but it forces the reader to return to the difficult act of contemplation. Rather than Saint Olaf’s dead, we may be greeted with Hamlet’s father—a supernatural mystery still, but one concerned more urgently with matters of the living than those of the dead.

The Third Realm encourages readers to set aside the explanations they had in mind for the previous installments’ events and to consider new ones. The return of the dead is constantly revisited as a theme, but it passes through the perspectives of the novel’s many characters and the limited information they are given. We suspect that the dead will rise, but will it be through the return of Jesus? The rise of Satan? The mythology of Saint Olaf? The dead returning is the stuff of nightmares, but wouldn’t it also make life triumphant? Knausgaard takes a treacherous step forward into the world unpierced by human thought. We have no choice but to follow.

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