lokroma reviewed The plains by Gerald Murnane (New Issues poetry & prose)
Review of 'The plains' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
This is a strange, beautiful, and brilliant book. It's a short, but not easy read. A coastal Australian filmmaker travels to an unnamed area of interior Australia ("the plains") presumably to create a movie that probes the essence of the shifting, shimmery, and often vague landscape. He interviews the wealthy ranch owners in the area, and becomes a client of one of them. He spends years probing the meaning of the plains and the people who inhabit them, but never produces an actual film.
The book is allegorical, and feels detached and surreal. To me, it is about the search for meaning within life, the creative process, and relationship, and how that meaning is constantly changing and often illusory. The experience of reading the book mimics the content, and I found myself crying one moment while reading a passage, and not having a clue about what I was reading in …
This is a strange, beautiful, and brilliant book. It's a short, but not easy read. A coastal Australian filmmaker travels to an unnamed area of interior Australia ("the plains") presumably to create a movie that probes the essence of the shifting, shimmery, and often vague landscape. He interviews the wealthy ranch owners in the area, and becomes a client of one of them. He spends years probing the meaning of the plains and the people who inhabit them, but never produces an actual film.
The book is allegorical, and feels detached and surreal. To me, it is about the search for meaning within life, the creative process, and relationship, and how that meaning is constantly changing and often illusory. The experience of reading the book mimics the content, and I found myself crying one moment while reading a passage, and not having a clue about what I was reading in the next.
