Gerald Murnane: Landscape with Landscape

Now published for the first time outside of Australia, Landscape with Landscape was Gerald Murnane’s fourth book, after The Plains, and his first collection of short fiction. It offers a wide-ranging exploration of the different landscapes which make up the imagination of this extraordinary Australian writer. Five of the six loosely connected stories also trace a journey through the suburbs of Melbourne in the 1960s, as the writer negotiates the conflicting demands of Catholicism and sex, self-consciousness and intimacy, alcohol and literature. The sixth story, ‘The Battle of Acosta Nu’, is remarkable for its depth of emotion, as it imagines a Paraguayan man imagining a country called Australia, while his son sickens and dies before his eyes.328