Austrialian writer Gerald Murnane has been called a “genius” and is considered a contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature. After I read an article on Gerald Murnane (who I had never heard of) in the New York Times Magazine (you can read that article here), I decided to read one of Murnane’s books. The Plains was published in Australia in 1982 and published in the U.S. in 2017. Here’s a sample of what I read:

I could not complain that I lacked the advantages of other salaried clients–the dramatists, toymakers, wavers, illusionists, curators of indoor gardens, musicians, metalworkers, keepers of aviaries and aquaria, poets, puppeteers, sings and reciters, designers and modellers of impractical costumes, historians of horseracing, clowns, collectors of mandalas and mantras, inventors of inconclusive board-games, and others who could use so much more than mere words to produce their effects. (p. 166)

I was not impressed. GRADE: C