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The Plains

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  The Plains was once described by Ben Lerner as a ‘strange Australian masterpiece’, a novel that ‘can feel less like something you’ve read than something you’ve dreamed’ ( The New Yorker, 29 March 2017).While Gerald Murnane locates the story in the Australian continent, its mythic qualities are such that Lerner recognises the expansive grasslands and unobstructed sky of the Great Plains of North America.   Wayne MacCauley also makes the case for a wider reading in his introduction to the 2012 Text Publishing edition to Murnane’s 1982 novel, placing it figuratively in ‘the library of alternative Australian fiction’ (vii), a reading experience he compares to ‘anything proposed by Swift, Kafka, Borges or Calvino’ (ix). Indeed, these are appropriate references. From Swift and Calvino, the sense of allegory and fable; from Kafka, the alternative world, dream-like but here more faintly oppressive; from Borges, the labyrinth library of poets, artists and writers endlessly specia...

The Music of Chance

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  Paul Auster writes about chance in most of his novels, from a chance phone call in ‘City of Glass’ ( New York Trilogy ) to writing four versions of the same life, with outcomes dictated by an incident or its absence in 4321 . The Music of Chance has such elements: Nashe begins a year of driving across America on a whim, after missing a ramp on the freeway, Nashe heads in the opposite direction to where he had planned to go. Committed now to the wrong road, he understood ‘that there was no difference, that both ramps were finally the same’ (p. 5). Similarly, when Nashe picks up a beaten-up young hitchhiker, Jack Pozzi, his life changes, ‘for better or worse’ in that moment (p. 19). For the record, decidedly for the worse. The strange, the surreal, also characterise many Auster novels. In Mr Vertigo , Walt undergoes bizare and difficult trainings (such as being buried alive) before learning to levitate, earning a living a circus by making the impossible appear to be simply a tri...