/lit/ - Literature

>>22095776
Read Gerald Murnane. Only metafiction writer who knows how to tap into its potential

Real OP here. >>22086824 is an impostor. Meant to post this, sorry for the confusion.

The Gypsy and his shills fear this book.

Inland by Gerald Murnane

Better than Proust, Beckett, Bernhard, Sebald

Explain /lit/'s ignorance of Murnane. Less talented non-meme writers like Sebald, Coetzee and Bernhard have some dedicated shills here.

I have begun to write as though Gunnar T. Gunnarsen will send my pages to one of the rivals of my editor. I am writing as though the scientist and forger will take my pages to a room I could not have dreamed of in the towering Institute in Ideal. Gunnar T. Gunnarsen delivers my pages into the hands of a young woman from Lincoln, Nebraska, and I wonder what kind of alliance my enemy has made with this woman who is going to pretend to be my editor.

When I last saw this woman she was trailing her hand in the water of a fish pond on the far side of the prairie that looks like a lawn between Tripp County, South Dakota, and Lancaster County, Nebraska. She was pretending to reach with her hand for one of the red fish that drifted sometimes up to the surface of the pond. She had dipped her hand into the water when the sun was shining on the pond and on the prairie that looked like a lawn. But then a cloud had drifted in front of the sun, and when the woman looked down she could no longer see the tips of her fingers. She thought of a large fish tearing at her fingers with its teeth, and of her blood clouding the water in the ornamental pond.

The woman drew her hand out of the water. Around the white skin of her wrist was a thin line of green. The woman held out her wrist in the sun to dry but she did not rub away the green, and she was left with a dried trace of dark-green that would soon become black.
The woman sat beside the shallow ornamental pond in Lancaster County and stared at the line on her skin. She remembered the story of Winefride in the book of saints she had read as a child.

Winefride was left alone at home on a certain Sunday while the rest of her family were at church. A man named Caradoc arrived at her house and demanded to know where Winefride’s father kept his money. Winefride would not tell him, and Caradoc then threatened to cut off her head with his sword. Winefride began to run towards the church, but Caradoc chased her and caught her and drew his sword and beheaded her.
At the place where Winefride’s head struck the soil, a crack opened and water flowed out. The flow increased, and the stream of water met the congregation as they were leaving the church. The priest and the people followed the stream towards its source and found Winefride’s body with the head lying beside it; near by they found Caradoc, who was rooted to the spot.
The priest placed the head against the neck, the people knelt and prayed, and Winefride was brought back to life. The crack in the soil widened and deepened and became a well, famous for healing. Caradoc was struck dead from heaven. Winefride lived a normal life afterwards, except that a thin red line was always visible around her neck.

Which philosopher deals with phenomena? Ancient Skepticism?

Anne Kristaly Gunnarsen translates much more than names of grasses and shrubs. She is director of the Bureau for the Exchange of Data on Grasslands and Prairies. The Bureau is a department within the Institute of Prairie Studies.
When I first heard of the Bureau, I dreamed of a large American building crowded with filing cabinets and desks and with clerks wearing green eyeshades. But Anne Kristaly Gunnarsen speaks lightly of the Bureau. She tells me it is literally a desk – the same desk from which she writes to me. And she diminishes the Bureau by naming it from the initial letters of its title.

Sometimes Anne Kristaly Gunnarsen describes herself sitting at her desk and thinking of the grasslands of the world. At every hour of the day, in one country or another, a man looks up from peering at plants with names such as ironweed or wolfberry. The man is the only person inside the circle of the horizon. He stares across the veldt or the steppes or the pampas and prepares to think of himself as quite alone. But he cannot think of himself and the grass around his knees and the clouds over his head and nothing more. He thinks of himself talking or writing to a young woman. He thinks of himself telling the young woman that he thinks of her whenever he finds himself alone in grasslands. He thinks of himself telling the young woman that he thinks of her telling him she thinks of a man such as himself whenever she sits at her desk and thinks of the grasslands of the world.

Every night in summer Anne Kristaly Gunnarsen leaves the windows of her bedroom open wide. The last sound that my editor hears before she falls asleep is either the clashing of small seed-pods in the night breeze or else the soft thud and the faint metallic echo of a beetle or a moth against the window-screen.

Anne Kristaly Gunnarsen’s dream-prairie begins at her window. Instead of lawns and gardens around their houses, the prairie-scientists of Ideal let the wild kinds of grass grow freely. If Anne Kristaly opens her eyes in the night, she sees between herself and the moon and stars blade-shapes and spear-shapes and helmet-shapes, or sometimes the shapes of feathers or bells or bonnets.

My editor has never told me, and I will never ask, but I believe she sleeps alone in her room. All night she is only wakened, I believe, by scents. Every day on her dream-prairie countless flowers almost too small to see burst out at the ends of grasses. Each flower spills particles and droplets in the air. Every night the air of Ideal has the taste of the inner parts of flowers, and all night in her room my editor takes this rich air into her throat.

>>21377341
My name is Gerald Murnane and I am much better than Thomas Bernhard.

Better than Proust, Calvino, Beckett.