/lit/ - Literature

...and Calvino, and Beckett.

Is Murnane the most original writer of all time? I think so.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/books/2023/jul/23/a-homemade-avant-garde-of-one-why-is-gerald-murnane-revered-abroad-but-divisive-in-australia

>One night in March 1964 the man in this story had written in one of his letters to his cousin that he was thinking of going to Sydney for a couple of days in order to tell his cousin something important.

>The cousin had written back to the man that he would be welcome to visit him in the monastery. The cousin had sent with his letter four small colour prints of photographs of parts of the monastery. The man had looked only once at three of the colour prints, which showed parts of the outsides of buildings, but he had looked often at a colour print showing part of a low wall of cream-coloured stones with a few dark-green ferns hanging down in front of the stones.

>Sometimes during the five years when he had not called himself a Catholic and had not gone into a Catholic church, the man in this story had wondered whether he himself ought to have been studying to be a priest in a monastery. Even though he claimed not to believe in the teachings of the Catholic Church, he had sometimes wondered whether he was the sort of man who could only have been contented as a priest in a monastery. The man had wondered about this whenever he had tried to persuade a young woman to become his girlfriend but had failed.

>Whenever the man in this story had wondered why he had never been able to persuade a young woman to become his girlfriend, he had foreseen himself learning at last, in about December 1970, that he was the sort of man who would never persuade any young woman to become his girlfriend. He had then foreseen himself doing things other than trying to persuade one young woman after another to become his girlfriend and thinking of things other than having one or another young woman as his girlfriend. He had foreseen himself walking up and down in a corner of a garden and thinking only about the stones and the green leaves in the garden. He had then wondered whether the garden where he foresaw himself walking up and down was the garden of a monastery.

>>21962996
One of the greatest living writers hasn't even left his home state of Victoria.

>>21656455
>>21656638
>>21657047
That's all good, but he still not as idiosyncratic as Murnane.

Read him you pussies

>>21617674
Read better writers

>>21565500

>>21467351
>During each morning of his holidays, the chief character of this story and the owner of the collection of racebooks had checked the level of the water in the drinking troughs for fifty and more Hereford steers in a paddock of grass and had poured buckets of water into the soil around the roots of each seedling in the lines of seedlings of cypress and sugar-gum that the owner of the racebooks, who was also the owner of the Hereford steers, had planted a few months previously along one of the boundaries of one of the paddocks of grass, which he rented from three men who were the sons of one of the sisters of his father.
>>21467513
>>21467591
What's unique or distinct about it?