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Barley Patch (2009)

by Gerald Murnane(Favorite Author)

3.5 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

1920882537 (ISBN13: 9781920882532)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Giramondo Publishing Company

review 1: Wow this book was annoying. This is the book from Australia for the World Cup of Literature. The book drew me in as purporting to be about an author who "gives up" writing. The narrator says he is going to explain why. Instead of actually explaining anything the narrator just talks around and around and around. He hints at why he gave up writing, but never actually comes out and says it. He talks about the character he WOULD have written about if he had finished his half-started novel. It felt very much autobiographical--author who was once studying to be a priest and then quits and gets involved with horse racing--just like the author Murnane. Some of the piece was actually interesting or at least held my attention, but by the time I got to the last ten pages I had n... moreo idea what the narrator was going on about any more or why. Aussie Aussie Aussie...no no no!
review 2: This is a fictional novel about factual events; or a factual novel about fictional events.This book is a memoir of true events written as objectively as possible; it is therefore not a novel.This book is a factual analysis of fictional events written as a memoir; it is therefore a novel.All the above sentences are true (or not true) of Murnane's 'Barley Patch'.If you like the sort of intellectual gymnastics of paradoxes such as the above you might enjoy this book, and you might also philosophise about what it is to be a writer, what it is to be a reader, or maybe what it is like to be a writer writing about being a writer, or, indeed, a writer writing why he no longer writes fiction novels, recalling maybe some of the events, memories and images from his mind which may or may not be the source of the subjects of previous, current or future novels (which may therefore not be novels at all...) For me it is yet another example of postmodern-influenced writing gone wrong.Take the very first sentence of this work (after the initial query 'Must I write?'):"A few weeks before the conception of the male child who would become partly responsible, thirty years later, for my own conception, a young man..."Why adopt this very convoluted way of writing? What's wrong with: "Before my paternal grandfather was conceived..."? And why do I need this information? Is it linked up to some significance later on in the novel? Not really. It is just convoluted writing; and it persists throughout the work.Another persistent device used is continual back referencing that, it seems to me, is deliberately confounding for the reader; it begins early on in the work and continues regularly enough throughout. For example, we find on page 9: "Before I began to write the first of the three preceding paragraphs, I was about to report that a few images had come to my mind while I was writing the last two sentences of the paragraph preceding that paragraph." The next paragraph starts: "While I was writing the first few sentences of the previous paragraph ... At some time while I was writing the last two sentences in the previous paragraph ..." Thirteen paragraphs later we find: "Before I began to write the first of the six previous paragraphs ..." And so on.Some people enjoy this kind of writing. I find it quite annoying, and I don't think it should be encouraged.I believe that at the core of most extreme postmodern posturings and theorising there is a supercilious conceit that the recipient of any work of art (the audience, the reader) is merely a passive, unthinking, wholly receptive dolt. Proponents of this theory also appear to take it upon themselves to be the wake-up call for these dolts, reminding them always of their passiveness and doltishness. This 'need' to take the alleged passive participant to task infuses much postmodernist ideology and has been, in my opinion, a baleful influence on all the arts. less

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