Members of the group were challenged, of course, to explain themselves. The group seemed to be insisting that what moved them more than wide grasslands and huge skies was the scant layer of haze where land and sky merged farther in the distance. Initially, a group of artists who would come to call themselves the Horizonites made art that rarely literally represented the plains, rather, they painted the horizon: The dispute started as an aesthetic and philosophical argument between artists. Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler… is literally just literary criticism turned into a novel, while The Plains repeatedly interprets and reinterprets the different art of the plains (in the introductions, Ben Lerner describes The Plains as “ekphrastic.”)įor example-once the narrator has arrived at a town “far enough“ into the plains, he learns of the decades-long conflict between the Horizonites and the Haresmen. Murnane and Calvino both fictionalize theory. The plains described in the novel are more magical than the real plains of Australia-except, perhaps, in the eyes of those who have visited the plains. We know that this too is what Murnane would say about his own book.

Like the protagonist, all of these artists fail to capture the plains in its entirety. The novel describes the many attempts of many artists to represent the plains in many different mediums. The titular plains both are and are not the plains of central Australia. Even within the world of the novel, these cities do not “exist,” rather, they are representations of Venice, Marco Polo’s home and “implicit city.” The Plains reminded me of Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, in which an imaginary Marco Polo and Kublai Khan discuss the many imaginary cities in Kublai Khan’s empire. I’ll be using this movie to illustrate my review. This is a review in which I compare Murnane to the Holy Trinity of Book Notes:Ī still from Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven. This is a review that is almost incoherent with joy. That said, it is my absolute pleasure to announce that The Plains is a near-perfect, mind blowing, totally unforgettable book. I enjoyed the books, but I absolutely do not understand the hype! Like literally, if it weren't for the fact that people keep talking to me about Sally Rooney, I would've forgotten the plot of her books within a week or two of reading. Here are my thoughts on Sally Rooney: she is a good writer who writes good books that, after I've finished reading, I've never thought about again. I haven’t read it, but I have read her other two novels.

Sally Rooney's Beautiful World, Where Are You published last week. Again, I will give no excuses, but I will sit with it, briefly, shamefully, in a moment of humble silence. Here let me acknowledge that I have done a terrible job at consistently writing this blog.

The Plains by Gerald Murnane