AustLit

'Gerald Murnane’s landmark novel, Landscape with Landscape(1985), is a masterpiece of Australian postmodern experimental fiction. Divided into six parts, which could be read as six independent stories, the book adopts the structure of embedded Chinese Boxes, providing both unity and a feeling of inescapable entrapment. The characters in the book use a series of images, such as juice, freckles on a woman’s skin and the mandala, to communicate their secret impulses and desires for the real beyond life’s immediate impressions. Through these images, the book examines the wide gap between flesh and spirit, ideals and reality in Australian society and literary writing, and the depression and anguish of a new generation of Australian writers. With its allegorical presentation of the inescapable confinement and anguish experienced by emerging writers, this book stands as a classic work of Australian anguish on the eve of the country’s literary modernization.' (Publication abstract)