Murray BailKirja-arvosteluja

A widowed father moves to a large ranch in Australia where he plants hundreds of eucalyptus trees on his land (there are 700 distinct species, I had no idea!) He’s pretty much obsessed with the trees. His daughter grows up into a beautiful young woman, admired by many in town but kept secluded on the ranch. The father announces that he will give his daughter in marriage to the man who can correctly name every tree on his property. Many come with little success- they’re really just there hoping to catch a glimpse of the daughter. Then a man arrives who is a eucalyptus specialist himself; he methodically walks the land with the father, naming tree after tree, in no hurry but looks easily able to finish the task. The daughter watches with growing apprehension- she’d thought nobody would ever be able to name all the trees. She falls into silence and despondency. Meanwhile, another man appears on the property, just sitting under a tree. He starts to show up every day, finding the daughter where she’s walking under the eucalypts, and he casually tells her stories. Odd little stories that don’t really have endings. They catch her interest and she seeks out his company day after day, while all the while becoming more dismayed that the other man will win her hand.

This whole novel feels like a parable. It has a dreamy air of magical realism, though really there are no magical elements, maybe a few slightly surreal things happen in the stories that are told. In some parts the style definitely reminded me of Gabriel Garcia Márquez. I thought at first I wouldn’t like this book- it feels like the characters are all held at arm’s length, you never really sink into anything as a reader. The storyline flits back and forth through the multitude of smaller stories- rather like the incomplete shade cast by a eucalyptus, I suppose. I was going to ditch it after the first few chapters but kept going and became more intrigued to see how it ends. It’s one I think worth a re-read someday. There is plenty of information on the eucalyptus trees themselves in the pages, the characteristics of their leaves, what type of soil the different species like, the strength of their timber and its uses, etc. Readers not much interested in plants might find this tedious, but I kind of liked it.

from the

“A person meets thousands of different people across a lifetime, a woman thousands of different men, of all shades, and many more if she constantly passes through different parts of the world. Even so, of the many different people a person on average meets it is rare for one to fit almost immediately in harmony and general interest. For all the choices available the odds are enormous.The miracle is there to be grasped.”
― Murray Bail, Eucalyptus
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From Wikipedia: Meaning of EUCALYPTUS:

"Eucalyptus is a genus of over seven hundred species of flowering trees, shrubs or mallees in the myrtle family, Myrtaceae. Along with other genera in the tribe Eucalypteae, they are commonly known as eucalypts."

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My review.

I would so like to rave about this book. Why? Because it has been sitting on my "to read" list for years. And now I decided to get to it. It was..frankly..one of my biggest letdowns..well..ever. Not because of the quality of the book but because it was nothing like what I thought it would be. To understand, see quote below.

"I am Mealeger. I belong to Atlanta".

No. That quote is not from this book. That is from another book about Mythology. It is about the story of Mealeger and Atalanta. Without going into to much detail....they fell in love but Mealeger died. Atalanta was devastated and refused to ever love another. Her father was worried about this and eventually made a deal with her that she should marry the first man who could beat her in a foot race. This was crazy be cause Atalanta was known as one of the fastest and nobody had ever beaten her at that.

Now to this story..the description was of a father who decides to marry his growing daughter off to the man who knows the most about and can plant the most, Eucalyptus trees. It seemed a fairy tale, a different spin on the Atalanta tale and I thought it sounded enchanting and sweet. I was really looking forward to reading it.

Well..I did not get a fairy tale. In fact this was a DNF. I just could not go on. I was as so let down as this was nothing like what I thought I was getting.

There is so much info on Eucalyptus trees. It seems an ode, a love letter to those trees which is fine, just not what I had really wanted to read about When I stopped reading, the daughter, Emily was still a a young girl, running about free and sometimes naked and this was not whimsical or a Fairy Tale. It was also slow moving, a bit dry and honestly I do not want to say anything bad about this book. It was just so far away from what I'd actually read and as I had been so looking forward to it , it was extremely disappointing.½

Lovely book, but it starts slowly, setting up a half-dreamlike, half clumsily unlikely premise, built on a whole series of other unlikely premises. You allow this, because it is a dreamy book and obviously it demands your credulity in return for consenting to create wonders.
I'll not discuss plot . . . the blurb for the book here does that adequately. What I do want to tell you is that about halfway through the book you begin to not want it to ever end. It becomes a kind of mill of wonders, spinning out story after story that takes the details of the most mundane kinds of lives and creates mythic and resonant tales, in a half-page's compass. You begin to see unimagined links between the full knowledge of one taxonomy's worth of details and the cascade of details of previously unknown taxonomy of human lives.
The framing tale tips and teeters on the edge of narrative disaster a number of times, but Bail brings it home-- a writer with more nerve than most, certainly!
You'll like this. Just stick it out through those opening chapters. . .

I suspect that this book has fallen between two stools: if you're looking for a classic love story, you're likely to be annoyed that the plot gets going by having a man offer his daughter to any man who can name all the species of gum tree on his property. If you're looking for clever reflections on anything, you're likely to be irritated by the cheesiness of the courtship and the extra, super-duper cheesiness of the conclusion. I am of the latter. Other reasons to be annoyed by Murray Bail wasting his significant talents on this book:

i) The daughter, while given some kind of interior life, is also, like, SO BEAUTIFUL. Because aren't all fictional women.
ii) Where some of Bail's opposites-in-tension books at least try to pretend that there are two sides to the opposition (psychology vs philosophy, for instance), this one falls into the worst kind of heart is more important than head cliche.
iii) The winning-her-heart-with-stories plot only works if the stories are good, and these stories are mostly dull love stories. Consistent, but still, Bail can do better.

I did learn, at least, some things about Eucalypts. And I learned that, just as I love Kitty more than Anna Karenina, and every other plain-but-kind sidekick of every dangerous-but-beautiful protagonist, so too I love the male version of Kitty more than the female version of Anna, a lesson I had previously learned by watching an adaptation of Middlemarch. I found Casaubon's downfall very sad.

Another goodreads review complains that this book isn't ambitious enough, despite being about the entire history of Western philosophy. That is a gross misreading: the book is about the very important differences between the third person perspective, here understood as essentially philosophical and analytical, and the first person perspective, assumed to be revealed by psychoanalysis.

Other goodreads reviews complaint that the book isn't like Eucalyptus, which just makes me not want to read Eucalyptus, because it makes Eucalyptus sound like an unbelievably dull paeon to the landscape and the Great Australian Soul and so on.

More positively: two women, one a professional philosopher, the other a psychoanalyst, go to a farm to work out if a squatter's amateur philosophical work is worth publishing or not. Then we get the history of the philosopher who, of course, goes to Europe and comes back a changed man. But there's a problem trying to devote yourself to the life of the mind when you're a farmer, and even more so when you're Australian: Bail's version of Henry James' American-in-or-and-Europe business, which he really does very well.

So, is (this) philosophy worth publishing? The reader gets to decide, thanks to a few pages of aphorisms at the end. They're of variable quality, and presumably have their origins in Bail's 'Notebooks.' I did like 'The disturbance of mind is the mind.'

And who understands (this) man better, the philosopher or the analyst? I can't help feeling that we're meant to see the importance of both perspectives--the third-person and the first--but the philosopher, quite rightly, is more convincing.

Downsides: I'm pretty sure this is not an accurate depiction of heterosexual women's feelings about relationships and men, and the romance sub-plots are much less interesting than the philosophical reflections on emotions.

I liked this okay as I was reading it, and I like it a lot more for reading all the negative reviews. Bail does the now standard modernist version of is-this-now-or-is-this-a-memory-and-what's-the-difference-really, and does it fairly well. For the record, "now" is on a boat from Vienna to Australia. The memories are of Vienna. It's pretty easy to get once that's clear.

The story is similarly simple: a man goes to Vienna, music capitol of the Western world, to sell his newly invented piano. He pretty much fails to sell it, but does succeed in picking up the daughter of a Viennese socialite and music aficionado.

The book becomes worthwhile once it's read as the sum of its influences, to wit, Thomas Bernhard (and other cranky Austrians writing about how shit Austria is) Henry James (New World naif is taken in by/clashes with old world sophisticates) Virginia Woolf (see above re: now standard modernist form). Bail seems to be wrestling with his own debts to the European modernist and whatever you call Bernhard's time period writers, which can easily be read as a case study in the broader question of Australia's relationship to its European heritage. The answer, in good Jamesian style, is ambivalence.

Bail uses many obviously Bernhardian tics (long paragraphs, complex syntax, Vienna, music, slightly cracked protagonist), but at the same time asserts himself. Our heroic piano inventor goes to Europe, sells one piano to an avant-garde composer who 'writes' a piece that requires the destruction of said piano, then comes back to Australia, where he finds himself inevitably changed, but not changed into a Viennese. Just changed.

I have no idea how anyone would read this who hasn't read, at the very least, Bernhard's "Loser" and James's "The American." It might make no sense at all. For fans of those books, though, this is a nice addition to the corpus.

A victim of false marketing: many goodreads reviewers complain that there's no plot here. They are correct. But since Bail isn't interested in a standard plot, that's not his fault. Nor is it the readers' fault. Anyway.

The introduction in this 'Text Classics' edition describes Bail as a cross between Patrick White and Don Delillo, which is pretty much accurate, except that he's far funnier than Delillo. His strength is set pieces, and he plays to it here: a group travels the world; we see them in hotels and in museums, and that's about it.

I found this wonderful to begin with--the first museum, in an unnamed African country, is essentially dedicated to the detritus of colonialism, and our naive Australian travelers aren't very comfortable with this. Later, in England, we get a museum of corrugated iron. Possibly only Australians will actually understand the humor and pathos here, but trust me, corrugated iron is next to Vegemite in the Australian national identity. So after failing to understand the deep history of colonialism, the travelers get to confront the far gentler version of the Australian colony. In South American they see the museum of the leg, specifically designed to tire and bore attendees, so they become aware of their own legs.

And at this point it becomes clear that Bail is also up to metanarrative tricks: this 'boring' museum comes along just at the point when his readers will be bored with the constantly recurring museum set scenes. Homesickness, from this perspective, demands more of its readers than you might expect. You have to fight through the boredom of the unexpected, and the rewards are great.

After the leg museum the relationships between the characters take on a new strength, which reinforces the book's more intellectualized points. In the U.S. we see a museum of marriage, the strongest section of the book. It brings together the more or less dysfunctional relationships between the characters, or in their history, and the way that 'romance' is used in fiction to the detriment of more interesting or relevant material. Just in case you didn't get it, the chapter ends with our travelers being led to a treehouse, from which they are invited to observe black men raping a white woman--and, quite possibly, encouraged to shoot the men.

Towards the end the book veers into Kafka territory, which isn't particularly interesting, but does point to the ambition and seriousness of the book; an ambition which Bail matches, in a very Australian way, with slapstick (one of the travelers is a blind photographer; he often falls over).

If you've read any of Michel Houllebecq's books about tourism and been even remotely intrigued, Bail's is far better, and brings far more to the table than the Frenchman. If you like Delillo's set scenes, Bail gives you a different take on them. If you like Patrick White's prose, Bail gives it to you with much more good humor. Highly recommended.

A most unusual book. It went through several stages of writing style for me. A bit slow getting into. It revived my interest in eucalypts and I would side track myself looking up the species he mentioned.
The latter part of the book was like 'One Thousand and One Nights' (or 'Arabian Nights'), fascinating.
I'm deliberately not giving anything away. I thoroughly enjoyed it but the was one in our book group who could not get into it.

I was given this by Kirsten after she’d spent some time wandering around the suburban streets in our area. They still feature many beautiful specimens of the eucalyptus, developers and other anti-tree people not withstanding. It would help me know them, she said.

This is a botanic guide, embedded with a fairy story, which, like all fairy stories, I guess, is hard to pin down. I felt like it was ‘olden’ and yet from time to time modernity sneaks in. Did this matter? Probably not, maybe it’s the point, fairy stories can be now.

Spoiler….

I was scared this was going to be some sort of modern anti-fairy story with an unhappy ending. But that isn’t the case! All that exquisite writing by Bail comes together in an ending which will please any lover of fairy tales. For whom this book is highly recommended.

Iain Banks' Crow Road begins thus:

'It was the day my grandmother exploded.'

Why this is a famous opening baffles me. It is vulgar, too brash. It is an opening by a writer that wants the reader to look at him, not the words on the page. It shows off.

Murray Bail's short story 'Camouflage' begins thus:

'All things considered, piano-tuning is a harmless profession.' Now that's a great opening gambit.

'Camouflage' and 'The Seduction of My Sister'.

Two trifles, both about flying in odd ways. Impossible to put down, to be read in moments. You end reluctantly, wishing for more, like the end of a dessert that wasn't quite large enough, or sex sometimes.

Exquisite.

I was given this by Kirsten after she’d spent some time wandering around the suburban streets in our area. They still feature many beautiful specimens of the eucalyptus, developers and other anti-tree people not withstanding. It would help me know them, she said.

This is a botanic guide, embedded with a fairy story, which, like all fairy stories, I guess, is hard to pin down. I felt like it was ‘olden’ and yet from time to time modernity sneaks in. Did this matter? Probably not, maybe it’s the point, fairy stories can be now.

Spoiler….

I was scared this was going to be some sort of modern anti-fairy story with an unhappy ending. But that isn’t the case! All that exquisite writing by Bail comes together in an ending which will please any lover of fairy tales. For whom this book is highly recommended.

Iain Banks' Crow Road begins thus:

'It was the day my grandmother exploded.'

Why this is a famous opening baffles me. It is vulgar, too brash. It is an opening by a writer that wants the reader to look at him, not the words on the page. It shows off.

Murray Bail's short story 'Camouflage' begins thus:

'All things considered, piano-tuning is a harmless profession.' Now that's a great opening gambit.

'Camouflage' and 'The Seduction of My Sister'.

Two trifles, both about flying in odd ways. Impossible to put down, to be read in moments. You end reluctantly, wishing for more, like the end of a dessert that wasn't quite large enough, or sex sometimes.

Exquisite.

I was given this by Kirsten after she’d spent some time wandering around the suburban streets in our area. They still feature many beautiful specimens of the eucalyptus, developers and other anti-tree people not withstanding. It would help me know them, she said.

This is a botanic guide, embedded with a fairy story, which, like all fairy stories, I guess, is hard to pin down. I felt like it was ‘olden’ and yet from time to time modernity sneaks in. Did this matter? Probably not, maybe it’s the point, fairy stories can be now.

Spoiler….

I was scared this was going to be some sort of modern anti-fairy story with an unhappy ending. But that isn’t the case! All that exquisite writing by Bail comes together in an ending which will please any lover of fairy tales. For whom this book is highly recommended.

Iain Banks' Crow Road begins thus:

'It was the day my grandmother exploded.'

Why this is a famous opening baffles me. It is vulgar, too brash. It is an opening by a writer that wants the reader to look at him, not the words on the page. It shows off.

Murray Bail's short story 'Camouflage' begins thus:

'All things considered, piano-tuning is a harmless profession.' Now that's a great opening gambit.

'Camouflage' and 'The Seduction of My Sister'.

Two trifles, both about flying in odd ways. Impossible to put down, to be read in moments. You end reluctantly, wishing for more, like the end of a dessert that wasn't quite large enough, or sex sometimes.

Exquisite.

Sharp differences of opinion over this award winning novel. Yes, it's poetic, but it's also slow, meandering, confusing and cryptic. The first half follows a plot that seems to develop with clear lines, but then a mysterious stranger tips the balance and the plot meanders into incoherence. All too recondite for me. But prettily poetic.

I wanted to like this one. I found it too repetitive and arbitrary: a chore to read.

Let me start with an excerpt.

Here he could look at her closely. He began wandering among the many different birthmarks and beauty spots. As for Ellen, her questions seemed to direct him towards her state of dress. For a moment, without looking down, Ellen wasn't sure whether she was being buttoned or unbottoned.

Came his voice, 'When the breeder of canaries knocked on Miss Kirschner's door he had dandruff on his shoulders. She had a squint in one eye---something like that. And she had the excruciating taste in furnishings usually found with musicians. It's a mystery how an attraction can spring up in one person for another. Who can say why? It would be amazing, except it happens all the time. A person's voice, say a man's voice, heard in the dark or behind a door is sometimes enough. But it must be a combination of things. What do you think?'

'Just voice isn't enough, I don't believe.'

'There must be cases where the attraction is not deliberate. It just sort of happens,' he proposed. 'it can't be explained---a real mystery. There's no logic to it,' he added. It was enough for him to shake his head.

'Logic?' She almost wanted to laugh.

'I mean the person is not given a choice in the matter.'

In and out went the conversation, and the light and shade slanted between the trees. Normally he would have gone long a ago. Clearly he wanted to stay. Frowning again, he was looking away from her.

'And you don't know whether your stories are true or not?' She waited, not thinking of anything else.

So it was left in that intimate, unresolved state, which too can be seen as something of a mystery.

Would that more often, we were left in an intimate, unresolved state. Eucalyptus is truly kaleidoscopic, yet soothing and intimate rather than harsh and disorienting. Here is playful writing at its best, still full beauty and life. Murray Bail's writing carries us lightly through both the scientific world of eucalypts and the emotional world of longing and fulfillment. "The scientific naming of trees doesn't follow a pattern," he tells us. "In some respects it has an attractive, amateur randomness just like the distribution of the trees themselves." Which somehow makes it a perfect source of inspiration for the telling of stories, stories meant to win the affection of our dear daughter, Ellen.

Remaining motionless Ellen tried to decipher a shape to the stories; she even followed the contours of the plantation, somehow taking an aerial view of the stories, as if that would reveal a hidden pattern....

These were women who followed the idea of hope. It seemed to be their greatest obedience. Ellen couldn't help respecting them. These women, one by one, moved about with a form of lightness, and obeyed their ideas of truth to feelings. Ellen usually liked the women he happened to talk about. Under the Spinning Gum he had his hands in his pockets as he turned to face her. 'Off the coast of Victoria,' he shielded his eyes, 'was a wife of a lighthouse keeper who became addicted to kite-flying. She was young and had no children...'

And so another story fragment unfolds.

There is a merging, an interplay, of order and disorder throughout the novel. And isn't that how we feel about ourselves? The parts we understand and the parts we don't? The parts we want to control and the parts we want to discover? Sometimes we try to remain motionless in ourseves, take our own aerial view, find our own hidden pattern. But we know, too, that we just sort of happens, and we can't be completely explained.

As you can tell, I loved this book, and can't wait to read a few more of Bail's other novels.

link

A beautiful dreamlike atmosphere pervades this near-fairy tale. A man plants hundreds of different varieties of eucalyptus trees on his property and declares that only the man who can correctly name them all can marry his daughter. A stuffy academic arrives and begins to name them, but the daughter is tempted by a storytelling stranger who woos her with his quirky tales.

I was really surprised by this book.

I had to read it for a book club, and I wasn't really holding any high hopes for it. But it's beautiful. The writing is incredible. It's lyrical, it's magical, and I found myself highlighting so many passages and wishing I had written them.

This book is distinctly Australian - it talks about gum trees and eucalyptus trees in a breath-taking way. If you're looking for some distinctly Australian literature that has very evocative, rhythmic writing, this will be an awesome book.

I don't have much more to say about this book except that it made me respond in such an emotional way, and I'd definitely recommend it to anyone and everyone. c:

Well, I only made it to p. 36, and some of my GR friends loved this, so maybe I'm not justified in calling it a pretentious pile of poop. Or maybe I am. I'll never know. Or care.

An Australian inventor takes a voyage home after unsuccessfully trying to garner support for his invention in Vienna. The voyage allows him partially to process what happened in Vienna and his life in Australia.

In the book, there is one actual voyage so there is one chapter. Don't forget the inventor's voyage through his life and his voyage through experiences in Vienna - the paragraphs seamlessly meld these three voyages into each other (one paragraph = 9 pages). The reading rhythm is affected by this - the reader is caught on the ship of words and thus experiences a voyage too. I found I embarked with excitement and interest (What will I find with this new experience?). I settled into inescapable forward motion through the pages once I settled into the rhythm of The Voyage. Towards the end I was racing to step out of the book and land back in my own life again.½

I'm interested in people, their relationships, and what makes them work at an emotional level. Unfortunately there's none of that in this bizarre, pretentious and now somewhat dated work. Here's a sample: " ...'Colleague of mine in Sydney,' North was telling them, 'collected railway stations. He claimed to have the finest collection, I think it was, in the Southern Hemisphere." (p.86) What do we make of this? Collected railway stations??? The characters just treat this statement as an ordinary fact. Sorry Mr Bail, I can't do that. I live in the real world. This is clearly meant to be almost absurdist literature, but masquerading as kind-of-believable story. This might be a good book for an Australian Literature 101 course, or for intellectual Glebe book club discussions among trendy book snobs, but for me the time I spent reading the first 100 pages was completely wasted. Why didn't I follow the Nancy Pearl rule and quit much earlier? "Regrets, I've had a few..." This is one of those.

Eucalyptus is quite beautifully written. It is quite an unusual book – an ode to the eucalyptus tree of sorts. Holland has grown every type of eucalyptus tree on his property, and has set a challenge in order for suitors to win the hand of his beautiful bespeckled daughter Ellen – they have to name every tree he owns. Of course all of them fail, but along comes a serious contender, Mr Cave, a eucalyptus expert himself. To him, it’s not about the prize at the end but about the challenge. He gets closer and closer as each day passes, and as each tree is named, Ellen grows despondent – that is, until she meets the mysterious stranger who wanders her father’s land and tells her these seemingly random, but rather enchanting stories. So on the one hand, you have Mr Cave naming all the trees, and on the other, the stranger charming Ellen with his stories. They’re kind of waltzing away in two different directions, in the shade of the eucalyptus trees.

I never realised that there are so many different types of eucalypti (didn’t realise that that was the plural form either!). This book is kind of like a love song to this species of tree.

Eucalyptus deserves a good solid read though, and I sadly wasn’t able to provide it with that at this point of time. It definitely deserves a second go, perhaps some years down the road, a comfy chair, a glass of wine and a view of the Margaret River in Western Australia. Under the shade of a eucalyptus tree of course.

I plucked this book almost at random from the library shelves after finding the book I was seeking to be unavailable, and not wanting to go away empty handed. It turned out to be excellent reading. Quite different to most books I read, but not too modern! (Well, the author is quite old now.) I found the characters and their relationships interesting, and I think Bail makes some worthwhile comments on the nature of people and societies. I only know Australians, but it seems to me that the author is a rather astute observer of Australian character, and has given me some fresh insights into myself and my own behaviour - if not the people I relate to.

This is the story of Holland and his daughter Ellen. They live together on a vast property in New South Wales where Holland has planted over 500 different species of Eucalypt. He devises a plan that the man who can successfully name all of the species will win his daughter's hand in marriage. Eucalyptus is a beautifully crafted novel - not easy to read but very rewarding. #MurrayBail