Author(s): Gerald Murnane

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As a boy, Gerald Murnane became obsessed with horse racing. He had never ridden a horse, nor seen a race. Yet he was fascinated by photos of horse races in the Sporting Globe, and by the incantation of horses' names in radio broadcasts of races. Murnane discovered in these races more than he could find in religion or philosophy: they were the gateway to a world of imagination.

Gerald Murnane is like no other writer, and Something for the Painis like no other Murnane book. In this unique and spellbinding memoir, he tells the story of his life through the lens of horse racing. It is candid, droll and moving--a treat for lovers of literature and of the turf.

Gerald Murnanewas born in Melbourne in 1939. He has been a primary teacher, an editor and a university lecturer. His debut novel, Tamarisk Row(1974), was followed by nine other works of fiction, including The Plainsnow available as a Text Classic, and most recently A Million Windows. In 1999 Murnane won the Patrick White Award and in 2009 he won the Melbourne Prize for Literature. He lives in western Victoria.

'Murnane, a genius, is a worthy heir to Beckett.' Teju Cole

'Murnane is a careful stylist and a slyly comic writer with large ideas.' Robyn Cresswell, Paris Review

'Murnane is quite simply one of the finest writers we have produced.' Peter Craven

'Unquestionably one of the most original writers working in Australia today.' Australian

'Something for the Painis Gerald Murnane at his best. His meticulous exploration of his lifelong obsession with horse racing is by turns hilarious, moving and profound. If Australian writing were a horse race, Murnane would be the winner by three and a half lengths.' Andy Griffiths

'A marvellous book about horse racing, one of the best this country has produced. It is full of fast and loose stories and colourful characters...and lots of laughs.' Stephen Romei, Australian

'Something for the Painbears testament to a lifelong obsession and further illustrates the breadth and depth of meaningfulness that Murnane can draw from a seemingly straightforward spectacle.' Australian Book Review

'Murnane is a writer of the greatest skill and tonal control. Reading his description of the death of a racehorse in the arms of its owner-trainer at Flemington racecourse, tears rolled down my cheeks: "The man put his arms around the horse's neck and pressed his face against the horse's head. The man went on lying there. The light rain went on falling."' Financial Times

'An absolute gem. It's literary, lucid, full of love for horses and racing and full of the strange highly-ordered madness of Murnane, full of a selfless disclosure. It's marvellous. Funny, moving, beautiful. A brilliant book.' Jonathan Green, Radio National Books and Arts

'Murnane recounts his life through his abiding obsession with horse racing. But you don't have to care about horse racing--it's the quality of the obsessed mind that matters.' Ben Lerner, New Yorker

'Yes, this is about Murnane's lifelong obsession with horseracing, but it's so much more than that. It's a memoir that illuminates his deliberately unusual life and his exquisite fiction.' Australian

'Murnane's books are strange and wonderful and nearly impossible to describe in a sentence or two...His later works are essayistic meditations on his own past, a personal mythology as attuned to the epic ordinariness of lost time as Proust, except with Murnane it's horse races, a boyhood marble collection, Catholic sexual hang-ups and life as a househusband in the suburban Melbourne of the 1970s.' New York Times

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THOMAS'S REVIEW:
Why would I, who have no interest in horse racing and who seldom reads a memoir or biography, read a book composed almost exclusively of one man’s recollections of the minutiae of horse racing in Victoria, Australia, from the 1940s to the present? Gerald Murnane has written some very interesting, layered and subtle fictions (see my reviews of Inland, Barley Patch and A Million Windows), which have formed in me an opinion of his craft with which he evidently concurs: “My sentences are the best-shaped of any sentences written by any writer of fiction in the English language during my lifetime”. If you are wanting intimations of the interior life of the Australian Proust, you will not find them in this book, largely because you have brought to your search what you must henceforth regard as unwarranted romantic notions. In fact, the mechanisms of Murnane’s literary thinking are all here: the obsessive arrangement and rearrangement of a narrow range of idiosyncratic elements; the interrogation of memory, not to arrive at factual truth as such but as an attempt to recapture the truth of subjective experience, which somehow springs into poignancy from the fine-milling of detail; an acknowledgement of the inescapability of life’s circumscriptions, which, for Murnane, act as subjective intensifiers, providing circumstance with significance beyond the quotidian. As always with Murnane, meaning and banality are separated by the thinnest of membranes, permeable in either direction. Why horse racing? “I find it peculiarly satisfying that the year when Bernborough became famous was the same year in which I began to read the Sporting Globe and to find in horse racing more than I would find in any religious or philosophical system.” And: “I got from horse racing in the first twenty-five years of my life more than I ever got from any friendship or courtship.” Like all religions (and, perhaps, all other fields of human activity), horse racing is irrelevant beyond its own parameters, but is also revealing of deep human needs and aspirations. I will probably never read another book on horse racing. I wonder what someone interested in horse racing would have made of it.

{THOMAS}