Murray Bail is an Australian author celebrated for his novels, short stories, and non-fiction. His literary contributions delve into the nuances of Australian identity and landscape, employing a distinctive narrative voice and keen observation. Bail's writing is characterized by its precise prose and his ability to distill complex themes into resonant explorations of culture and human experience. He offers readers a unique lens through which to understand the Australian condition.
"The idea that Holland's daughter was like the princess locked in the tower of a damp castle was of course false. After all, she was living on a property in western New South Wales." Once upon a time, on a property in western New South Wales, a man named Holland plants hundreds of varieties of eucalyptus trees, then decrees that only the suitor who can name each and every one of them will be worthy to marry his beautiful daughter, Ellen.
The wildly funny novel-never published before in the United States-that put Murray Bail on the literary map.Thirteen men and women on a package tour travel the world, visiting museums, hotels, and shops. They are like tourists anywhere, except that wherever they go-Africa, England, South America, New York, or Russia-they find nothing is as it seems. Challenged by unexpected propositions, differences, and subtleties of life and history, Murray Bail's tourists are in turn repelled, attracted, altered. As the Nobel laureate Patrick White put it, Homesickness, with its "tourists permanently traipsing through the museums of their own obsessions," is the work of "a visual writer with great understanding of sensual man." It is surely one of the most distinctive, original Australian novels of recent times.
Frank Delage, piano manufacturer from Sydney, travels to Vienna, a city immersed in music, to present the Delage concert grand. He hopes to impress with its technical precision, its improvement on the old pianos of Europe. How could he not know his piano is all wrong for Vienna? Perhaps he should have tried Berlin. But a chance meeting with Amalia von Schalla brings new possibilities for Delage - connections, her daughter Elisabeth, and an avant garde composer. Now travelling home, on a container ship, with Elisabeth, the real story is about to begin. The Voyage is a masterly novel by a great writer at the peak of his powers.
В "Евкалипти" любовь к словам, историям и завораживающим пейзажам создает романтический мир захватывающей и опьяняющей истории. Залог велик: рука самой красивой женщины, а в непосильном испытании — назвать точные наименования всех видов евкалиптов в ее имении — меряются силами молодые и старые, профессора и пастухи, странники и соседи. События, импульсированные амбициями, желаниями и страстью, переворачиваются с появлением таинственного дерзкого незнакомца, взявшего на себя роль Шехерезады. А он умеет рассказывать истории...