A Lifetime on Clouds

Начало книги

GERALD Murnane is the author of some of the most original books ever written by an Australian. His first novel, Tamarisk Row, is an obsessive exploration of the imaginative terrain of childhood. His third novel, The Plains, is a meditation on love, landscape and creativity that has an hallucinatory power. The novel that came between these two extraordinary books, A Lifetime on Clouds, has long been out of print. And yet it is, for my money, the funniest and most accessible of all his works. It is also a moving and fearless account of adolescent angst. Murnane’s frank treatment of sexuality, longing, adult hypocrisy, and the guilt and confusion created by a sexually repressive 1950s Catholic boys’ school is as engaging now as when it was first published, in 1976.

The protagonist of A Lifetime on Clouds is the fifteen-year-old schoolboy — and self-confessed sex maniac — Adrian Sherd, who lives in the south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne. By coincidence, in 1976 I was a fifteen-year-old schoolboy living in the south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne and, although I don’t think I qualified as a sex maniac (not compared to Adrian Sherd, at least), I did have a strong interest in the subject.

Читать дальше →