The Pages - Softcover

Bail, Murray

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099524287 ISBN 13: 9780099524281

Publisher: Vintage Books, 2009

Synopsis

Murray Bail’s first novel since Eucalyptus is a beguiling meditation on friendship and love, on men and women, on landscape and the difficulties of thought itself.

What are THE PAGES?

On a family sheep station in the interior of Australia, a brother and sister work the property while their reclusive brother Wesley Antill, spends years toiling away in one of the sheds, writing a philosophy. Now he has died.
Erica, a philosopher, is sent from Sydney to appraise his work. Accompanying her is Sophie who needs a distraction from a string of failed relationships. Her field is psychoanalysis. These two women, each with a different view of the world, meet a situation they have not experienced before — with surprising results.
From the Hardcover edition.

About this title

About the Author

Murray Bail was born in Adelaide in 1941. He is the author of four novels and two collections of short stories. His novel Eucalyptus won the 1999 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Harvill Secker published his Notebooks in 2005.
From the Hardcover edition.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

At dawn—what a word: the beginning of the world all over again—the two women set out from Sydney in a small car, as other people were slowly going about their tasks, or at least beginning to stir, producing a series of overlapping movements and stoppages, awakenings and false dawns, framed by the glass of the car.
   They were city women. Comfortably seated and warm they were hoping to experience the unexpected, an event or a person, preferably person, to enter and alter their lives. There is a certain optimism behind all travel. The passenger, who wore a chunky necklace like pebbles made out of beer bottles, had never been over the mountains before. And she was forty-three. Directions had been given in biro, on a page torn out of an exercise book. It would take all day getting there. Over the mountains, into the interior, in the backblocks of western New South Wales, which in the end is towards the sun.
   At an earlier time, perspiring travelers found no other way but to hack a path through the jungle or the dry bush. Very common image. Now on the long wide road called Parramatta, the obstacles consisted of nouns, adjectives and flags, and flashing lights in the shape of arrows, the many different interruptions of
color and promises, honestly, the hard work of selling jutting into the road itself, cluttering and distracting the mind. Traffic kept stopping, starting: you’d think by now they could synchronize the lights.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage Books
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0099524287
• ISBN 13: 9780099524281
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208