'Matisse is jammed with confidence': painting and creative inspiration in the early writings of Murray Bail

Ackland, Michael

Abstract

[Extract] Ever since their publication Murray Bail's first books, Contemporary Portraits and Other Stories (1975) and Homesickness (1980), have posed major interpretative problems and defied neat classification. Readers immediately recognised that these works marked a radical break with the Australian realist tradition, and were soon enrolling the author among the ranks of postmodernist experimenters, noting the reliance of his work on the fragment, innovative narrative strategies and the absurd.1 Bail also acknowledged these affinities, and professed an interest in writers such as Tournier, Roussel, Borges, Marquez, Calvino, Grass and Bernhard, as well as Kafka and Patrick White, but this left many questions concerning his approach and subject matter still unanswered.

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Westerly

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0043-342X

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University of Western Australia

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