Murray Bail

A widowed father moves to a large ranch in Australia where he plants hundreds of eucalyptus trees on his land (there are 700 distinct species, I had no idea!) He’s pretty much obsessed with the trees. His daughter grows up into a beautiful young woman, admired by many in town but kept secluded on the ranch. The father announces that he will give his daughter in marriage to the man who can correctly name every tree on his property. Many come with little success- they’re really just there hoping to catch a glimpse of the daughter. Then a man arrives who is a eucalyptus specialist himself; he methodically walks the land with the father, naming tree after tree, in no hurry but looks easily able to finish the task. The daughter watches with growing apprehension- she’d thought nobody would ever be able to name all the trees. She falls into silence and despondency. Meanwhile, another man appears on the property, just sitting under a tree. He starts to show up every day, finding the daughter where she’s walking under the eucalypts, and he casually tells her stories. Odd little stories that don’t really have endings. They catch her interest and she seeks out his company day after day, while all the while becoming more dismayed that the other man will win her hand.

This whole novel feels like a parable. It has a dreamy air of magical realism, though really there are no magical elements, maybe a few slightly surreal things happen in the stories that are told. In some parts the style definitely reminded me of Gabriel Garcia Márquez. I thought at first I wouldn’t like this book- it feels like the characters are all held at arm’s length, you never really sink into anything as a reader. The storyline flits back and forth through the multitude of smaller stories- rather like the incomplete shade cast by a eucalyptus, I suppose. I was going to ditch it after the first few chapters but kept going and became more intrigued to see how it ends. It’s one I think worth a re-read someday. There is plenty of information on the eucalyptus trees themselves in the pages, the characteristics of their leaves, what type of soil the different species like, the strength of their timber and its uses, etc. Readers not much interested in plants might find this tedious, but I kind of liked it.

from the … (más)

“A person meets thousands of different people across a lifetime, a woman thousands of different men, of all shades, and many more if she constantly passes through different parts of the world. Even so, of the many different people a person on average meets it is rare for one to fit almost immediately in harmony and general interest. For all the choices available the odds are enormous.The miracle is there to be grasped.”
― Murray Bail, Eucalyptus
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From Wikipedia: Meaning of EUCALYPTUS:

"Eucalyptus is a genus of over seven hundred species of flowering trees, shrubs or mallees in the myrtle family, Myrtaceae. Along with other genera in the tribe Eucalypteae, they are commonly known as eucalypts."

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My review.

I would so like to rave about this book. Why? Because it has been sitting on my "to read" list for years. And now I decided to get to it. It was..frankly..one of my biggest letdowns..well..ever. Not because of the quality of the book but because it was nothing like what I thought it would be. To understand, see quote below.

"I am Mealeger. I belong to Atlanta".

No. That quote is not from this book. That is from another book about Mythology. It is about the story of Mealeger and Atalanta. Without going into to much detail....they fell in love but Mealeger died. Atalanta was devastated and refused to ever love another. Her father was worried about this and eventually made a deal with her that she should marry the first man who could beat her in a foot race. This was crazy be cause Atalanta was known as one of the fastest and nobody had ever beaten her at that.

Now to this story..the description was of a father who decides to marry his growing daughter off to the man who knows the most about and can plant the most, Eucalyptus trees. It seemed a fairy tale, a different spin on the Atalanta tale and I thought it sounded enchanting and sweet. I was really looking forward to reading it.

Well..I did not get a fairy tale. In fact this was a DNF. I just could not go on. I was as so let down as this was nothing like what I thought I was getting.

There is so much info on Eucalyptus trees. It seems an ode, a love letter to those trees which is fine, just not what I had really wanted to read about When I stopped reading, the daughter, Emily was still a a young girl, running about free and sometimes naked and this was not whimsical or a Fairy Tale. It was also slow moving, a bit dry and honestly I do not want to say anything bad about this book. It was just so far away from what I'd actually read and as I had been so looking forward to it , it was extremely disappointing.… (más)

Lovely book, but it starts slowly, setting up a half-dreamlike, half clumsily unlikely premise, built on a whole series of other unlikely premises. You allow this, because it is a dreamy book and obviously it demands your credulity in return for consenting to create wonders.
I'll not discuss plot . . . the blurb for the book here does that adequately. What I do want to tell you is that about halfway through the book you begin to not want it to ever end. It becomes a kind of mill of wonders, spinning out story after story that takes the details of the most mundane kinds of lives and creates mythic and resonant tales, in a half-page's compass. You begin to see unimagined links between the full knowledge of one taxonomy's worth of details and the cascade of details of previously unknown taxonomy of human lives.
The framing tale tips and teeters on the edge of narrative disaster a number of times, but Bail brings it home-- a writer with more nerve than most, certainly!
You'll like this. Just stick it out through those opening chapters. . .… (más)

I suspect that this book has fallen between two stools: if you're looking for a classic love story, you're likely to be annoyed that the plot gets going by having a man offer his daughter to any man who can name all the species of gum tree on his property. If you're looking for clever reflections on anything, you're likely to be irritated by the cheesiness of the courtship and the extra, super-duper cheesiness of the conclusion. I am of the latter. Other reasons to be annoyed by Murray Bail wasting his significant talents on this book:

i) The daughter, while given some kind of interior life, is also, like, SO BEAUTIFUL. Because aren't all fictional women.
ii) Where some of Bail's opposites-in-tension books at least try to pretend that there are two sides to the opposition (psychology vs philosophy, for instance), this one falls into the worst kind of heart is more important than head cliche.
iii) The winning-her-heart-with-stories plot only works if the stories are good, and these stories are mostly dull love stories. Consistent, but still, Bail can do better.

I did learn, at least, some things about Eucalypts. And I learned that, just as I love Kitty more than Anna Karenina, and every other plain-but-kind sidekick of every dangerous-but-beautiful protagonist, so too I love the male version of Kitty more than the female version of Anna, a lesson I had previously learned by watching an adaptation of Middlemarch. I found Casaubon's downfall very sad.… (más)