There go those blurbs again, tricking me into thinking that I could actually enjoy the book. It is shown in miniature by the reverence women have for flowers, at its most concentrated when they look up and in recognition of their natural affinity accept flowers.” Lovely sentences, rotten meaningless ideas. If ya need an example, check these Bail-isms out: “It may not be exaggerated to say that the formidable instinct in men to measure, which is often mistaken for pessimism, is counterbalanced by the unfolding optimism of women, which is nothing less than life itself their endless trump card. I suppose I’m only saying this: a series of great sentences cannot be an end in itself… somewhere along the line ethics slips in, and in the absence of their careful weight even the best grammatical clauses fall to pieces. See, the Noun Verb Object trick can actually wind up implicating writer and reader both in as far as they become complicit with said sentence’s nefarious values. There’s a tangle that results between sentence as sign and sentence as signifier-or something along those lines. The problem is great sentences have been called on to propound dreadful stuff. If the writer can lay down an inviting sentence… we tend toward trust. In other words, I feel like I’m circling a beef with, like, sentences critically, and I suppose it is this… when all else fails-theme, conscience, geometry, plot-as readers, we fall back on the sentence.

He has a great ear for tone and a masterful ability with sentences. What’s truly maddening is that Murray Bail is a capable writer. And, sexist?-oh honey, it’s all that-in a way that defies direct implication (beautiful inactive frequently naked daughters, grotesque obsessive delinquently powerful men, arranged marriages, little snipes here and there like in speaking of the outback “…let’s not forget the isolation, the exhausted shapeless women…” which as a hiccup might almost appear benign but consolidated turns into this constant goat-getting action, etc). But, we’re talking a predictable plodding plot. I mean I love eucalyptus trees about as much as a kola bear does. This was ultimately a very frustrating book. Oh, and each chapter is named for a specie of Eucalypt. That process is basically Act II of the book, and it’s about as exciting as it sounds. Once his daughter is of a marriageable age he makes an Atalantan (as in the golden apple/race myth) deal to marry her off to the first suitor who can name all the various eucalypts on his land. Apparently there are over 200 specie of this plant. The man collects the life insurance, moves to a small town in western New South Wales, and plants eucalypts… lots of them.

It’s about a man whose wife dies while giving birth to their daughter. Nothing else, I guess Eucalyptus lives up to its title.

Eucalyptus by murray bail