A Lifetime on Clouds: Text Classics
Text Classics
Gerald Murnane
Introduction by Andy Griffiths
Adrian Sherd is a teenage boy in Melbourne of the 1950s—the last years before television and the family car changed suburbia forever.
Earnest and isolated, tormented by his hormones and his religious devotion, Adrian dreams of elaborate orgies with American film stars, and of marrying his sweetheart and fathering eleven children by her. He even dreams a history of the world as a chronicle of sexual frustration.
A Lifetime on Clouds is funny, honest and sweetly told: a less ribald, Catholic Australian Portnoy’s Complaint.
andA Lifetime on Clouds
‘Unquestionably one of the most original writers working in Australia today.’
‘A Lifetime on Clouds delighted me: I was particularly admiring of the author’s unfailing ability to say just enough and no more.’
‘Murnane draws out a great deal of comedy from the distance between what his hero does and what he dreams.’
‘If you only ever read one Gerald Murnane novel in your life, I urge you to make it this one.’
‘Gerald Murnane had me hooked from page one of what is his second novel, A Lifetime on Clouds. Murnane’s wonderful imagination (and perhaps parallels with his own Catholic schoolboy upbringing) is exhibited through the hilarious and sincere tale of teenager Adrian Sherd, whose mundane 1950s family life in Melbourne suburbia is supplemented by his own wild imagination.’
‘Murnane, a genius, is a worthy heir to Beckett.’
