Something for the Pain: A Memoir of the Turf

Gerald Murnane is a particular man: he doesn't like travel, or the ocean, or computers, and he's never been on a horse. And for over seventy years, even as he's become one of Australia's most acclaimed novelists, his true passion has been horse racing, "a one-man religion with myself as bishop, priest, congregation." As a novelist he's known to be difficult, an Aussie Beckett or Calvino, but as a memoirist here for the first time he's not difficult in the least, writing with a quiet and humble exactitude about his obsession—barely explicable even to himself—with certain elements of the sport: the corrupt romance of race-fixing, the synaesthetic pleasures of each stable's racing colors, and the elemental drama of a wager, a crowd, and a stirring finish. A one-of-a-kind sensibility, and a one-of-a-kind book.