A Season on Earth by Gerald Murnane

A Season on Earth

Gerald Murnane

Plagued by sexual obsession, fantasies and guilt, an imaginative Melbourne teenager grows up in a narrow-minded and old-fashioned Catholic environment. Adrian's thoughts and dreams are so over the top that they sometimes become funny. But I did wonder if he ever could be happy in the 'real' world.

Extract

Every Wednesday the boys went for sport to some playing fields near the East Swindon tram terminus. Under the changing rooms was a lavatory with its walls covered in scribble. Some of the messages and stories were illustrated. Even here, most of the pictures were of men's and boys' organs, but Adrian sometimes found a sketch of a naked female.

From these crude drawings he pieced together an image of something that was oval in shape and bisected by a vertical line. He practised drawing this shape until it came easily to him, but he found it impossible to imagine such an odd thing between two smooth graceful thighs.

Parallels
  • Goodbye, Columbus by Phillip Roth
  • The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
  • The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
Borrow this book
Explicit sexual content