Landscape, Memory: On Gerald Murnane’s Inland

By Bailey Trela

When I was a child—say seven or eight—and I thought of God, an image of Miss Clavel, the nun in charge of the boarding school in Ludwig Bemelmans' Madeline books, would appear in my mind. I remember realizing this in the backseat of our family car during a long road trip; it was shocking, in its way, and curiously exciting. I knew that Miss Clavel wasn’…