Abstrakt
Jim Crace is known for his compelling parable-like stories written in rhythmic prose and his distinctive diction which combines poetic figurativeness with the matter-of-fact precision of exact description. In each of his twelve novels he has created a distinct yet recognisable imaginary landscape or cityscape, which has led critics to coin the term "Craceland" to denote this idiosyncratic milieu that, due to its author's ability of both authentic and poetic geographic and topographic rendering, appears other and familiar at the same time.
Having exceptional sense of observed detail and spatial sensibility, he likes to refer to himself as a "landscape writer". Indeed, Crace's narrative power lies in his ability to render places and spaces, which in spite of their wholly fictitious character evoke a strong feeling of plausibility and familiarity.
However, his imaginary milieux are never devoid of the human element and his stories examine the close interconnectedness between his protagonists and the places they occupy or move through, thus emphasising the experiential dimension of space and place. Crace likes to depict "communities in transition", that is groups of people who need to face up to an imminent socio-economic change and adapt to the newly emerging circumstances, which is why his fictional landscapes always reflect the protagonists' disturbed psyche as they project into them their anxieties and frustrations resulting from the process of revising and restoring the essentials of their shattered identity.
His protagonists then tend to be individuals who have to face up to the very impacts of these imminent changes in personal and everyday life, which often involves their own displacement, territorial as well as identitarian. Alfred Busi, the protagonist of The Melody (2018), his latest novel to date, is an exemplary representative of such an individual both in his professional and private life.
Using phenomenological geocriticism as its theoretical point of departure, this paper will attempt to demonstrate the diverse ways in which the novel (re)presents what Eric Prieto calls entre-deux, or in-between - that is transitional, transgressive, peripheral, liminal and interstitial - places and spaces, and will suggest that its narrative tends to comply with the view of transmodern literature as foregrounding a nostalgic and conservative essentialist approach to the past.