Unusual works by Dinesen and the new phenomenon Murnane

Two unusual and quite different (from each other ) stories yesterday: First, Gerald Murnane's Land Deal made available as a preview from his new US publisher FSG. After reading the amazing profile of the elusive and cantankerous Murnane (Most Books Are Crap) in the NYT Mag who knew what to expect? I expected something obscure and impenetrable - but this story is both mind -bending and ciiletely accessible. Written in first-person plural it tells from the Native American POV the experience ca 1830 of trading w white settlers/invaders for a large tract of the native land. Yes we all know that the native tribes had no concept of land as something that could be owned much less bought and sold. But this story goes way beyond that commonplace and gives us a sense of how the natives first perceived the objects of the trade - mirrors, knives, scissors etc. they considered these objects, in murnane's take, as the "possible" compared w their current tools (e.g. Sharpened rocks) as the "actual" , which leads to some weird cosmic speculation as they begin to think of their entire existence as being part of some other's dream - kind of like the founding of a religion or the beginning of a tragedy. Beautiful and odd - in the tradition of Borges and Calvino but more political and more charged w ideas rather than mere playfulness and experimentation w form. Other story: Isaiah Dinesen's The Immortal Story, about a European merchant in canton in the 1800s whose entire life is about power and money who becomes obsessed w engineering the events in a famous sailors' yarn about a sailor ashore asked by a wealthy old man to have a tryst w a beautiful woman (I think Hemingway wrote about this as if it actually happened to him, probably a complete boastful lie). Like just about everything else by Dinesen it's creepy and cold, w no sense of human emotions and feelings and in this instance w a particularly distasteful portrayal of women (and of Jews for that matter). How such a talented, educated, and fiercely independent woman could build her works around such characters is a mystery - I may read more of her works to see if there's an answer or at least a clue.