In the first days of spring in his eighty-second year, Gerald Murnane―perhaps the greatest living writer of English prose―began a project that would round off his strange career as a novelist. He would read all of his books in turn and prepare a report on each. His original intention was to lodge the reports in two of his legendary filing cabinets: in the Chronological Archive, which documents his life as a whole, and the Literary Archive, which is devoted to everything he has written.
As the reports grew, however, they themselves took on the form of a book, a book as beguiling and hallucinatory, in its way, as the works on which they were meant to report. These miniature memoirs or stories lead the reader through the capacious territory Murnane refers to as his mind: they dwell on the circumstances that gave rise to his writing, on images and associations, on Murnane’s own theories of fiction, and then memories of a deeply personal kind. The final essay is, of course, on Last Letter to a Reader itself: it considers the elation and exhilaration that accompany the act of writing, and offers a moving finale to what must surely be Murnane’s last work, as death approaches. “Help me, dear one,” he writes, “to endure patiently my going back to my own sort of heaven.”
“Has any writer ever paraded his aesthetic privacies so shamelessly? It doesn’t matter. These are the ravings of a genius. Ignore them if you dare, literature-besotted unraveller.” —Peter Craven, Australian Book Review
“The best book about Murnane’s books that anyone is ever likely to write.” —Shannon Burns, The Monthly
“When looking over the endless paddocks of his fictions, one is also looking out at the mysterious landscape of the soul.” —Dustin Illingworth, New York Times Book Review
“Murnane, a genius, is a worthy heir to Beckett.” —Teju Cole
“[For Murnane,] access to the other world—a world distinct from and in many ways better than our own—is gained neither by good works nor by grace but by giving the self up to fiction.” —J. M. Coetzee, New York Review of Books
“Murnane’s sentences are little dialectics of boredom and beauty, flatness and depth. They combine a matter-of-factness, often approaching coldness, with an intricate lyricism.” —Ben Lerner, New Yorker
“An image in Murnane’s prose has the quality of an image in colored glass: One both sees the image and sees through the image simultaneously.” —Benjamin H. Ogden, New York Times
“Murnane has proven, over four decades and some dozen books, to be one of [Australia’s] most original and distinctive writers.” —Paris Review
“Murnane’s fantasies are many-layered, and the narration weaves between these and his mundane life in thrillingly long, lyrical sentences.” —Christian Lorentzen, London Review of Books
“Murnane’s is a vision that blesses and beatifies every detail.” —Jamie Fisher, Washington Post
“[The] Nobel Prize contender writes like a clockmaker: every sentence is a finely tooled cog, every book an exquisite machine.” —Australian Book Review
About the Author
Gerald Murnane is the award-winning author of such acclaimed works of fiction as Border Districts, Inland, Barley Patch, and The Plains, as well as the memoir Something for the Pain. Murnane lives in the remote village of Goroke in the northwest of Victoria, near the border with South Australia.
