A cult Australian author tipped for the Nobel prize explores the ways our minds and memories mediate the world
The novelist Gerald Murnane is something of a writer’s writer’s writer. He is celebrated but not much read in his native Australia, or in Britain (the last of his novels to be published here, so far as I can tell, was Inland, in 1988). But elsewhere his reputation as an author of strange and luminous books is well established: Ben Lerner, JM Coetzee and Teju Cole are all fans, and a profile in the New York Times last year tipped him for the Nobel prize.
Now Sheffield-based small press And Other Stories is publishing five of his novels in the UK, starting with his most recent, Border Districts (which Murnane has said will be his last, though he has given up writing fiction before: he turns 80 this year), and his first, Tamarisk Row. Reading these books alongside each other shows that, while his style has developed over the years, many of his interests have remained the same. His central themes – parochialism, the workings of memory, the Australian landscape, Catholicism, horse racing – have been there from the beginning. So too have many of what he calls the individual “mental images” (instances in which characters keep records, or perceive things through coloured glass, or half-closed eyes) from which he assembles his novels. Though his books are deftly crafted, he’s not very interested in plot. Instead he wants to show the world as it seems (“seems” is a very Murnane word); how our minds and memories mediate it.
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2Hs3WbY
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