Last Letter to a Reader

by Gerald Murnane

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."

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Biography, Australia, Literature, Writing, Books About Books

140 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2021

About the author

Murnane's first two books, Tamarisk Row (1974) and A Lifetime on Clouds (1976), seem to be semi-autobiographical accounts of his childhood and adolescence. Both are composed largely of very long but grammatical sentences.

In 1982, he attained his mature style with The Plains, a short novel about a young filmmaker who travels to a fictive country far within Australia, where his failure to make a film is perhaps his most profound achievement. The novel is both a metaphysical parable about appearance and reality, and a parodic examination of traditions and cultural horizons. The novel depicts an abstracted Australia, akin to something out of mythology or fable. The novel was followed by: Landscape With Landscape (1985), Inland (1988), Velvet Waters (1990), and Emerald Blue (1995). A book of essays, Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, appeared in 2005, and a new work of fiction, Barley Patch, was released in 2009. All of these books are concerned with the relation between memory, image, and landscape, and frequently with the relation between fiction and non-fiction.

Murnane is mainly known within Australia. A seminar was held on his work at the University of Newcastle in 2001. Murnane does, however, also have a following in other countries, especially Sweden and the United States, where The Plains was published in 1985 and reprinted in 2004 (New Issues Poetry & Prose), and where Dalkey Archive Press has recently issued Barley Patch and will be reprinting Inland in 2012. In 2011, The Plains' was translated into French and published in France by P.O.L, and in 2012 will be published in Hungarian. In July/August 2017, The Plains was the number 1 book recommendation of South West German Radio (SWR2). His works have been translated into Italian (Velvet Waters as Una Melodia), German (The Plains as Die Ebenen, Border Districts as Grenzbezirke, Landscape With Landscape as Landschaft mit Landschaft, all publ. Suhrkamp Verlag), Spanish (The Plains as Las llanuras, and Something for the Pain as Una vida en las carreras, all published by Editorial Minúscula), Catalan (The Plains as Les planes, also published by Editorial Minúscula), Swedish (Inland as Inlandet, The Plains as Slätterna, Velvet Waters as Sammetsvatten and Barley Patch as Korntäppa) and Serbian (The Plains as Ravnice; Inland as Unutrašnjost, both published by Blum izdavaštvo 2025).

Reviews

[Fionnuala]

Last Letter to a Reader, published in 2022, is eighty-three year old Gerald Murnane's most recent book.
It is made up of fifteen short chapters, each a meditation on the themes and mental images that make up each of his published works.

My last book would be a book of books: a distillation of precious imagery, one of the narrators of his 1980s short stories had maintained, and Gerald Murnane did write a book about books in 2012. It was called A History of Books, and while it might be described as a distillation of the imagery that had stayed with him from the small number of books he remembered out of the large number he'd read in his life, I feel that Last Letter is far more entitled to be the book of books, the distillation of precious imagery because it is full of the images that suffuse all of his own books, none of which he has forgotten.

Coming to Last Letter after reading and reviewing almost every one of the works it discusses has been a kind of sacred experience for me, a bit like, for example, getting a letter from Beethoven in which he tells me why he wrote each of his compositions, and about the images that were in his mind as he wrote certain of them, the miraculous Sanctus from his Missa Solemnis, for example.

If I'm using religious-themed vocabulary in this review, it's because I've felt genuinely uplifted while reading certain passages in Murnane's books but also as a result of Murnane telling the reader of Last Letter that he has a folder in his archives marked 'Miracles' in which he keeps an account of the fifty or more experiences he's had in his life which he feels to have been miraculous according to his own sense of that word. He only shares one but it gave me a sense of the revelatory nature of his concept of the miraculous, and reminds me of Joyce's forty recorded Epiphanies and of Proust's many revelation moments as well.

The one epiphany moment Murnane chooses to share with his 'last reader' is in the chapter where he thinks back on his most celebrated book, The Plains, and puzzles out the answer to the questions, Why did I write it? and What pattern of meaning has it developed in my mind? The revelation he arrives at concerns an experience he gave to his very first fictional character in his very first novel, an experience he had had himself as a child though he feels he'd have forgotten it if he hadn't given it to Clement Killeaton, the main character of Tamarisk Row.

This is how Murnane describes the 'miracle' revelation : …the primitive rudiments of the text [The Plains] might well have been formed on an afternoon of fierce sunlight in the 1940s, when a child who is by now as much a fictional person as an actual boy stood a little apart from two self-assured young female persons among vistas of lawns and shrubbery beside a splendid house in the grandest city of the goldfields of Victoria and when he first divined the vastness of what he was by birth entitled to dream of and the narrowness of what he was by nature likely to obtain.

That revelatory experience does indeed explain certain themes and images in the text of The Plains but it made me think also of the vast creative 'goldfield' that Gerald Murnane not only dreamt up but brought into being in his writing, a goldfield suffused with yellow-green and orange-gold imagery that will stay with me longer than much of what I've read in other books.

In one of the short pieces in his Stream System collection, Gerald Murnane writes about standing in front of a shelf of his own books in the year 1980 and wondering if anyone will be reading his words in forty years from then. Well, he can now picture a reader standing in front of a shelf of his books in the 2o20s after spending the last three months steeped in his words.
And this review, the final one of ten, is that reader's 'Last Letter to Gerald Murnane'.

[Alwynne · Rating 4 out of 5]

An unorthodox memoir from the eccentric, acclaimed, but under-read, Australian writer Gerald Murnane, whose supporters include Teju Cole, Ben Lerner and J.M Coetzee – the promotional material for this also place him alongside Grace Paley, Lydia Davis, Clarice Lispector, and Lucia Berlin. Those connections alone were more than enough to make me want to try this, and I wasn’t disappointed. It’s brief but surprisingly gripping: witty, lucid, self-deprecating yet gloriously opinionated. It’s also an unexpectedly moving piece, a sort of self-memorial by someone keenly aware that these may be their last published words or their last months on Earth. The idea behind it’s simple, now in his eighties Murnane devoted lockdown time to revisiting and reassessing his own work, attempting to cover it in chronological order from his debut Tamarisk Row onwards.

A recent review claimed Last Letter to A Reader would be most meaningful for people who’ve made their way through Murnane’s fiction, I’ve hardly read any of it. Although I’ve also seen a short documentary about him - mostly centred on his love of horse racing which I loathe - I don’t count as a Murnane expert or fan in any way, shape or form but I lapped this up. I was fascinated by so much here: his responses to reading Proust and Emily Bronte; impressions on the influence of Borges; ideas about the place of memory in his novels drawing on James Joyce and Moby Dick; more abstract discussions of the relationship between author, text and reader; his pithy account of studying literature in the age of Leavis, a critic Murnane sums up as “a narrow-minded and truculent splitter of hairs in Cambridge.

Thanks to Edelweiss Plus and publisher And Other Stories for an arc

[Nick Grammos · Rating 5 out of 5]

A thing has meaning for me if it seems connected with another thing, and a work of fiction acquires meaning from the connectedness of its subject matter.

Sometimes while reading Gerald Murnane, any Gerald Murnane, I’m convinced that his sentences mesmerise and lull me as the reader into enjoying the reading of his work without any consideration that there is any meaning behind it. And yet each phrase, or sentence hangs pregnant with expectation that I have reached some golden place of understanding. It may simply be the confident enjoyment that one of his multi-clausal sentences only means something internal to itself. That I’ve worked out the structure of the sentence and examined the relationship between its parts. And the astonishing beauty those sentences have as a result of how they were constructed.

Sometimes he leaves just an impression like the one you get when driving along a highway and everything rushes by but you can’t take it all in. You only see an outline of the structure of the landscape, occasionally taking in a detail – a cow, a fence, a lone tree, a rocky outcrop. You can only take in so much from your limited point of view.

And then by the end of a Gerald Murnane book, I’m convinced I’ve been treated to what I think fiction can do above any other form of art (due to the length of time one is immersed in it): to allow the reader to touch another consciousness. Not the author’s consciousness, of course. That would be so banal, it needs embellishment, something grander you'd expect. And oddly, Murnane teases us with the banalities of events and experiences he ascribes to his narrators. A fence, a field, a bush, a window, line of trees. Imagine looking into another consciousness and discovering it isn’t a Hollywood blockbuster!

That ‘experience’ of another consciousness if we can get it, is constructed through the author’s artifices, and leave behind the impression, a blur like that we see in the landscape on the highway, just the belief that that other consciousness can be experienced.

I feel while reading fiction as though I know what it would be like to know the essence of a person… And sometimes, like that same author, I feel as though the part of me that thus feels in my own essence.

The premise of this work is that Murnane has re-read all his own works. So the work hints at the style of a memoir, an autobiographical premise. He then discusses his impressions or any new thoughts he has about each work. It's as though a separation has been made, that these works belonged to the works of someone else, some long past episodes of that other author’s life. The past, his own, like our own, really is another place, performing for us as though it were someone else behind it all with its own troupe of characters. The arc of narrative we ascribe to ourselves may not hold up to the scrutiny of examination. Here we have that artifice at work again. The reader is reading the impressions of the author of his own work. The author creates a separation to examine that idea, which after all is the same as the author’s construct of the narrator through which to tell any other story.

Is this fact, then, or fiction? One fact is that he tells us he enjoyed many of his sentences. I can see that and so he should - many are true marvels of sentence engineering. But it also creates a nice little disarming of the reader who can say “That fellow Gerald Murnane, reading his sentences after thirty-five years still thinks they are pretty good.” Truth, not fiction, you say! Maybe. But this is Gerald Murnane, who can write a sentence that places us in the time and space of a fiction we could never dream of. Through that we suspend disbelief and then, presto he will tell us that last sentence was a work of fiction.

Was I, rather, after fifty years as a certain sort of writer, skilled enough to link together in an impressive passage what might have been of no use to another sort of writer? Or is what we call actual a vast fictional text that we can only sometimes interpret and, even then, only in part?

And when he does gaze at one of his sentences from this long past, as though they hold some greater meaning than before – or new meanings layered on from new experiences since first having read them – I believe he too is caught in the gaze of the words on the page like I am. Our consciousnesses merge in an act of fiction, perhaps.

I chuckle to myself by the end of it of this book that Murnane has found the ideal medium (again) in this work to muddy further the relationship between fiction and non-fiction but also put to bed the relationship between the author and fiction. While explaining to us certain facts in a certain work of his, say an image or a memory, he takes us to places where we must question whether what we are in fact reading here is the most recent work of fiction by Gerald Murnane.

‘according to a man who devoted his entire life to the study of how fiction works on the reader, you are destined never to learn anything of value about me from a study of my fiction.’

And after all that, even when he has told us so much through his endless "I" narrator, we are reminded that what he has written so far still makes the author unknowable.

[George · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think if you've read even a little bit of Murnane, you'd be able to predict the style and effect of this collection. These are exactly the sorts of essays the author of those novels would write. The sentences are killer, obviously, and like most of his work this book is a great education in creating incredible effects using grammar conventions beloved of people who went to school in the 1950s. Here Murnane goes a bit further in teaching his actual, non-ideal readers, though, because in this book he offers a very generous bit of explicit (if still coy on the details) writing advice: "my ignorant teachers and the ignorant authors of my textbooks had led me to suppose that an author of fiction is gifted with some sort of insight into human nature, and – more preposterous still – that the purpose of fiction is to create believable characters. I was in my twenties before I learned that I was admirably qualified to write fiction, because I knew next-to-nothing about human nature and was incapable of creating any sort of characters" (37). He goes on later to describe the 'convincing insight into human nature' aesthetic as "a narrow view of fiction indeed, and I soon learned to think otherwise and to make use of some of the countless possibilities available to the fiction-writer" (74). He doesn't list these possibilities beyond sharing his private and somewhat idiosyncratic terminology of 'true fiction' and the art of reporting only the contents of the mind of the narrator. Nonetheless I found that unexpectedly informative. Even though this book is as patrician as ever, reading it I think has a salutary inspirational effect on the young creative writer.

It's funny to me that he says he isn't persuaded he has an unconscious, preferring Proust's moi profond, when so much of his work rests on sudden and revelatory connections he dredges from his psyche, and also when he spends so much of his time in a fantasy horse-racing universe of his own creation. I could expand more on that but he doesn't really go into details, besides telling a story of accidentally regaling a fellow horse-racing-enthusiast with an anecdote about some unfortunate incident that he too-late realised was part of his invented world. I'm not sure what to make of that. There are a few mysterious things in this book like that. I find it odd, although many people have remarked on this in different ways, that Murnane very briefly raises the spectre of certain theoretical discourses that are sometimes at odds with his books only to quickly move on. Feminism, for one, which is perhaps given additional peculiar grist here by Murnane's revelation that his Ideal Reader is a silent woman, and also the discourse of Australia's colonial history, which seems only rarely to appear in Murnane's work. As he writes towards the end, "I was annoyed recently to read, at the end of a mostly favourable review of one of my books recently published in the United Kingdom, the disapproving comment that I seemed unaware that a different sort of landscape had preceded the Australian landscape that I wrote about so often and that a different sort of people had occupied that landscape. These are matters that I'm well aware of, but I exercise the freedom enjoyed by all writers in this country: the freedom of choosing what they wish to write about, even if I seldom choose but was more often driven" (121). This is all fine in the end but it's a bit of an ungenerous deflection (and do we choose what we wish? or do we just choose what we write, damn what we wish?). The reference to "freedom" is not apt, especially so soon contradicted.

It's an anti-theoretical book, although Murnane seems to be a keen reader of Wayne Booth, which is another thing we could perhaps profitably imitate. It seems to me, finally, that nobody ever talks about the moral problems associated with horse-racing in connection with Murnane. It is odd to me that it doesn't seem to come up in reviews, given the absolute centrality of that particular cultural-economic area to his life and work. Murnane complains about Leavis in this book, mostly because he professes not to understand at all the patronising instructions he received from his Leavisite teachers at unimelb about the place of morality in art – sure, although Murnane doesn't ever spell out his disagreement with Leavis or refer to any of his writings, which is again too coy for his own good – and as somebody who has never really heard a discussion about the Melbourne Cup not couched in terms of animal abuse, sheltered life that I lead, it jars me to read Murnane say he's never really looked at a horse, as he does at the beginning of his memoir of the turf and quotes in this book. That line speaks, maybe, to a persistent silence in his work on certain matters that necessarily take place outside of the narrator's beautiful mind.

[Renata · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extraordinarios ensayos sobre su propia obra. Las conexiones de Murnane entre lo que escribe y cómo lo imagina son fascinantes. Una mente brillante, un escritor que ama su propia obra y que en cada capítulo sobre cada libro nos comparte más que la historia del libro, una parte suya y de cómo creó un párrafo, una línea, una imagen y de ahí, con más o menos control, salió su obra.

[Madeline Mcfarlane]

There is no less expected of Gerald Murnane but to have written another piece of work with such intricate and well composed language. Last Letter to a Reader is intended to be Murnane’s final symphony, his final chance to reflect on his life as a writer before age comes to take him. The essays are arranged chronologically by release date, each piece focusing on his readings of his published fiction, yet he discusses them with no regard for time, nor seems to ever finish reading them. He acknowledges this in the first essay, ‘Tamarisk Row’ as being his ‘preferred form of narration:’ that ‘no such thing as ‘Time’ exists; that we experience only place after place.’

Murnane is undoubtably obstinate. He spends time lamenting the ideas of others’: of writers, reviewers and readers, and his displeasure with their ideas. His concern with the technicalities of language, and what he views to be the correct ways of structuring it, make it easy for the reader to form a perception of him as behind his time. It is undisputed though, that Murnane is a literary genius. His mind seems to be something of a labyrinth we must make passage through, which turns the work into more of a rumination on reading and writing, and even memory, than anything else. The essays are more concerned with the memories his work invokes in him and how his life has shaped his novels and vice versa. While he tends to stray from placing too much of his own ideals in the work, what he says of how the reader should consume literature echo his own. He spends careful time examining sentence structure and length, especially though his love of Moby Dick, where he writes of his desire for his fiction, specifically his sentences, ‘to enrich an actual life.’

Perhaps this holds more weight knowing that Murnane expects—and this time seems set on—this to be his final published work before his death, making it more profound than if it were from any other writer of middle age. This is a man coming to the end of his days and searching for the final avenue to explain himself. He ends the final essay with a piece he composed on his fiddle after writing an earlier essay. ‘Help me, dear one, to endure patiently my going back to my own sort of heaven.’

[Glenn · Rating 4 out of 5]

In terms of idiosyncratic apologias, this runs a distant but definite second to Raymond Roussel's "How I Wrote Certain Of My Books." Which is not to suggest that Murnane is barking mad or delusional. But his more insistent passages flirt with both the pompous and the perverse, and wind up strongly implying that having any interests outside of Proust and horse racing mean that YOU'RE the freak. I've only read four of Murnane's novels (he prefers the term "long fictions," because of course he does) and this is the first self-explication that actually made me want to STOP reading an author's work. (The feeling will pass, but you get the idea.) There is some material of genuine interest dotted throughout, however. But really...

Page 66: "For some time after the publication of 'Inland' in 1988, I had been preparing to write a substantial, book-length work of fiction titled 'O Dem Golden Slippers.'"

Pages 95-96: "I've read none of the work of the mid-twentieth-century American writer James Baldwin."

Tell me this guy doesn't think he's the cutest Australian ever.

[M. Sarki · Rating 5 out of 5]

…I know of no better way to appraise a work of fiction than to observe and then report for one’s own benefit, or for others’, the extent to which the reading of the work has changed the set of one’s mind…

A treasure trove of insight into the working mind of Gerald Murnane. Definitely a five-star addition to an already illustrious career. His many digressions discovered in reading these essays as he re-read and considered all his previously published books were simply amazing and a joy to visit intimately. Please read the rest of my review here:

https://rogueliterarysociety.com/f/la...

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

If there's one thing I've learned from reading Gerald Murnane, it's that it's impossible for me to write the kind of review that writing of this calibre deserves.  And this is just as true of Last Letter to a Reader as it is of his enigmatic fiction.

Last Letter to a Reader is not like Murnane's other books.  Murnane is addressing his own legacy as a writer...

In the essay about his book Invisible but Enduring Lilacs, he explains the obligation to compose something worthwhile, something worthy of the attention of the personage that I know only as my Ideal Reader, one of a select band of those that I call readers of good will. 

Well, I like Murnane's books, and he has my enthusiastic attention, and I have the good will. But I am not his Ideal Reader, and I approach his work well aware of my limitations.  This is partly because in his previous fiction he has been explicit about what he expects of his readers.  He is unabashed in his scorn for most reviewers and for a certain sort of reader.  In his essay about Velvet Waters, he writes:

A certain sort of reader of these paragraphs might have cause to complain that an author of my sort denies him or her what readers of fiction have traditionally sought and obtained: meetings-up with complex but credible characters ; insights into human nature.  My reply to such a complaint would be the claim that the alert reader of my fiction obtains therefrom an extraordinarily detailed knowledge of its implied narrator, the personage who created it.  The mouse behind the mesh, the grey-gold monastery/brain, and the sky of melting colours — each of these and of the host of their counterparts throughout my fiction is an item of evidence, no matter how fragmentary, of the workings of the mysterious invisible entity that we call Mind. (p.54)

What might distinguish me from that certain sort of reader is that while I do like fictional meetings-up with complex but credible characters and insights into human nature, I don't complain about fiction that offers something else.  I often relish it.

This is what happens when Murnane reads:

The reading of a work of fiction alters — sometimes briefly but sometimes permanently — the configuration of my mental landscape and augments the number of personages who are its temporary or permanent residents.  Morality, social issues, psychological insight — such matters seem as fanciful and inconsequential to me as my talk of shapes and dissolving imagery might seem to my conjectured reader. (p.53)

Again, although I generally find commercial and genre fiction disappointing, I enjoy complex novels that explore morality, social issues, and psychological insights.  But equally, I like reading books that reconfigure my mental landscape in the way that Proust, James Joyce, Borges and Murnane do.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/12/31/l...

[Declan Fry]

We are told early on in Last Letter to a Reader – purportedly Murnane’s final correspondence – that the book consists of an attempt by Murnane-the-writer to remain alive, so that the reader might “go on reading what I could never write”. This project, he reflects, is “likely to provide a neat rounding-off to my career as a published writer”.

The question of how to neatly round things off is a recurring one in literature, where age often outlasts both talent and passion. We imagine that things can last forever, but for artists, who are always writing against time and the prospect of loss – of body, of mind, and finally, of the audience who might read them – this aspiration has never been persuasive.

Last Letter to a Reader, then, feels like a bulwark and a final word before the inevitable regrets of l’esprit de l’escalier. A summa of Murnane’s corpus, if you like – although a term such as corpus, with all its physicality, doesn’t exactly correspond to Murnane’s work, which is invested in the more-than-bodily: in ideals, personages, interweaved connections, and a kind of transcendence.

The book’s title recalls Murnane’s Last Letter to a Niece, a story in which, as its blurb states, “a writer searches for [...] an ideal reader”. This ideal reader has, in Murnane’s work, often figured as female. The yearning relationship that exists toward women or “women-personages” (fictional or ideal women), as felt by Murnane’s various narrators, protagonists, and the author-figure himself, are the driving force of some of the most resonant passages in his fiction.

Yet idealising women can be difficult to distinguish from objectification. In Last Letter to a Reader, Murnane complains that an early reviewer of Landscape with Landscape – who reportedly called it “a feminist reader’s nightmare” – apparently left him “astonished”: “I could only suppose that her feminist convictions must have prevented her from recognising what seems to me obvious: the narrators of all six pieces in Landscape with Landscape [...] are awed by women, baffled by them, and in various degrees afraid of them.”

Well, move aside, Ryan Gosling, there’s a new male feminist in town …

Read on:
https://www.smh.com.au/culture/books/...

[Ahmed Fathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I finished the book while waiting for something in an empty cafe early in the morning, and while looking across the other side where, a bit far, sat the only other solitary visitor of the cafe. Murnane's mind is such a labyrinthine landscape.

[Milly Cohen · Rating 3 out of 5]

la idea es buena
el problema es que yo no lo he leído a él
pero dice cosas interesantes

[Robert Reinhard · Rating 5 out of 5]

His last published work, printed in 2021, written during Australia's strict lockdown conditions. The only equivalent I'm aware of are the prefaces Henry James wrote at the end of his career for the formal publication of his works for the New York edition. Here Murnane, like James, reads back and reflects on every one of his previous books with razor sharp insight into his own attachment to fiction, his methods and the nature of writing, words and sentences. The chance to overhear a writer at this level is rare and rewarding. For Murnane, the sentence is the unit of art making and each one is another experiment in how to write what he sometimes calls a novel.

[Steve Reinke · Rating 5 out of 5]

great strange

Destabilizes and restabilizes in each sentence. Each sentence both straightforward, ordinary and complex, marvelous. I have learned nothing, but seem wiser and calmer and ready to either write or not write. And to think about what I have written, or not think.

[Domitori · Rating 4 out of 5]

Murnane claims this to be his last book ever, a claim he made (in public or to himself) at least 4 times before. During the lockdown he decided to re-read each of his books and to report on his “experience as a re-reader”. Unsurprisingly, he couldn’t finish any of them but his stray thoughts, digressions and “seeming-memories” paint as complete portrait of Murnane as a writer as one could hope for.

[Blair · Rating 4 out of 5]

It doesn't exactly have spoilers for his books, which are unspoilable anyway, but this last letter from Murnane, where he rereads all of his published work, is probably most of interest to people who have made it most or all of the way through his oeuvre. There is more than a hint of egotism, and he travels over ground that is familiar to me, but there is some beautiful and in a couple of places surprisingly moving writing here. For the completists.

[Matthew Alvarez]

"I hear from myself a voice I have wanted for a long time to hear."

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

On reflection, it was not a good idea to read this book before I had read any of Murnane's fiction. I had thought that it would give me a sort of preview of his oeuvre; there are a few different books of his that I have meant to read, and I thought I might be able to both gain some insights into his characteristic concerns or themes as well as get a sense of which book of his I might enjoy most as an entry into the rest.

There is not really enough detail about any of the novels to make such a decision, and while he does mull over what he considers his major themes, the principal thing which I took away from this book is a distaste for Gerald Murnane the man, or, as he says, "the breathing author."

"The breathing author" is one of Murnane's private idioms, and there is nothing more that Murnane enjoys telling us than that he is pleased with the idiosyncratic phrases, the bespoke theoretical frameworks, the personal "mythology," the unique visual vocabulary that he has developed over his many decades of writing. Perhaps all writers feel this sort of self-satisfaction in their (alleged) creative independence, perhaps they all get a similar pleasure from feeling that—even though thousands and thousands of writers and critics have come before them—only a few have actually seen part of the true nature of fiction that they alone have discovered.*

Murnane has a bottomless capacity for knocking himself sideways in awe: "I freely admit to re-reading certain passages from my books simply in order to be impressed by them and to find in them more meaning than I had previously found and much more than I had been aware of while I first wrote the passages." "The eighth paragraph [of the last section of History of Books] seems to me one of the most impressive of many impressive endings that I’ve found for my many works of fiction." "Most of my favourite sentences from my own works are too long to be learned by heart." Occasionally, his pride is pricked by a small detail, as when he says rather petulantly that he regrets letting his editor choose the title for The Plains: "My best-known book is the only one of all my books with the definite article as the first word of its title." Murnane also notes frequently that bad reviews of his books or reviews he disagrees with have been lodged under his skin for decades—his independence of mind apparently does not mean that he is content to let his readers think what they like about his books.

Murnane is also curiously proud of the meagerness of his experiences and his knowledge: "Morality, social issues, psychological insight – such matters seem as fanciful and inconsequential to me as my talk of shapes and dissolving imagery might seem to my conjectured reader." "After the first few of my books had been published, I was emboldened to say sometimes that I wrote fiction for the very reason that I was ignorant: that I had seldom travelled, had observed little, and found human nature baffling." "I’ve never felt the least interest in the mythologies of my own or any other culture." Or this lengthier passage, which has the virtue of illustrating the mind of settler colonialism better than any explicit analysis I have found:
"I was annoyed recently to read, at the end of a mostly favourable review of one of my books recently published in the United Kingdom, the disapproving comment that I seemed unaware that a different sort of landscape had preceded the Australian landscape that I wrote about so often and that a different sort of people had occupied that landscape. These are matters that I’m well aware of, but I exercise the freedom enjoyed by all writers in this country: the freedom of choosing what they wish to write about, even if I seldom chose but was more often driven."
That pivot from insisting on the complete freedom to ignore a pre-settler past and the effects that settler colonialism had on erasing that past to denying any volition in making that choice—just a perfect distillation of the cognitive incoherence of the settler mentality.

There are, to be sure, some interesting ideas in this book, and I do think I will end up reading one or more of Murnane's books. Like other supremely arrogant writers (Naipaul comes to mind), Murnane seems worth reading; I just would not take him at his word about his own work or anything else.



* The few writers or critics whom Murnane admits had some insight before him: Proust, Wayne Booth, Virginia Woolf.

[Ceriel · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first foray into the work of Gerald Murnane. Admittedly, an unusual starting point, given that it chronicles the author’s revisiting his published past, and, being unacquainted with Murnane’s output (a wrong soon to be righted), my reading has been a prologue rather than a coda, an epilogue.

As Murnane revisits his published works in chronological order, he meditates on the reasons for re-reading and composes a calculus for literary merit:

“[M]y usual way of assessing the value of a book is to ask myself how much I recall, long afterwards, of the experience of reading the book” (103).

And, re-reading factors into the calculus as well, as Murnane adds: “there is a similar method I’ve sometimes used, which is to ask myself how often I feel urged to look again at certain passages if not to read the whole book again” (103).

Last Letter to a Reader is a profound meditation on reading and writing:

“Robert Musil wrote somewhere about the baroque palaces erected by the philosophers: vast labyrinths visited by no one. I mentioned in Barley Patch the memory-palaces laid out, room after room along corridor after corridor, by thinkers of old for the systematic storage of their most precious mental possessions. I’ve mentioned in my own writings my perception of mind as a sort of space the boundaries of which are far beyond my reach, and the image that most often occurs to me when I try to comprehend the significance of the million and more of my published words is of a vast and variegated landscape” (136).

On reading Last Letter, I can safely say that Murnane’s literary project poses extended, lush space for exploration and mental mapping.

[Rose Marie · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the land of the King of Sentences where coincidence and contiguences prove the persistence (and fallibility) of memory there still exists at least one more book by Gerald Murnane.

Please.

As we are still living through times not intended to tax the intellect "... because it had to be written..." is still unwritten.

Your dirge plans for the place that we will all get to go to are outlined. It does get harder to focus with age yet surely your imaginarium still aspires to more than just beginnings and endings.

LAST LETTER TO A READER contains some new mind swivelling aspects, provides explications and bookends a career most excellent.

A cake is baked in the shape of a book... declension as an alternative in search of an ending.

[Warrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

In part as exasperating and even annoying as the work, in part just as wonderful.

An indispensable companion guide to the work, or more of the work itself? As strange and unknowable as the image place that haunts the image writer, we are fortunate to be given these new notes and new insights into this unique body of work.

[ron beazley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a must read.

This is a powerful and honest work by our most original and thought provoking writer. I cannot recommend it too highly. I have have only read half of his published books and I look forward with relish to reading the remainder.
Thank you Mr Mornane.

[Shawn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kinda blah for me, and I think GM is a genius. He reflects on each of his books in the order they were published, writing in his usual style, but much of the prose seems uninspired and limited to purely recounting events.

[jamdiet · Rating 4 out of 5]

Made me enjoy Australia’s most literate cuckolder and public masturbator a little but more.

[David Rice · Rating 5 out of 5]

Immensely moving -- a true testament to a life's work and a completely singular way of thinking.

[Mark Ames · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thoroughly enjoyed this book about books.

[L]

I probably should have read some Murnane before picking this up