Proving that it’s never too late, it seems Australian writer Gerald Murnane — at 84 years old — is finally getting his time in the international spotlight.
His 1988 novel, Inland, has been reissued in the UK by small indie press & Other Stories, and has been widely reviewed in the Guardian UK, the Guardian UK again (they often review books twice), the Times Literary Supplement, The Telegraph (paywalled) and the online journal Curatorial Affairs.
Murnane has also been interviewed in the Irish Times (paywalled) by former blogger and now lit critic John Self.
The London Review Bookshop in Bloomsbury (one of my favourites) has even made him their Author of the Month
To top it all off, Murnane has granted a rare interview to BBC Radio 4’s Open Book programme, telling Chris Power about his writing life, how his books are NOT postmodernist because he doesn’t “know what postmodernism is” and the importance of Wuthering Heights in his final year at school.
He also explains how reading Ulysses when he was 20 liberated him from thinking that fiction had a strict framework and a set of rules.
“Don’t mistake me for a well-read man,” he says. “I’ve read a lot of books but most of them — and I say this unashamedly — most of them I have completely forgotten.”
His recent resurgence has caught him by surprise, but there’s a mischievous sense of delight in his voice when he recalls how he’s got the last laugh on the Australian critics of yesteryear who dismissed his work, calling him “an example of how not to be a writer” because he “turned inwards on myself instead of looking outwards”. Those critics are no longer around, meanwhile, his books are still being read, often by people young enough to be his grandchildren!
It’s 10 minutes of joyful listening.
Listen here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0h62p28
In Australia, Murnane is published by Giramondo Publishing and some of his work is available in Text Classics. I have previously read and reviewed The Plains (1982) and Border Districts: A Fiction (2018). If you’re keen to buy a collection of Murnane’s books — Australian, American and English editions — there’s a collector’s set going for $12,000 at a secondhand bookshop in NSW.
Reading Matters 
I was shamefully late to the Gerald Murnane party – I blame all that horse racing stuff in the newspapers – but I can only rejoice that he might be belatedly getting the recognition he deserves.
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Me too… and I’ve still only read two of them. But there’s a couple in the TBR and I’d like to get to them at some point.
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Good for Murnane.
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Yes, from the radio interview it’s clear he’s rather delighted with it all 😊
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I’m proud to say that I published (and edited) Inland when I was working at William Heinemann Australia in 1988. Working with Gerald was an interesting experience, to say the least … !
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Oh, that’s amazing! And yes, I can imagine he might have been a little bit stubborn/wilfully independent. In the interview he claims he went to a seminary for three months (aged 17), not because he wanted to be a priest but because it gave him an excuse to break the expectation that he would go to university and be told how to think about literature. I note that he did, eventually, go to uni to do an arts degree.
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He was very endearing but very odd. I went to his house for dinner one night (with some other people), and he had written out a list of topics for us all to talk about during the meal … !
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I just fished this comment out of my spam folder … no idea why it went there … he sounds like quite a quirky character!
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Yes, yay for Murnane, I love his stuff.
When I started reading him, (because Sydney Uni Press had reissued Inland and The Plains) I’d never heard of him before.
Whether he ever gets the Nobel or not, I think he’s a very special writer that Australia can be proud of.
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I actually think I might have discovered him via you because his books certainly weren’t available in the UK when I was living there until Border Districts was published in 2018 (and that was a US edition).
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It’s certainly been an uphill battle for him to get recognition.
I think bloggers who’ve championed unusual books that haven’t really cracked The Market, can have an impact, and I guess that’s why some publishers chase us with review copies!
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Yea, there’s a lot of truth in that.
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Well, I think of all the books I’ve discovered and how my tastes have developed thanks to the book bloggers I read (yourself included, of course!)
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It was thanks to Diana Gribble and Text classics that I ‘discovered’ Murnane a decade or so ago. When we started stocking The Plains at work, a few customers drew my attention to it as being one of those books that changed the way they read. When I eventually read it myself, I had to agree with them!
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Yes, it was thanks to Text Classics that I got introduced to his work. I have no memory of buying The Plains, which I reviewed in 2016, but I must have bought it on one of my trips back to Oz prior to that.
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Love Murnane’s work, and after a couple more reads late last year, I splashed out on a few books in a Giramondo sale – just waiting for the right time to dig in 😉
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I’ve got a few in my TBR as well, but you really need to be in the right mood to read his work, right? I remember Border Districts did strange things to my brain!
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Not so much a matter of moods as of finding the time, especially in January (too much J-Lit getting in the way!).
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Surely there is no such thing as too much J-Lit 😉
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Only if you have books from other countries you want to read!
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‘tis true! I have stacks from Ireland and Italy lying in wait.
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I’ll set this aside for later. Just back from three weeks way and I’m looking forward to diversions like this after I’ve tackled the Must Do list!
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Welcome back!
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Thank you!
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