AustLit

'Born in 1939, Gerald Murnane is an Australian author of 14 books of memoir and fiction, each of which is wonderfully unusual in that it takes as its focus the mental images Murnane sees while he writes, the scenery surrounding those images and the way one mental image will lead to another and then another. Murnane’s books, apart from his early novel “The Plains,” aren’t about anything in the way that most fiction is about events and action among characters whose motivations interest the reader. Rather, the few thousand pages that Murnane has produced since his 1975 debut, “Tamarisk Row,” are a record of what he has seen when he tried to look at the place that is his own mind, and the effort of a lifetime that it has been for him to explore the inner reaches of this place through writing about it.' (Introduction)