Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This spectacular novel from Murnane (Inland), originally published in Australia in 2009, takes the form of an internal dialogue about the images, memories, and obsessions the author values as a reader and writer, beginning with the question, "Must I write?" His response, inspired by Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, combines summaries of an abandoned manuscript with inquiries into the meanings and necessities of a life devoted to literature ("I suspect that I had already accepted, more than 50 years ago, that no writer could be required to deal fairly with his or her characters, let alone readers"). Recurring images--the jockeys' colors and horses' names on the Australian racing circuit, the mesmerizing views of the "level grassy countryside" of Victoria, the convents that defined his Catholic childhood--construct a world that feels at once autobiographical and surreal. Murnane holds the reader's attention with his erudition and dry wit, as when he describes his penchant for eschewing conventions such as character and plot. "My preferred way of summing up my deficiencies was to say simply that I had no imagination," he writes, adding that reading other authors showed him that "powerful imagination, it seemed, was no preventative against faulty writing." Murnane's effort to push the novel from its traditional bounds pays dividends. The result is nothing short of genius. (Feb.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Why do we write? Why do we read? What is fiction? These questions haunt Murnane's inventive yet maddening stream-of-consciousness narrative. A man who may or may not be the author reflects on his reading life, where he was, and how he felt while deep in any one of thousands of novels. He reveals a penchant for inserting himself into a story until the line between reality and imagination is blurred. If our narrator is to be believed, his family moved from place to place as Dad gambled away his paychecks on horse races, Mom compensated through storytelling, and our young man grew into an adult more comfortable around books than people. Though a nonbeliever, he entered a monastery seeking the solitude to write fiction and poetry, a dalliance of short duration, but one that set him on the path to an impressive literary output. VERDICT Australian writer Murnane has received the Melbourne Prize and a Patrick White Award. His prose is alluringly evocative, his sense of humor sly and dry, but only some will have the patience to sift through the gimmickry that gives readers the uncomfortable feeling that the author is having them on.-Sally Bissell, Lee Cty. Lib., Ft. Myers, FL (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
One of Australia's leading writers looks at the unusual building blocks of his work. This is a reissue of a book first released in 2009, and noteworthy, among other reasons, because it ended a hiatus of more than a decade in which Murnane "gave up writing fiction." As the narrator of this "fiction"--he avoids the terms "novel" and "story"--explains, instead of writing, he would concern himself with pondering images, characters, landscapes, and feelings from his previous reading and writing that made a lasting impression. He might also "write intricate sentences made up of items other than words." Fortunately, only words are used in this book, a strange kind of writer's manifesto that tries to convey how the mind of this Australian fictionist works, or at least the mind of the narrator--a distinction Murnane struggles to maintain given the narrative's many autobiographical details. The early pages deal at length with the lasting impressions he absorbed from readingBrat Farrar, one of the better works by an exceptional mystery writer named Josephine Tey. A similar discussion concerns impressive images from the comic stripMandrake the Magician. Eventually, certain themes or motifs emerge that appear frequently in other Murnane works, such as colored glass in doors or windows, jockeys' racing colors, horse racing in general, and the monthly illustrations of a wall calendar. Some images almost become mantras with their frequent repetition, such as a house with two storeys and a "grassy countryside" (each appears more than 40 times). There are compelling ideas here about the creative process, but the average reader may find it difficult to appreciate them amid the repetition, the painstaking diction, and the bemusing eccentricities of Murnane's prose. A peculiar kind of reluctant self-revelation that is both intriguing and frustrating. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
