Gerald Murnane lives in Goroke, a town of three hundred people in Australia’s West Wimmera plains. A five-hour drive from Melbourne, the West Wimmera is a sequestered, rural world, but it’s not really the outback. The bushland here has been cleared for wheat cultivation, and venerable gum trees stand alone in the grasslands, as if positioned to emphasize the landscape’s flatness and expanse. It’s a place that has striking affinities with Murnane’s fiction: his narrators always seem to be looking out on “an image-landscape comprising mostly level grassy countryside” with “scattered image-trees.”
For a time, it seemed that Murnane’s career had begun late and ended early. His first novel, Tamarisk Row, was published in 1974, when he was thirty-five years old. Written in long, precise, and often extravagantly intricate sentences,…
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The Paris Review (Digital) - 1 Issue, Winter 2024 (250)