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.