'Final work by internationally acclaimed Australian author Gerald Murnane, reflecting on his career as a writer, and the fifteen books which have led critics to praise him as ‘a genius on the level of Beckett’.
'A book which will appeal equally to Murnane’s legion of fans, and to those new to his work, attracted by his reputation as a truly original Australian writer.
'In the first days of spring in his eighty-second year, Gerald Murnane began a project which would round off his career as a writer – 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 archives, the Chronological Archive, which documents his life as a whole, and the Literary Archive, which is devoted to everything he has written. But as the reports grew, they themselves took on the form of a book, Last Letter to a Reader. The essays on each of his works travel through the capacious territory Murnane refers to as his mind: they dwell on the circumstances which gave rise to the writing, images, associations, reflections on the theory of fiction, and memories of a deeply personal kind. The final essay is on Last Letter to a Reader itself: it considers the elation and exhilaration which accompany the act of writing, and offers a moving ending to what must surely be his last work as death approaches. ‘Help me, dear one, to endure patiently my going back to my own sort of heaven.’
Source : publication summary
'As the title of Gerald Murnane’s final work makes clear, this book is not one that should be opened by a reader new to his work, one who might be looking for an introduction. Such a reader would be better served by going to any of the earlier works. The reader addressed instead seems to be one who has read Murnane before, as he says, with ‘good will’. To put this more clearly: this is a work that involves Murnane looking back, as a reader, and with his various conceptions of readers who have already engaged with or informed his work, on what has been written, rather than a book that introduces his works to a new reader.'(Introduction)
'Murnane delivers a 'constellation of ideas' in this collection of essays.'
'The Australian literary great bows out with a collection of essays that ruminate on his experience of reading all his books in order.'
'No contemporary Australian writer has higher claims to immortality than Gerald Murnane and none exhibits narrower tonal range. It’s a long time since we encountered the boy with his marbles and his liturgical colours in some Bendigo of the mind’s dreaming in Tamarisk Row (1974). There was the girl who was the embodiment of dreaming in A Lifetime on Clouds (1976). After The Plains (1982) came the high, classic Murnane with his endless talk of landscapes and women and grasslands, like a private language of longing and sorrow and contemplation.' (Introduction)
'As the title of Gerald Murnane’s final work makes clear, this book is not one that should be opened by a reader new to his work, one who might be looking for an introduction. Such a reader would be better served by going to any of the earlier works. The reader addressed instead seems to be one who has read Murnane before, as he says, with ‘good will’. To put this more clearly: this is a work that involves Murnane looking back, as a reader, and with his various conceptions of readers who have already engaged with or informed his work, on what has been written, rather than a book that introduces his works to a new reader.'(Introduction)
