Cirrus@Austlit

'Murray Bail has broken his eight-year silence with a new book, a memoir (?) titled He. The question mark arises because "memoir" conjures up a range of familiar possibilities: a narrative of foundational events in the memoirist's life or depictions of influential figures in that life or a behind-the-curtain account of the writer's world, revealing truths and dispelling myths. But this is Murray Bail, a writer of idiosyncratic, often dazzling fictions, a man who early on rejected the "duncoloured realism" endemic to Australian writing in favor of the experimental. Now [End Page 392] eighty years old, Murray Bail has much to recall and on which to reflect. How will he do that?' (Introduction)