Murnane

Gerald Murnane’s novels are so strange, so far from literature’s beaten path, that their very existence – let alone their republication and celebration – seems miraculous. And they are celebrated: the 84-year-old Australian author is a regular favourite for the Nobel prize in literature, and this month sees the reissue of his fourth novel, Inland, first published in 1988 and in the view of JM Coetzee, Murnane’s “most ambitious, sustained and powerful piece of writing”.After his early novels, Tamarisk Row (1974) and A…

The reissue of Australian author Gerald Murnane’s fiction is introducing new readers to this most idiosyncratic and formally adventurous of novelists, now in his 80s. Postmodernism is at a nadir, but Murnane’s nested, self-reflexive narratives may be placed alongside the fabulations of Nabokov, Calvino and Borges, once grouped under that label. Murnane is known for not straying far from Goroke in Victoria – he is the anti-type of globe-trotting literary celebrity – but like those writers, and some of the modernists before…