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A beautiful whirly movement

by
October 2005, no. 275

Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs: Essays by Gerald Murnane

Giramondo, $24.95 pb, 225 pp

Book 2 Cover Small (400 x 600)

Literati: Australian contemporary literary figures discuss fear, frustration and fame by James Phelan

Wiley, $29.95 pb, 291 pp

A beautiful whirly movement

by
October 2005, no. 275

I could always rely on Gerald Murnane for a beautiful quote. Nine years ago, when I was researching a piece on writers and technology, he told me he wrote all his books on a manual typewriter with the index finger of his right hand: ‘My favourite word to type, as a one-finger typist, is “afterwards”,’ Murnane told me over the phone. ‘It’s a beautiful whirly movement with one finger.’ Afterwards, as I transcribed his perfectly weighted sentences, it was clear that Murnane had probably already written the words he spoke to me. ‘I tend to think of words as written things rather than spoken things,’ Murnane writes in ‘The Breathing Author’, one of the more recent pieces in Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, his first book in a decade. ‘While I speak, I often visualise my words as being written somewhere at the same time.’

Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs showcases Murnane at his freshest and most direct: as an essayist. As he says in his three-paragraph introduction, ‘I should never have tried to write fiction or non-fiction or even anything in-between. I should have left it to discerning editors to publish all my pieces of writing as essays.’

Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs: Essays

Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs: Essays

by Gerald Murnane

Giramondo, $24.95 pb, 225 pp

Literati: Australian contemporary literary figures discuss fear, frustration and fame

Literati: Australian contemporary literary figures discuss fear, frustration and fame

by James Phelan

Wiley, $29.95 pb, 291 pp

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