The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Gerald Murnane's Barley Patch.
I'm a sucker for books about writing (and reading) anyway, but Murnane's near-perfect putting theory into practice here puts this many cuts above the usual such novel -- though admittedly a big part of that is presumably that I see reading and writing much as he does here. Certainly this book strikes me as an ideal corrective to the American MFA-school-of-writing.
Some of the other reviews suggest not everyone sees/read this book in any way similarly to how I did -- in large part because they seem unable or unwilling to see it as a work that is decidedly one of fiction (given how emphatic Murnane is on this point it seems kind of hard to miss, but what do I know ...) -- but this is easily the best and by far the most impressive book I've read in well over a year.
I'm a sucker for books about writing (and reading) anyway, but Murnane's near-perfect putting theory into practice here puts this many cuts above the usual such novel -- though admittedly a big part of that is presumably that I see reading and writing much as he does here. Certainly this book strikes me as an ideal corrective to the American MFA-school-of-writing.
Some of the other reviews suggest not everyone sees/read this book in any way similarly to how I did -- in large part because they seem unable or unwilling to see it as a work that is decidedly one of fiction (given how emphatic Murnane is on this point it seems kind of hard to miss, but what do I know ...) -- but this is easily the best and by far the most impressive book I've read in well over a year.