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‘To write in Kannada is to inherit a legacy of cosmic wonder and earthly wisdom': Banu Mushtaq
On May 20, Banu Mushtaq became the first Kannada-language writer to win the International Booker Prize. She shared the £50,000 award with her translator Deepa Bhasthi – the first Indian translator to win the award – for Heart Lamp, a collection of her selected stories. Here are the texts of their acceptance speeches at the award cermony at Tate Modern, London. Banu Mushtaq If I may borrow a phrase from my own culture: this moment feels like a thousand fireflies lighting up a single sky – brief, brilliant, and utterly collective. To even stand among these extraordinary finalists is an honour I'll never forget. And I accept this great honour not as an individual, but as a voice raised in chorus with so many others. I am happy for the entire world which is full of diversity and inclusiveness. I am happy for myself and my translator Deepa Bhasthi. This is more than a personal achievement – it is an affirmation that we, as individuals and as a global community, can thrive when we embrace diversity, celebrate our differences, and uplift one another. Together, we create a world where every voice is heard, every story matters, and every person belongs. First, to the Booker Prize committee – thank you for recognising stories that dare to bridge worlds. To my relentless team: my visionary literary agent, Kanishka Gupta, who believed in this book before it had a heartbeat; my translator, Deepa Bhasthi, who turned my words into bridges; and my publishers – especially Penguin Random House and And Other Stories – who sent these stories sailing across languages and borders. This is your victory too. And to my family, friends, and readers: you are the soil where my stories grow. This book is my love letter to the idea that no story is 'local' – that a tale born under a banyan tree in my village can cast shadows as far as this stage tonight. To every reader who journeyed with me: you've made my Kannada language a shared home. It is a language that sings of resilience and nuance. To write in Kannada is to inherit a legacy of cosmic wonder and earthly wisdom. This book was born from the belief that no story is ever 'small' – that in the tapestry of human experience, every thread holds the weight of the whole. In a world that often tries to divide us, literature remains one of the last sacred spaces where we can live inside each other's minds, if only for a few pages. To every reader who trusted me with their time: thank you for letting my words wander into your heart. Tonight isn't an endpoint – it's a torch passed. May it light the way for more stories from unheard corners, more translations that defy borders, and more voices that remind us: the universe fits inside every 'I'. Thank you, from the depths of my soul. Deepa Bhasthi Ellarigu Namaskara. Hello everyone. The story of the world, if you think about it, is really a history of erasures. It is characterised by the effacement of women's triumphs and the furtive rubbing away from collective memory of how women and those on the many margins of this world live and love. This Prize is a small win in a long, ongoing battle against such violences. Elsewhere, there is erasure, in the media, in people's understanding of works of literature, of translators and the work we do to bring what would otherwise be unread, uncelebrated texts to new and very different sets of readers. Which is why it is so heartening that the International Booker celebrates and places both writers and writer-translators on the same page, so to speak. Thank you first and foremost to the International Booker judges for loving these stories and my translation of them. And what a win this is for my beautiful language: Jenina holeyo, halina maleyo, sudheyo Kannada savi nudiyo, goes a song, calling the Kannada language a river of honey, a rain of milk, and compares it to sweet ambrosia. Kannada is one of the oldest languages on earth and I am ecstatic that this will hopefully lead to a greater interest in reading and writing and translating more from and into the language, and by extension, from and into the other magical languages we have in South Asia. Thank you to my incredible editor Tara Tobler, for sprinkling gold dust over my work. Thank you to the dream team at And Other Stories, to Stefan, Michael, and others. As also to the wonderful people back home, at Penguin Random House India, to Moutushi [Mukhrjee], Milee [Ashwarya], et all. Thank you to my wonderful agent Kanishka Gupta for… absolutely everything. The last few months would have been unmanageable without you. To Priya Mathew, to Farah Ali, friends old and new, thank you for the grace, for the sisterhood. Thank you to my parents Sudha and Prakash, who don't always understand why I do what I do, but cheer me on nonetheless. And most importantly, my husband Nan, the greatest love of my life, I miss you so much here tonight. Thank you, thank you, thank you, for what would I ever do without you! Play
Hindustan Times
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Heart Lamp: Contemporary Kannada literature's moment in the sun
The International Booker Prize win for Heart Lamp, a collection of short stories that Banu Mushtaq wrote in Kannada and Deepa Bhasthi translated into English, seems to have unleashed in the Kannada literary sphere an abundance of what Gautama the Buddha used to call mudita — our capacity to rejoice in the good fortune and well-being of others. Poet, essayist and short story writer Fathima Raliya, who is also the founder of a publishing house called Udugore Prakashan, says, 'Although, Kannada is not my mother tongue, I feel a deep connection to it. It is a language that is attached to my soul. This international recognition to Kannada brings immense joy; it feels like I have received the award myself.' Fiction writer, essayist and LGBTQ rights activist Vasudhendra, who founded the publishing house Chanda Pustaka, says, 'This honour for Kannda literature is an honour for all of us who love Kannada, speak Kannada, read and write in Kannada. Sometimes, we do not recognise the potential of our own literature; people from outside remind us to see it afresh.' Vasudhendra thinks that this Booker win will open doors for other Kannada authors and translators. He says, 'When Han Kang's novel The Vegetarian, translated by Deborah Smith, got the prize in 2016, the entire publishing industry was drawn to Korean literature and started publishing more Korean writers. That might happen with Kannada as well.' He adds, however, that 'trends last only for a while' but 'good literature finds a way to survive.' Srinath Perur, who headed the jury for the JCB Prize for Literature 2023 and has translated Girish Karnad and Vivek Shanbhag's work from Kannada into English, celebrated the win by treating himself to some chocolate ice cream. He says, 'The first effect of an Indian book doing well internationally is that we start taking it seriously in India.' He adds, 'Prize-winning books become ambassadors for their literary cultures. I expect readers and publishers outside will take a little more notice of Kannada literature and Indian writing in general.' Samvartha Sahil, who has translated Jacinta Kerketta, Nagraj Manjule and Yogesh Maitreya's poetry into English, believes that this moment gives 'a certain kind of cultural confidence' to Kannadigas. He says, 'I used to think of Kannada as the intimate space of home, and English as the courtyard that is open to engagement with the outside world. The global recognition that Heart Lamp has brought to Kannada literature has collapsed this binary for me.' The main objective of the prize, as mentioned on their website, is to 'encourage more reading of quality fiction from all over the world', and writers of all nationalities are welcome to apply as long as their novels or short story collections are translated into English and published in the United Kingdom. Heart Lamp was published simultaneously by And Other Stories, an independent not-for-profit publisher in the UK, and Penguin Random House India. The prize money — a generous £50,000 — was divided equally between Mushtaq and Bhasthi. Translator and novelist Anton Hur, who was on the jury for this year's prize, says, 'I do not think the verve and vigour of this book and translation could have been possible without the brilliant diversity and creative traditions of India as a whole.' He commends Bhasthi's translation for 'having the satisfying texture and astonishing beauty of raw silk, rough and smooth at the same time, in a way that richly rewards the reader who ventures beyond their comfort zone of flat and commercial Anglophone prose.' He adds, 'I hope, by using this effective instrument we call the International Booker Prize, that we encourage readers to slow down a little to really take in the unexpected beauty of prose from other Englishes.' He recalls that the judges were 'enchanted by this experience of having lived so many and so different lives in the space of a very slim book'. He does not read, write or speak Kannada but Heart Lamp left an impression. He says, 'Deepa captivated us, and Banu bewitched us.' In a similar vein, Mushtaq's acceptance speech called Heart Lamp her 'love letter to the idea that no story is 'local'.' She took pride in the fact that 'a tale born under a banyan tree' in her village could 'cast shadows' large enough to reach that international stage. She said, 'To every reader who journeyed with me: you've made my Kannada language a shared home.' Poet, translator and cultural critic Ranjit Hoskote, who is on the editorial board of the Murty Classical Library of India at Harvard University, views the win as a triumph against the 'unexamined dogma' of agents and publishers who often discourage fiction writers from anthologizing their short fiction. He also draws attention to the fact that Mushtaq 'is a woman, a Muslim, and a writer whose intellectual formation took place' within the Bandaya Sahitya movement of the 1970s and 80s'. He describes it as 'a literary and cultural movement of protest and resistance that asserted itself against a more classicising, savarna-led, bourgeois-located modernist canon.' He contextualizes this moment by saying, 'On every count, this win registers a departure from the norms of a society steadily buckling under toxic patriarchy, Hindu majoritarianism, and a tendency towards self-censorship.' Fathima Raliya says, 'As a Muslim girl and Kannada writer, I have always felt celebrated and appreciated in the Kannada literary world. However, I believe there is still a need for more inclusive representation. I firmly believe that a language and literary culture become richer when they receive diverse inputs from various sources and different backgrounds.' Mushtaq's writing is rooted in her feminism, journalistic work, grassroots activism, practice as a lawyer, and experiences as a wife, mother, and daughter-in-law negotiating patriarchy. Samvartha Sahil adds, 'Our society and state are invested in Islamophobia, which weaves narratives about Muslims as destructive people, and not creative beings. Banu Mushtaq's win creates a dent in that narrative.' He appreciates the fact that Mushtaq's work 'does not lose sight of universalism' while being rooted in her own milieu. It is, he says, a reminder to 'young writers and thinkers today, for whom identity politics has eclipsed universalism'. The short stories that Bhasthi translated in Heart Lamp were selected out of six different short story collections that Mushtaq published between 1990 and 2023. Moutushi Mukherjee, Commissioning Editor, Fiction, Translations, and Classics at Penguin Random House India, recalls that she gravitated towards this collection over other translations submitted to her last year because of 'the originality of its author's voice and how fiercely she wanted to champion the women she wrote about'. She adds, 'Deepa's approach was respectful and quiet, but she brought a lot of conviction to her work. She didn't hurry through it. Yet, she was steadfast and always happy to pitch in with ideas. All of this encouraged me to take this forward.' In her essay To Translate with An Accent (2023) Bhasthi laments that the most widely recognised Kannada authors are men, and she 'would redistribute some of this fame' if she could. With the International Booker Prize win, Bhasthi has fulfilled this cherished dream. Susheela Punitha, who has translated stories by Hebbalalu Velapanuru Savithramma, Saraswathibai Rajawade, Shyamaladevi Belagaonkar, Nanjangudu Thirumalamba, Kodagina Gowramma, Triveni and Sara Aboobacker — all women writing in Kannada — for a new anthology titled A Teashop in Kamalapura and Other Classic Kannada Stories (2025), says, 'I am happy for both Banu and Deepa. I had read quite a few of Banu's stories before translating a few for a project that fell through. I have translated another story by her for the project that I am working on.' While she agrees that more men than women have found recognition, numbers don't matter much to her. There have been well-known women writers who have made significant contributions to stories in Kannada, right from the earliest times.' Mukherjee, however, hopes that the prize will help women writing in Kannada to push forth their work, and make publishers, literature festivals and award committees focus on them. American translator Daisy Rockwell, who is an advisory board member to the South Asian Literature in Translation (SALT) project based out of the University of Chicago says, 'I am sure that prior to the nomination from the International Booker Prize jury, Western readers were unaware that the language Kannada existed and if they heard someone speak of it, they probably thought they heard 'Canada.' As such, of course, it's tremendous for Kannada, but also for spreading awareness that there are umpteen flourishing literary languages in the subcontinent, as well as legions of amazing up and coming translators.' The translator's note — Against Italics — at the end of Heart Lamp reminds readers that Kannada is spoken by an estimated 65 million people in the world. Rockwell, who won the International Booker Prize in 2022 for Tomb of Sand, her translation of Geetanjali Shree's novel Ret Samadhi, adds, 'Now that Banu and Deepa are in this spotlight, I am sure they will enlighten many readers about Kannada literature in general, and Muslim women's stories in particular. They will help international readers expand their understanding of all the things Indian literature can be.' She hopes that Western publishers will become more open-minded about 'bringing out voices from the margins and South Asian literature in translation'. Chintan Girish Modi is a journalist, educator and literary critic. He can be reached @chintanwriting on Instagram and X.
The Hindu
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
The Hindu On Books newsletter: International Booker Prize buzz, the dangers posed by Laskhar-e-Taiba, talking to Rutger Bregman and more
Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter. The winner of the International Booker Prize will be announced later tonight. Readers all across the world have been voicing their picks from the shortlist of six. This year is special for India particularly with Banu Mushtaq's short stories collection, Heart Lamp (And Other Stories/Penguin), translated by Deepa Bhasthi, about the lives of Muslim women, featuring on the shortlist. If she wins, it will be the first for a writer in Kannada. Read the review. In 2022, Geetanjali Shree won the International Booker Prize for Tomb of Sand, translated from the Hindi by Daisy Rockwell, which was a first for Hindi. We have a special on the Booker books; we also read Adil Jussawalla's essays on Bombay, two books to understand the terror network based out of Pakistan, and talk to Dutch historian Rutger Bregman about his new book, Moral Ambition. Booker books This year, the International Booker Prize has several firsts: all six books in the shortlist are represented by independent publishers; and just two of the shortlisted books, Hiromi Kawakami's Under the Eye of the Big Bird and Heart Lamp (Granta Books), are over 200 pages. Kawakami's book, translated by Asa Yoneda, is set in the future with human beings in the fierce grip of AI. The narrative changes constantly, and the book slides across people, centuries and continents in what appears to be in a chaotic manner. In her review, Manjula Padmanabhan writes that the sci-fi novel provides such a horrid preview of the future that one can only hope we will never get to know it. Two of the shortest books are the gut-wrenching Slow Boat (Small Axes/Simon&Schuster) by Vincent Delecroix (translated by Helen Stevenson) about a disastrous Channel crossing by migrants and the devastating implications, and Perfection (Fitzcarraldo Editions) by Vincenzo Latronico (translated by Sophie Hughes), which explores the vacuous social media-driven lives of the modern rich. Danish writer Solvej Balle's On the Calculation of Volume I, (Barbara J. Haveland/Faber) is the first part of a planned septology to be translated into English. It tells the story of a seller of old books caught in a time loop. Every morning Tara Selter wakes up to November 18. The judges said though the protagonist is inexplicably stuck in the same day, a familiar narrative trope is transformed into a 'profound meditation on love, connectedness and what it means to exist.' In Anne Serre's A Leopard-Skin Hat (Lolli Editions), translated from the French by Mark Hutchinson, the unnamed narrator writes about a platonic relationship with Fanny, his troubled best friend, and the impossibility of knowing anyone fully. Written in the aftermath of the untimely passing away of her sister, it's a profound meditation of love and loss. The jury led by writer Max Porter said the six books 'place a huge variety of human experiences under the microscope.' So who is expected to win? Well, it's a wide open race this time with each book having dedicated readers. Any of the writers and translators can walk away with the top prize. Books of the week In an essay, Stanly Johny explores the work of two writers who have analysed Pakistan's use of several proxies to expand its geopolitical interests abroad. Christine Fair's In Their Own Words: Understanding Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (Oxford University Press) offers a detailed picture of the Pakistan-based terror group that has carried out several attacks in India over the years. She explains why the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) is 'the most lethal and most loyal' outfit of the Pakistani establishment. Supporting militant groups was part of Pakistan's 'strategic thinking' for decades, writes Carlotta Gall in The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014 (Penguin). Pakistan has used this approach not only against India, but also against the U.S. So how can Pakistan's proxy wars be dealt with? 'Fair lays down three options — maintain the status quo, decapitate the leadership, or escalate tensions.' The problem, writes Johny, is that Pakistan's nuclear capability offers the country some protection for its proxy activities. 'By launching strikes inside Pakistan against terror attacks, India has opted for controlled escalation. It is trying to create room for manoeuvre under the nuclear threshold. And by launching counterattacks, Pakistan is challenging India's resistance against the status quo.' The Diamond-Encrusted Rat Trap (Speaking Tiger) gathers Adil Jussawalla's prose on Bombay — now Mumbai — written for newspapers and magazines between 1980 and 2002. In his introduction, Jerry Pinto points out that Jussawalla was 'a part of Bombay's literary landscape in a way that few could challenge or would want to'. Besides championing of new voices, the pieces in the collection are 'a way of giving witness to the bigness and the strangeness of the city', charting a relationship 'between man and landscape, man and city, man and nightmare'. In his review, Sanjay Sipahimalani writes that Jussawalla examines Mumbai from multiple, often unexplored, angles. 'When he writes about the city's fabled monsoon, it is not to romanticise it, but to speak about those who leave the city during the season, such as roadside cobblers and itinerant vendors. Similarly, he notes the plight of sewage workers and the homeless without sentimentality.' He notes that a wry, self-deprecating tone runs through the collection, sparing it from becoming elegiac or celebratory. 'Jussawalla's shrewd, ironic approach is especially welcome at a time of grand narratives and inflated rhetoric — about Mumbai or anything else.' Spotlight In his books, Dutch writer and popular historian Rutger Bregman has argued passionately for an optimistic, goal-oriented worldview. His latest work, Moral Ambition, outlines the lessons, strategies and objectives suited to those with (as the title suggests) moral ambition. Bregman contends that the most common category of young people is ambitious and not especially idealist. He says this category ends up occupying the vast majority of corporate jobs, and cites the concept of 'bullshit jobs', as described in the 2018 book of the same name by the late anthropologist David Graeber. Asked to explain this concept, he tells Aditya Mani Jha: 'As Professor Graeber describes it in his book, a 'bullshit job' is basically a job [corporate, usually] that adds very little perceptible value to the world. If these people went on strike tomorrow, it would barely make a dent in the world, nothing would stop. In polls conducted among a variety of professionals, it is people in these 'bullshit jobs' that report the most feelings of insignificance and confusion — 'what are we bringing to the table here, really?' that is the predominant feeling or sentiment. Most of all, BS jobs are BS because they are taking time and energy away from educated professionals who could be using that for much better aims, for themselves and for the world.' Browser Audrey Truschke's forthcoming book, India:5,000 Years of History on the Subcontinent (Princeton University Press), tells the story of the region historically known as India—which includes today's India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and parts of Afghanistan—and the people who have lived there. It chronicles the most important political, social, religious, intellectual, and cultural events. (Princeton University Press), tells the story of the region historically known as India—which includes today's India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and parts of Afghanistan—and the people who have lived there. It chronicles the most important political, social, religious, intellectual, and cultural events. On the Brink of Belief: Queer Writing from South Asia (Penguin), edited by Kazim Ali, brings together 24 LGBTQIA+ writers from South Asia and the diaspora who explore the personal and the political through poetry, memoir, and prose. (Penguin), edited by Kazim Ali, brings together 24 LGBTQIA+ writers from South Asia and the diaspora who explore the personal and the political through poetry, memoir, and prose. Torrey Peters follows up her Women's Prize-nominated Detransition, Baby with Stag Dance (Hachette India), which puts trans life, past, present and future, under the microscope. In it are restless lumberjacks who attend a winter dance, some dressed as women, other cross-dressers who have to make a career choice, and a host of characters on the brink because of their looked-down-upon desires. with (Hachette India), which puts trans life, past, present and future, under the microscope. In it are restless lumberjacks who attend a winter dance, some dressed as women, other cross-dressers who have to make a career choice, and a host of characters on the brink because of their looked-down-upon desires. Can your name change the course of your life? Florence Knapp's debut novel, The Names (Penguin), follows the lives of Cora, her husband Gordon and their children, particularly their son, and tells a chilling story of domestic abuse and its aftermath. Spanning thirty-five years, it follows three alternate and alternating versions of Cora's and her young son's lives, shaped by her choice of name.
Irish Times
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Tracker by Alexis Wright; Pig by Matilde Pratesi; Taking Manhattan by Russell Shorto
Tracker by Alexis Wright (And Other Stories, £19.99) 'Am I Aboriginal, or how much of an Aboriginal am I?' This question, posed by Tracker Tilmouth, encapsulates the profound introspection at the heart of Tracker . More than a biography, Alexis Wright's work is a living, breathing testament to oral storytelling. Chronicling the extraordinary life of Aboriginal leader Tracker Tilmouth, she assembles a chorus of voices, refusing to smooth them into a singular narrative. The result is messy, brilliant, and deeply human. Tilmouth emerges as a fiercely intelligent, often mischievous visionary – someone who saw beyond political pragmatism to a radically different future for his people. Wright challenges western notions of biography, privileging contradiction and collective memory over linear storytelling. It demands patience, but the reward is immense: a portrait not just of a man but of history in motion. Storytelling here is resistance – complex, unfiltered, and utterly compelling. – Adam Wyeth Pig by Matilde Pratesi (Little Brown, £20) This debut novel, shortlisted in 2023 for the Caledonia Novel Award, addresses the topics of neurodiversity and coercive relationships. However, the author's naive understanding of these subjects makes for an uncomfortable read. Vale, our pig-obsessed protagonist and narrator, is inconsistent as a character. The young Italian woman displays a lack of self-awareness when such is required of the plot and ample self-awareness when that is required of the plot. Vale's world, viewpoint and experience of a coercive relationship with her childhood friend challenge credibility. Pratesi may be well intentioned, but this is not matched by a knowledge base worthy of the neurodiverse community. Moreover, this lack of rigour does an injustice to Pratesi's characters and her readers. – Brigid O'Dea Taking Manhattan: The extraordinary events that created New York and shaped America by Russell Shorto (Swift Press, £20) New York was not named twice because it was 'so good', as the song says, but because two European imperial powers successively ruled and developed it on land that they annexed from the indigenous inhabitants. New Amsterdam, on the southern tip of Manhattan Island, was created 400 years ago, in 1625, by the Dutch West India Company. It was renamed 40 years later following a 10-day siege by four gunboats sent by Britain's Duke of York, who had been gifted its contiguous lands by his brother, King Charles II. A bloodless Anglo-Dutch 'corporate merger' then begat the 'hybrid colony', this scholarly and engaging history shows. – Ray Burke
Irish Times
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Barley Patch by Gerald Murnane: An intense single-mindedness
Barley Patch Author : Gerald Murnane ISBN-13 : 978 1 9167 5114 9 Publisher : And Other Stories Guideline Price : £14.99 The Australian writer Gerald Murnane is one of the literary world's idiosyncrasies . His work is demanding enough to attract regular tips for the Nobel Prize in Literature, but irresistible enough to give him a dedicated more-than-cult following. He attracts praise from writers such as JM Coetzee: he is the Nobel laureate's Nobel-laureate-in-waiting. Sheffield-based publisher And Other Stories has done sterling work in the last six years to bring Murnane's work back into print. Murnane writes about himself, or more accurately about a 'personage' (a favourite Murnane word) who to all intents and purposes is Murnane. All of his mature fiction, barring a couple of early novels, comprises what he calls 'no more and no less than an accurate report of some of the contents of [my] mind'. These contents are what most of us would call memories, but which Murnane thinks of as images. Even when recalling a favourite book – and of the thousand books he read from the 1960s to the 1990s, only 'twenty or so had left on me some sort of lasting impression' – what he remembers is not the plot or characters but the experience of reading: 'those mental entities that had come to me almost stealthily while I read'. [ Gerald Murnane: 'I could be killed by my own writing' Opens in new window ] There is, as this suggests, an intense single-mindedness to Murnane's work – a literal manifestation of the fact that, he says, he writes everything by typing with one finger. It's a hermetically sealed world that can be hard to break into, but it's worth making the journey. One of his novels, Inland, turns repeatedly to a sentence from the poet Paul Éluard: 'There is another world but it is in this one' – as good a description of a work of fiction as we could ask for. And now we have a reissue of a novel – sorry, 'fiction' – first published in 2009, 14 years after Murnane had declared himself done with writing fiction. READ MORE Barley Patch, then, is a book of fiction explaining why he has stopped writing fiction. That's very Murnane. And in a sense Barley Patch is his most Murnane work of all, the central text to which the earlier books led and from which the later books flow. Less a stand-alone novel than an episode of his great ongoing project, it contains all the elements Murnane-watchers expect: highly attuned memory, a specific sense of place, familiar subject matter (books, childhood love, horse racing), his fears (fast flowing water, meals prepared by other people) and a quietly mischievous quality. The books Murnane discusses include Josephine Tey's Brat Farrar, Charles Kingsley's Westward Ho! and adventure comics of his youth. These work as examples of what Murnane himself does not, cannot, do – literature of the imagination. 'I had never created any character or imagined any plot' in his own fiction, Murnane writes. 'I had no imagination.' Perhaps making a virtue out of a necessity, imagination is not what he values anyway: he prefers to present experiences in perfectly grammatical prose, and he reads each sentence he writes aloud, working and reworking it until he is satisfied. This makes the reading of Murnane's prose a pleasing process for the reader too, and it works best in a traditional sense when Murnane – or the Murnane surrogate ('I would remind the reader that every sentence hereabouts is part of a work of fiction') – is recalling his past, rather than talking about books. There is a charming and touching sequence about an early girlfriend who grew apart from him because the young Murnane couldn't resist spending his time with her 'explaining how one or another poem or work of fiction that I had read recently affected me'. There is also evidence that Murnane does after all have imagination, because of the creativity with which he shapes other stories from his past. We get a drily funny account of visiting a monk, who subsequently quits the monastery with a stolen pair of binoculars that he takes to a horse race (Murnane in tow) and makes up for lost time by quickly acquiring a girlfriend ('somewhat plump and dressed in pink'). Elsewhere Murnane reports how a nun once told him she was disappointed in his work because of the sex in it. Murnane observes, with inevitable precision, that of the half million words of his fiction to that point, 'no more than 150 [words] could be said to describe an act of sexual intercourse [and] only two refer to any part of the human body: the words are hands and knees .' In a sense Murnane's books work best in accumulation – which makes it hard to recommend the best point to begin. Barley Patch, being so central to his output, is probably not the one: The Plains or even an early novel like Tamarisk Row is more friendly to the newcomer. When I interviewed him for this paper in 2023, Murnane observed that he had given up writing four times, 'but this time it's for good'. He immediately qualified that – he is still writing, even if not publishing. There will be more, and we should be glad.
