Overall thoughts on the short fictoin of Gerald Murnane

Nearing the end of Gerald Murnane's collection of (loosely) linked stories, Landscape with Landscape, I offer a few observations and generalizations and speculations on this unusual author: First, we note that throughout the collection of what appear to be somewhat autobiographical stories, the first-person narrator is in a lifelong struggle to find an identity as a writer. He seems to have spent the first portion of his life, 40 years or so, thinking of himself as a poet, then switches to thinking of himself as a fiction writer. He apparently writes copiously and revises extensively, in particular via marginal notes in his ever-evolving unpublished manuscript. But the switch to fiction seems to have opened a pathway - a landscape, he might call it - that he can follow, perhaps with the result being the book we are reading. He talks about seeking a new form of writing - in particular a new form of poetry (in the final story, Landscape with Artist, he says he was compiling a list of words that would form the exclusive vocabulary o his poems - no abstract works - which is good - and gives us one strange example of a brief poem, intriguing but we can see why this unknown writers who is not part of any academic or literary movement would remain unpublished). Oddly - perhaps - the stories we are reading are not particularly experimental or avant garde in form; many are, superficially at least, familiar musings on coming of age, albeit with a remarkable frankness about sexual drive and about alcoholism. The unique aspect of his work is not the style of the writing but the mind of the narrator/protagonist, who is frank to the point of oddity and who is driven by a number of obsessions, all of which tend to remove him from family and society and to lead to a life of isolation and devotion to his writing (and drinking). Notably, he has a fixation on transit schedules and on place names (an obsession he shares w/ his partial counterpart in the search for lost time, Proust) and a need to create a complex and ever-evolving counterworld, which he documents through detailed maps and extensive ledgers of race-course meets and perhaps other information. It's not that he writes about this counterworld per se - it's not like sci fi or fantasy or imaginative "through the looking glass" fiction; he writes about the person (himself) obsessed w/ establishing this counterworld (or landscape, as he would call it). The initial effect is that these at first seem to be sad stories of an outsider artist struggling to find his place in the world, or in an alternate world - some of the stories are extremely painful in that regard (especially The Battle of Acosta Nu, which involves the death of a child), but that initial effect passes as we read more deeply and our final impression is of a man, an artist, who has managed to find some kind of happiness and satisfaction in his work. He is indifferent to social norms and expectations and even to the conventions of literary publication and success, but he seems to have found solace in his own peculiar way.