The strange short fiction of Gerald Murnane

Intrigued by the excellent profile in recent NYTnag of Australian author Gerald Murnane, I managed to borrow literally the only copy of any of his books in the entire R.I. public-library system, Landscape with Landscape (1987), a collection of six stories (at least one of which might qualify as a short novel). About 50 pp in, I'm still fascinated, puzzled, disoriented, and captivated by his writing, which, esp. in the first story (Landscape with Freckled Woman, is, I think, the title) is made all the more poignant by what we know about Murnane's strange work habits and personality. The obsessed and eccentric narrator in this story, which I would have taken as an extreme and odd creation by the author, is from what we now know so close and behavior and idiosyncrasies to Murnane himself that this story could almost be considered an essay: The author agrees to serve on a board (as treasurer), the only male on the board, which seems to oversee some kind of literary or literacy organization, perhaps a library board?. The author has fantasies about one of the women at the organization meeting, about telling her that he's a writer - yet he knows she will never understand what it means to him to be a writer. As he unwinds this obsessive desire, and recalls from his youth many women he spoke at extreme length to in bars about his literary ambitions, we gradually understand that his is like an anti-Proust: He wants to find some kind of isolation to write a novel about his childhood, but in fact he does not want to search for lost time, he wants to obliterate all input from the "real" world in order to inhabit and re-create in prose an alternate world or an alternate reality that he alone perceives (and we know from the profile that he had created on paper an entire continent with its own history and geography). The 2nd story, Sipping the Essence, which I haven't finished reading, is far more conventional in theme though the protagonist is extreme and odd in his behavior: a first-person narration about late teen/early manhood years in which the narrator, extremely uneasy and inexperienced with women, sabotages any chance he has for a relationship by obsessive, non-stop talking about his literary heroes - notably Kerouac - and his desire to leave Melbourne and trek through the bush of Queensland (a geography little known to most non-Australians): he prefers the emptiness of unexplored space (and time) to establishing a relationship with other people, women especially. In other words his painfully shy and immature, an adolescent tale in extreme.