A season on earth

Until the New York Times Magazine profiled him in 2018, Australian writer Murnane was obscure, a treasured eccentric considered difficult, which, in his case, is a just synonym for uncompromising. A Season on Earth is anything but. This is his second novel as he wrote it, almost twice as long as the funny but incomplete published version titled A Lifetime on Clouds (2013). Protagonist Adrian Sherd brings to mind another famous tortured adolescent, Salinger's Holden Caulfield if Caulfield had been a good student, a devout Catholic, and obsessed, almost consumed, by sex. This is laugh-out-loud funny yet, laughing, one can't help but admire Sherd's absolute sincerity. His naiveté is so complete it is almost wisdom. His isolation is so total he is practically the hermit he thinks he should become. Among this novel's many pleasures are the stories Sherd tells to imagined interlocutors, explaining, for instance, intercourse to his Catholic wife who is, in fact, just a girl he has seen but never spoken to. To call this the most accessible book by this extraordinary author is not to diminish it or him.--Michael Autrey Copyright 2010 Booklist

This touching, semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel from Murnane (Border Districts) presents the original vision of what became his second novel, 1976's A Lifetime on Clouds. Two previously unpublished sections are now added to the funny, stirring chronicle of the adolescence of Adrian Sherd. In 1950s suburban Melbourne, Adrian is fixated on sex. To appease his Catholic guilt and cure himself of the "sins of impurity" he commits alone, Adrian decides to devote himself to a girl he sees every day on the train. Though he never speaks to her, he vividly imagines a complex married life together that doesn't really alter his fixation on sex. So, he decides to become a priest, joining the Catholic Charleroi order as a junior seminarian (a section that proves essential for understanding how Murnane evolved from a sad, young seminarian into a committed literary aesthete). He later changes his mind, opting instead to join the Cistercians, which offer him better landscapes to peruse. But once he is back home in Melbourne, he changes his vocation yet again. Murnane's protagonist is absolutely unforgettable, and the author himself, whose name has been appearing on Nobel Prize--contender lists recently, only adds to his exceptional body of work with this wonderful novel. (Sept.)