It may be that Gerald Murnane’s vision of the world is born of astonishment. Herbert Read once quoted Picasso, reflecting on an exhibition of children’s drawings: “It took me many years to learn how to draw like these children.” Reading Murnane, through the essays in Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, and the novels Barley Patch and, most recently, Tamarisk Row, I begin to see astonishment not as naiveté, but as a mode of apprehension that resists habituation.

This astonishment carries none of the condescension of so-called childlike wonder. Rather than regress, Murnane opens a way of seeing that remains sophisticated, precise. His attention lingers long enough on surfaces for something below to begin to stir. The effect is not stylistic primitivism, as in Picasso’s idealisation of the primitive; it is a fidelity to the strangeness inherent in ordinary perception, before it is dulled by adult habituation.

In Tamarisk Row, the narrated events, a portion of a boy’s daily life, remain simple, almost elemental. But the vision animating them unsettles simplicity. Murnane recovers the moment before the world was overwritten by interpretation. The familiar is made to shimmer with latent possibilities, as if sight were being learned for the first time.

I plan to read more of Murnane this year, more or less chronologically, tracing the slow evolution of this form of vision. Perhaps interspersed with Clarice Lispector, who works a different spell, but whose stories similarly recompose the seen world around me.