Australian Author Gerald Murnan's Novel "Border Districts" Is a Bore

The NYT featured an article on Gerald Murnan (b Australia 1939) in May of 2018 in which they named him "the greatest English language writer most people have never heard of."  "Border Districts" is the first work I've read by this highly honored writer.  Murnan's received the Prime Minister Literary Award in 2018 for fiction and the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for non-fiction  in 2016.  "Border District" is a novella in which an octogenarian is looking back on his life in an attempt to glean what memories he retains.  The premise is not without its charms.  The fault lies in the drudgery of culling what warrant reminiscing.  Murnan's unamed protagonist is a pompous bore.  He reflects most back on life mainly through the books he so avidly he read as a precocious youngster and later as a pompous adult.  The novel shifts from 1st person to narrator that alienate the reader.  The man recalls without modesty his literary honors & academic achievements.  Other topics worthy of his note include horse racing, priests and the refraction of light particularly off stained glass.  Facts relating to his immediate family are glossed over.  The idea of connecting memory to music, colors and reading material was clever but failed to connect to interesting details from his past.  The one correspondent who failed to  answer his letter he described as "a tiresome eccentric,"  which describe the writer himself.  Furthermore, the author recounts a book he reads as "tedious and self-serving."  It's been suggested that "Border District" is Murnan's final foray into fiction.  The writer mentions in relation to yet another book he read he "had hoped that the book might reveal something of what I might have called the inner life of the author."  Should Gerald Murnan intended this novella as a guise for revealing himself then his ruse is neither amusing or enlightening.  I think there are reasons "most people have never head of" him.  His writing is flat, tedious and self-serving.  The harshest criticism I have for "Border Districts" from what I recalled is it's dull.