Since the mid-1970s, Murray Bail’s writing has delighted and divided. Though not a large body of work – five novels, including the 1999 Miles Franklin-winning Eucalyptus, sit alongside short stories and several non-fiction books – Bail is considered by many to occupy the upper echelons of Australian letters. His writing is divisive, some hailing it as groundbreaking, others as pretentious and impersonal. Bail’s lack of political conviction and the overly intellectual, obscure nature of his prose isn’t for everyone.

Bail’s first book since the 2012 novel The Voyage, He records a life from early childhood and adolescence in Adelaide, through interstate moves to Melbourne and finally Sydney, and his years overseas (1968-74), when he lived in India and the UK. At only 176 pages, He is short, but highly condensed.

Bail’s memories – the very personal, the public, the poetic, or the textural – are captured in one or two paragraphs, sometimes one or two pages, sometimes one or two brief lines. Rather than central life events giving structure and creating forward momentum, He moves with a looping stride, focusing on overlapping groups of time – early childhood, teenage years, life overseas. Precise images, for example, of 1940s-era Adelaide, are interspersed with questions – “To be intelligent and natural. Does one interfere with the other?” – or phrases from long-gone advertisements – “a little dab’ll do you”.

Bail’s memoir at times has the clipped feel of a diary, but without the dates or names. While steadily (if gradually) trudging forward, He constantly doubles back to earlier images. The oblique combinations of different registers of memory make for some strangely beautiful, wistful moments. The colours of the personal past and the everyday poetic bleed together:

Bread and dripping after school – something else that would not happen today.

What began slowly has accelerated.

Frangipani flowers scattered on the lawn here.

The most poignant of Bail’s recollections are of his early life, and of his mother and father. The melancholy of a key moment, moving away from Adelaide, is captured in the image of his parents “standing together in the garage as he reversed out ... In the headlights they looked forlorn …” Beauty is mixed with mourning in these pages. Bail repeatedly informs us that the person he is recalling is now dead. As he moves into the later stages of his life Bail reflects on how “an ordinary enough moment is looked back upon as the beginning of other dissatisfactions”.

It’s not by chance that Bail uses that same word when he wryly notes: “I began writing out of dissatisfaction”. The struggle to become a writer – and later, to maintain confidence in the value of that life – lends the memoir a strong flavour of the kunstlerroman (a form of novel about the coming of age of an artist). The impact of art on Bail’s life is a recurring theme. “He can still ‘see’ the Gorky’s and Rothko’s” of a particularly earth-shattering exhibition, and Bail and his first wife are inspired to move to India after watching the Apu Trilogy of films by Satyajit Ray.

Reflections on the gradual transformation of society, particularly in terms of language and fashion, inject lightness. Bail muses on the disappearance of hats and the casualisation of dress codes (Nike sneakers “gave the wearer an aura of mobility”). He observes how coffee and wine replace tea and beer (“Instant coffee arrived”), and notices the way “people began to say ‘Kafkaesque’ and ‘surreal’ – very disappointing”. Other, more serious issues submerged in the memory fabric of He include the violence of the every day, the devastation of war on the bodies of those who return, and the strangeness and restrictiveness of gender roles.

As much as He is about the particulars of one life, Bail is just as concerned with the operation of his memory. He’s often bemused by the vicissitudes of recollection: “Memories are unequal. Some don’t need searching for; they appear randomly. Others need concentrated effort to recall.” The passage of time has distorted itself: Bail notes how “images come forward of figures he has never spoken to”, and that “silly things are remembered more clearly than serious ones”.

Another of the leitmotifs of He is the search for authentic experience, the imagined antidote to an unexciting upbringing in suburban Adelaide. Bail’s life in India and the UK make for some of the most compelling parts of He, but seeing war-torn Africa, Bail comments: “Here was experience he did not seek. It was true experience.”

In He, Bail is able to take the ultra-personal and make it resonate with the general, an achievement that will connect an at times strangely aloof memoir with many readers.

• He by Murray Bail is out now through Text Publishing