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Summary
Summary
A bittersweet farewell to the world and the word by the Australian master
"The mind is a place best viewed from borderlands . . ."
Border Districts , purportedly the Australian master Gerald Murnane's final work of fiction, is a hypnotic, precise, and self-lacerating "report" on a life led as an avid reader, fumbling lover, "student of mental imagery," and devout believer--but a believer not in the commonplaces of religion, but rather in the luminescence of memory and its handmaiden, literature.
In Border Districts , a man moves from a capital city to a remote town in the border country, where he intends to spend the last years of his life. It is time, he thinks, to review the spoils of a lifetime of seeing, a lifetime of reading. Which sights, which people, which books, fictional characters, turns of phrase, and lines of verse will survive into the twilight? A dark-haired woman with a wistful expression? An ancestral house in the grasslands? The colors in translucent panes of glass, in marbles and goldfish and racing silks? Feeling an increasing urgency to put his mental landscape in order, the man sets to work cataloging this treasure, little knowing where his "report" will lead and what secrets will be brought to light.
Border Districts is a jewel of a farewell from one of the greatest living writers of English prose.
Author Notes
Gerald Murname was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1939. In 1956, he matriculated from De La Salle College Malvern. He briefly trained for the Roman Catholic priesthood in 1957, but decided to become a teacher in primary schools from 1960 to 1968 and at the Victoria Racing Club's Apprentice Jockeys' School. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Melbourne in 1969, then worked in the Victorian Education Department until 1973.
He is the author of numerous books including Tamarisk Row, A Lifetime on Clouds, The Plains, Landscape with Landscape, Inland, Velvet Waters, Emerald Blue, Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, Barley Patch, A History of Books, and A Million Windows. He won the Victorian Literary Award 2016 in the Nonfiction category for Something for the Pain: A Memoir of the Turf.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Devotees of Murnane (The Plains), the exacting Australian writer of crafty, austere fictions, will find familiar themes in this prismatic work: the fascination with color, the grassy landscapes, and the obsessive compiling of a mind's "image-history." The aged narrator, a "student of colors and shades and hues and tints," has retired to a "district near the border" of his unnamed native land. There he explores the regions of his psyche with a monklike devotion, "study[ing] in all seriousness matters that another person might dismiss as unworthy, trivial, childish." These include his lifelong enchantment with marbles and stained glass, his mental album of "image-heroines" (the Madonna, Thomas Hardy's Tess), and a remembered line from Virgil's Aeneid about the reddening dawn. He looks at his surroundings askance to make himself "more alert to what appears at the edges of [his] range of vision," attuning himself to the borderlands of his senses, as it were. He is punctilious in scrutinizing his own narration, insisting on classifying his text as a "report of actual events" and including compositional updates ("While I was writing the previous sentences...") and revisions as he goes. Murnane's mysterious, exquisitely constructed novel lingers with the reader just like the images that have indelibly imprinted themselves on the narrator's mind. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
A cult Australian author tipped for the Nobel prize explores the ways our minds and memories mediate the world The novelist Gerald Murnane is something of a writer's writer's writer. He is celebrated but not much read in his native Australia, or in Britain (the last of his novels to be published here, so far as I can tell, was Inland , in 1988). But elsewhere his reputation as an author of strange and luminous books is well established: Ben Lerner, JM Coetzee and Teju Cole are all fans, and a profile in the New York Times last year tipped him for the Nobel prize. Now Sheffield-based small press And Other Stories is publishing five of his novels in the UK, starting with his most recent, Border Districts (which Murnane has said will be his last, though he has given up writing fiction before: he turns 80 this year), and his first, Tamarisk Row . Reading these books alongside each other shows that, while his style has developed over the years, many of his interests have remained the same. His central themes - parochialism, the workings of memory, the Australian landscape, Catholicism, horse racing - have been there from the beginning. So too have many of what he calls the individual "mental images" (instances in which characters keep records, or perceive things through coloured glass, or half-closed eyes) from which he assembles his novels. Though his books are deftly crafted, he's not very interested in plot. Instead he wants to show the world as it seems ("seems" is a very Murnane word); how our minds and memories mediate it. Tamarisk Row is written in the present tense in close third-person narration, as a series of short chapters with descriptive, perfunctory titles such as "Mr Glasscock ill-treats his family" and "Augustine tells Clement how to avoid temptation". The sentences are long, sweeping and rhythmically complex, taking convoluted digressions before returning, eventually, to their beginnings in order to end. The novel focuses on a boy named Clement Killeaton growing up in the town of Bassett just after the second world war. Clement's Catholic father, Augustine, is a gambler who spends his weekends at distant racecourses hoping for a big win. Early in his career he tasted success with a horse of his own, Clementia, which was then injured, and he has lived on the fumes of his dreams ever since. Clement, an only child, is a loner who spends much of his time in his garden, which he has turned in his imagination into a vast landscape populated by farms and racecourses. When he is not using marbles to recreate imaginary horse races he tries to find out about sex and has run-ins with a local gang. It is often difficult to know who the narrator of the novel is supposed to be, or to ascribe the frequent passages of free indirect discourse to individual characters within it. At one point Clement's friend Desmond tells him that as soon as school has broken up he is going on holiday to Melbourne where "in a long street in a [...] suburb named after a tree or a flower, in a house with lawn between the footpath and the gutter, his little sweetheart waits for him". This isn't quite Desmond's language, and nor is it Clement's, though the indeterminacy of "a tree or a flower" suggests the narrator is not omniscient, either. Rather, with that "little sweetheart" - which is both indulgent and condescending - it reads as though an adult storyteller is trying to imagine the mind of a boy at one remove. Tamarisk Row is filled with such moments of fertile ambiguity or misreading. In another scene Augustine is talking to his horse racing friends outside church. Clement asks his father for money to buy a newspaper. "Augustine makes a face," the narrator reports, "that is meant to show the men that he is exasperated with his son but not able to refuse him." After he has handed over the money, Clement "asks in a voice that is meant to sound innocent and girlish - can I buy myself a chocolate malted milk too please Dad?" Here Augustine must perform his exasperation to his friends, just as his son performs for him, and the narrator's knowingness allows us to see through both performances. It's a method that draws attention to the way adults talk over and beyond children - referring to things they cannot understand in ways they cannot understand - but also to the fact that children are just as likely as adults to have secret lives of their own. Border Districts is a far sparser book. It presents itself not as a novel but as a "report" written by an old man after he has moved from the capital of the district to a small town in the interior "so that I could spend most of my time alone and so that I could live according to several rules that I have long wanted to live by". Mainly this involves trying to excavate and interpret the "mental scenes" and "thought images" that make up the narrator's memories. He is a bit like Beckett's Krapp, or Borges's Funes, but actually it sounds as if the bones of the story are pretty autobiographical: Murnane rarely travels, and for the last decade he has lived in the town of Goroke, Victoria (pop 623) with his son, whom he describes as a recluse. There he lives quietly, indulging visiting academics who come to interrogate him about his writing. He also maintains an extensive filing system, organising his papers under headings such as "I decide that most books are crap" and "Peter Carey exposed at last". You get the feeling he revels in his own eccentricity. If Border Districts is a stripped down example of late-style Murnane, Tamarisk Row feels like an authentically modernist novel, as though mid-century experiments in maximalism and postmodernist play had never happened. Its themes, as well as its technique, place him in the tradition of Katherine Mansfield and James Joyce. Like both Mansfield and Joyce, Murnane writes from the edges of English literary culture, and his stories are similarly sensitive to the feelings of children and the little worlds they inhabit (in this there is something of Henry James about him, too). But where Mansfield and Joyce were in flight from the provincial and parochial, Murnane has embraced it. Joyce's Stephen Dedalus said that the artist, like God, should remain "within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails". His big innovation, as critic Hugh Kenner put it, was to do away with the storyteller altogether. Murnane's technique is almost the opposite of this. In a 2007 foreword he said that his aim with Tamarisk Row was to bring "to life the fictional personage responsible for it: the narrator through whose mind the text is reflected". This storyteller he calls variously "the awesome personage" (Murnane trained as a priest at one point in his life) or "implied Author". In the end his books aren't really about the characters they describe, but about the mind behind those characters: the singular, fascinating consciousness that gives them life.
Kirkus Review
An old man ruminates on landscapes and houses, authors and religion, colored glass and memory in this drifting quasi-fiction.The unnamed narrator, age 72, has recently moved from a city to live alone in a "quiet township" near an unspecified border in an unnamed country. In the opening pages, he recalls his school days and the religious brothers who taught him. The colored glass in a church window sparks memories of a book that describes men during the Commonwealth period in the 17th century smashing the stained-glass windows of churches in England. A partial picture of the narrator emerges with references to teaching, marriage, children, relatives, and childhood horse-racing interests. But there's little ongoing narrative, just vignettes scattered among musings on visual perception and recollections of houses, books, and colored glass. The preoccupations with how one has seen the world and with memory suit an older man and a writer; the prose, with its precision, repetition, and verbal footnotes, smacks of an academic lecturer. Despite the subtitle, the narrator insists he is "not writing a work of fiction" but recording a "sequence of images," or "a chain of thoughts." The chain in one 12-page stretch includes a Proust allusion, a book jacket's author photo, childhood marbles, a kaleidoscope bought in Virginia, the colored glass in kaleidoscopes, 120 colored pencils, and marbles on a carpet which the narrator moves in the hope that a chance arrangement "would restore to me some previously irretrievable mood." In search of lost marbles? No, the narrator is utterly rational. The sui generis Australian writer Murnane (The Plains, 2017, etc.) is at least eccentric. He seems to be showing how a writer's mind works when he is writing and when he is riffling through or riffing on vision, insight, and memories.A fascinating, provocative, sometimes frustrating read; the stylistic tics may grow tiresome but Murnane's intriguing ideas and oblique angles rarely do. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Murnane's unnamed or nameless first-person narrator has moved to a small town near the border, where he composes a report about his memories of images. Images trigger memories; the narrator recalls and expounds on images from an image world. If this sounds odd, it is. I seem to recall not certain feelings, but, rather, the fact of my having once felt these feelings. What is remembered is less memorable than the settings in which the narrator's memories were formed. The narrator recalls not what he read but where he was when he read it; not the winner of horse races but where he was when he followed them; not how he felt about the Virgin Mary when he believed but a particular image of her. Acclaimed Australian author Murnane has said that this is his final novel. While reading this extraordinary work, some may envision the border the narrator has moved near to as the divide between life and death and interpret this report as a scrupulous accounting of what remains of what came before.--Autrey, Michael Copyright 2018 Booklist
