Osi reviewed Border districts by Gerald Murnane
Rich and strange.
4 stars
Thanks to the good people of Metafilter, I first learned about Gerald Murnane as a writer who made numerous works when he was quite old. Subsequently I learned he lives in the same state as me, and has lived there all his life (like me), and that his books are easily available at local libraries. His most feted book is The Plains, which I will be reading next now that I've discovered it's not a doorstopper (where did I get that initial impression?) (I avoid doorstopper books now because I just won't finish them. 200 pages or less, please.)
This book has a lot to say to me. It deals with mental imagery and memory, two issues that have been frequently on my mind lately. It's a reflective book, drawing on the author's past, and rather confusingly subtitled as "A fiction". Confusing because:
P. 109: "As I understand the matter, …
Thanks to the good people of Metafilter, I first learned about Gerald Murnane as a writer who made numerous works when he was quite old. Subsequently I learned he lives in the same state as me, and has lived there all his life (like me), and that his books are easily available at local libraries. His most feted book is The Plains, which I will be reading next now that I've discovered it's not a doorstopper (where did I get that initial impression?) (I avoid doorstopper books now because I just won't finish them. 200 pages or less, please.)
This book has a lot to say to me. It deals with mental imagery and memory, two issues that have been frequently on my mind lately. It's a reflective book, drawing on the author's past, and rather confusingly subtitled as "A fiction". Confusing because:
P. 109: "As I understand the matter, a writer of fiction reports events that he or she considers imaginary. The reading of the fiction considers, or pretends to consider, the events actual. This piece of writing is a report of actual events only, even though many of the reported events may seem to an undiscerning reader fictional."
Is it a fiction or not? Well, the focus of the book is on internal imagery (elsewhere he refers to himself as a "student of mental imagery"); and one's internal images are not verifiable. There are numerous descriptions of things which are explicitly imagined, but probably the imagining did actually take place, or perhaps could not fail to take place if they were to be written down here. Confusion around the terms is understandable.
I could write an essay on the book and might do so. He keeps talking about coloured glass, which I can relate to Pi.O's talk of numbers; references to something that is internally meaningful but lacks a way to refer to it directly. Perhaps there is nothing that can be directly referred to - the feeling is a composite of experience, and to get it across the experiences have to be described without too much editorializing (do we know who we are and what we do? I can't even hear my own accent). I'd give it a 4.5 if BW permitted half stars.
