Stream System: The Collected Short Fiction of Gerald Murnane

by Gerald Murnane

Stories from a mind-bending Australian master, "a genius on the level of Beckett" (Teju Cole)

Never before available to readers in this hemisphere, these stories--originally published from 1985 to 2012--offer an irresistible compendium of the work of one of contemporary fiction's greatest magicians.

While the Australian master Gerald Murnane's reputation rests largely on his longer works of fiction, his short stories stand among the most brilliant and idiosyncratic uses of the form since Borges, Beckett, and Nabokov. Brutal, comic, obscene, and crystalline, Stream System runs from the haunting "Land Deal," which imagines the colonization of Australia and the ultimate vengeance of its indigenous people as a series of nested dreams; to "Finger Web," which tells a quietly terrifying, fractal tale of the scars of war and the roots of misogyny; to "The Interior of Gaaldine," which finds its anxious protagonist stranded beyond the limits of fiction itself.

No one else writes like Murnane, and there are few other authors alive still capable of changing how--and why--we read.

Velvet Waters:
When the Mice Failed to Arrive
Stream System
Land Deal
The Only Adam
Stone Quarry
Precious Bane
Cotters Come No More
There Were Some Countries
Finger-Web
First Love
Velvet Waters

"The White Cattle of Uppington", published in Southerly, 55(3), 1995

Emerald Blue:
In Far Fields
Pink Lining
Boy Blue
Emerald Blue
The Interior of Gaaldine

"Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs" from the 2005 collection of essays

From A History of Books:
As It Were a Letter
The Boy's Name Was David
Last Letter to a Niece

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Australia, Literature, Anthologies, Literary Fiction, Unfinished

560 pages, Paperback

First published April 3, 2018

About the author

Murnane's first two books, Tamarisk Row (1974) and A Lifetime on Clouds (1976), seem to be semi-autobiographical accounts of his childhood and adolescence. Both are composed largely of very long but grammatical sentences.

In 1982, he attained his mature style with The Plains, a short novel about a young filmmaker who travels to a fictive country far within Australia, where his failure to make a film is perhaps his most profound achievement. The novel is both a metaphysical parable about appearance and reality, and a parodic examination of traditions and cultural horizons. The novel depicts an abstracted Australia, akin to something out of mythology or fable. The novel was followed by: Landscape With Landscape (1985), Inland (1988), Velvet Waters (1990), and Emerald Blue (1995). A book of essays, Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, appeared in 2005, and a new work of fiction, Barley Patch, was released in 2009. All of these books are concerned with the relation between memory, image, and landscape, and frequently with the relation between fiction and non-fiction.

Murnane is mainly known within Australia. A seminar was held on his work at the University of Newcastle in 2001. Murnane does, however, also have a following in other countries, especially Sweden and the United States, where The Plains was published in 1985 and reprinted in 2004 (New Issues Poetry & Prose), and where Dalkey Archive Press has recently issued Barley Patch and will be reprinting Inland in 2012. In 2011, The Plains' was translated into French and published in France by P.O.L, and in 2012 will be published in Hungarian. In July/August 2017, The Plains was the number 1 book recommendation of South West German Radio (SWR2). His works have been translated into Italian (Velvet Waters as Una Melodia), German (The Plains as Die Ebenen, Border Districts as Grenzbezirke, Landscape With Landscape as Landschaft mit Landschaft, all publ. Suhrkamp Verlag), Spanish (The Plains as Las llanuras, and Something for the Pain as Una vida en las carreras, all published by Editorial Minúscula), Catalan (The Plains as Les planes, also published by Editorial Minúscula), Swedish (Inland as Inlandet, The Plains as Slätterna, Velvet Waters as Sammetsvatten and Barley Patch as Korntäppa) and Serbian (The Plains as Ravnice; Inland as Unutrašnjost, both published by Blum izdavaštvo 2025).

Reviews

[Fionnuala]

The image on the cover of my edition of Gerald Murnane's collected short fiction is by Australian landscape artist, Philip Hunter, whose memories of growing up in the state of Victoria pervade much of his art work. The image is called Central District II, and seems to evoke what lies beneath the surface of the landscape. It is a delicate and fitting choice for Murnane's collection of pieces, most of which are about fragments of landscape which are slowly revealed through the close investigation of layers of his image-infused memory.

This collection of shorter fiction first appeared in 2018 and contains twenty-one pieces written over many years. Most of them had already been published as part of smaller collections, eg., Emerald Blue, Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, and Velvet Waters.
In his Last Letter to a Reader (2022), Murnane, who is now eighty-three, points out that some of his writing started life as essays but were reclassified later by his publishers as 'short fiction'. That fits with the feeling of never knowing what is fact and what is fiction in Murnane's writing. I was often convinced that what I was reading was non-fiction, especially if it contained motifs I'd come across in a previous piece, only to stumble on a sentence such as this: 'The paragraph that ends with this sentence is, of course, part of a work of fiction.'

The title piece, Stream System, which reads very like memoir, is a good example of his technique. It has a very complex construction, as if written on a map, the characters and motifs scattered across the surface. The map has time layers too, so it becomes three dimensional as we move horizontally across the map and vertically through time. "While I stood in all those places, I understood that I was standing in still another place." The entire airy construction is anchored by the recurring motifs that are like dots on the map: a heart-shaped pendant, a pair of lipsticked lips, a woman's bra, a drooping mustache, the color blue. And as with all his pieces, the scattered dots get joined eventually, leaving me in a state of total awe at the way it all becomes connected.
That experience was repeated again and again as I read through the volume. I began to take keen notice of the images that were mentioned in the seemingly unconnected early paragraphs of each piece, knowing that they would become connected. If there is 'plot' in Murnane's writing, it lies not in the destiny of characters but in the way the author makes those connections, and I felt his own excitement at mining his memory for such links. One of his narrators says: ….the chief benefits to be got from the writing of a piece of fiction was that the writer of the fiction discovered at least once during the writing of the fiction a connection between two or more images that had been for long in his mind but had never seemed in anyway connected.

Even in the pieces that are clearly non-fiction, such as Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, Murnane weaves back and forth in time and place within the confines of the text in search of patterns just as he does in his fiction. The word 'text' comes from the Latin 'texere': to weave, and it is as if Murnane constructs his pieces by laying down certain threads and then weaving in the patterns which, when the piece is complete, connect together, sometimes startlingly. As a reader who thrills at finding connections, I reveled in how Murnane's narrators themselves are thrilled at finding connections, eg., a narrator writing about the island of Tristan da Cunha, looks at a globe and finds that the island lies on exactly the same latitude as the place where he is sitting while he is writing about it. And indeed, while reading the story entitled Pink Lining, about a grandfather, his son and his grandson, I was reminded of a favourite song of mine but dismissed the connection, thinking Murnane, who gives little impression of being interested in popular culture, would never have heard of it. But then, the last words of the story made my heart turn over: he, the narrator, felt so broken up that he wanted to go home

………………………………………...............................

For those of you who've read any of Murnane's cryptic novels, the piece from this collection called In Far Fields, though fictional, gives a lot of insight into how he sets about writing a new piece in real life. One of his strategies is to composes single sentences on separate sheets of paper and file them in different colored plastic sleeves. Then he thinks about each sentence and adds to it as more ideas comes to him until finally he fuses all the separate sheets together. I wished I'd read In Far Fields before I read The Plains and Inland some years back.
There's also another piece here related directly to the writing process (they are all indirectly related to the writing process). Stone Quarry is about a writing workshop, but a writing workshop unlike any other in that all the texts are destined to be destroyed. The participants do get to read each other's work but never know who wrote what. That fits with another preoccupation of Murnane's: his wish that critics and reviewers would judge writing on its own merits alone and not try to connect it to the real life of the author. Proust, whom Murnane appreciates a lot, would have agreed with him—he also argued for separating the life from the work. The interesting thing is that in both cases, the authors reveal a lot about themselves in their work but it is as if they are saying to the reader: take what I am giving but don't go searching for more. And while I'm on the subject of Proust, I've had the thought that Murnane's main motivation as a writer seems to be similar to Proust's: the long continuous search for lost time, often with images as the triggers for the search. Proust's steeples at Martinville seen from a carriage are Murnane's line of pale trees against a blue horizon, both being images that recur frequently in their texts. And one of Murnane's narrators has this to say about reading Proust: The passages reporting the unhappiness of Swann over Odette and of the narrator over Gilberte and Albertine were the first accounts he had read of a state of mind similar to his own whenever during the years from his ninth year to his twenty-ninth year he felt towards a female person what is most conveniently denoted by the word love.
…………………………………………………...................

The characters in the twenty-one pieces collected in this book are all unnamed. "The man's name was whatever it was" is a typical reference to a character—except for one character in an early unpublished story called Adam, The Only Adam, which is included in the collection (incidentally, Murnane reused parts of the unpublished story in The Plains (1982) according to his Last Letter to a Reader). I thought it interesting that he chose the name Adam for that one named character and was reminded of something Percival Everett wrote about unnamed characters: I am not anyman's everyman and neither are you. One of Murnane's narrators reports being asked at a reading why he had chosen not to name his characters. This is what he said in reply: Other persons may pretend whatever they choose to pretend, but I cannot pretend that any character in any story written by me or by any other person is a person who lives or has lived in the place where I sit writing these words. I see the characters in stories, including the story of which this sentence is a part, as being in the invisible place that I often called my mind. I would like the reader or the listener to notice that I wrote the word being and not the word living in the previous sentence.
…………………………………………...............................

I doubt anyone has ever called Murnane a humourous writer but I found tiny examples of subtle humour here and there. They all seem somehow related to religion which in itself I find funny:

My father went to mass every Sunday and to confession once each month and seemed to suspect the motives of any Catholic who did any more than this.

The Reformed Gambler has no further part in this piece of fiction, but I would like to report that he lived a long life and that he spent much of his time far from his wife and son [and the odour of sanctity they carried] in the company of congenial relatives of his.

While obsessing about the faces of the women in a photograph of a church gathering, a narrator adds a parenthesis ...(I took no interest in the faces of the two nuns in the front row)…

[Katia N · Rating 5 out of 5]

It has been more than a week since I’ve finished this collection of short stories and I’ve decided to go all Murnane(ish) and write what comes to my mind when I think of this book.

The one of the memories, I am afraid, would be the moment when in the middle of a certain story I felt that if I would not start to read it aloud to myself, Murnane would lose me. It was the one, particularly long story. But when I’ve started reading it aloud, the rhythm, the sound of the words have brought the magic back. It was a weird feeling: I was providing a soundtrack to a visual sequence in my head.

What also have stayed with me so far was an image of “green grass and dark blue forrest”. Can I describe this image in words? Is it what he tries to do in his prose: to describe in words what he sees in his mind? Well, for what it’s worth, I imagine a painting rather than a real landscape. When I look closer, I can see the grass is taller than some trees. I can see that the green is merging with dark-blue and becoming black at the edges. Maybe, I am very small and look upwards from the ground… Are you still with me?

That is the image in my head when I think of “Stream System”. Of course I would lie if I say I do not recall any ideas or details from the book. I do; at least for now. But the truth is also that I remember only three stories out of a dozen as a coherent and elegant textual constructions. The rest is this green-blue-black image and a tangle of associations.

The preceding few paragraphs are about all you would learn of this Murnane’s story collection from reading this piece of mine. What follows is what it brought up. It made me thinking which kind of images are kept in my mind in relation to which kind of books of my reading life. And it was difficult to stop since I've started.

So very likely, the main memory that would stay with me from Murnane’s collection would be a recollection of a museum of images created by the books in my mind. The memory of a memory…

The first book I remember vividly is Two Captains, a popular soviet epic. I’ve read it at the summer of my 8th birthday. I remember being told that it was a book for the grown ups. But I’ve read it and loved it. When at the first lesson of my second year at school the teacher asked what we’ve read that summer, I've raised my hand and named the title. She did not believe me at first. So I still remember the feeling of bitterness and pride in equal measure. The biggest impression on me was a description of the first kiss between the main characters. I do not remember the context at all, but it was something like “we’ve kissed once and then again many more times”. And I understood that the kiss was something very important, something much more than a simple touch of lips. It was a connection, totally unknown to me which I wanted to experience one day. It was somehow a true symbol of closeness and sacrifice. I’ve taken also from that book is to try not to betray and not to give up. The book was very heavy, around 600 pages and it did not have pictures. I did not allow anyone to move it from my room for a long time. It made me feel suddenly old and and wise, especially compared to my six year old brother.

Image: My little raised hand with a blackboard as a background (for "Two Captains").

Later, when I was in my mid-teens, I do not recall the specific books, but the combination of Pushkin, Turgenev and other 19th century classics we’ve been spoon-fed in school has led me away from that warmness and trust of the first kiss towards almost opposite. I was imagining that if a boy would dare to kiss me without asking for permission first, I would slap him hard on the cheek in return. I am actually glad it did not happen that way in real life.

Image: A blushed, hot cheek (for the 19th century school's curriculum)

I remember the first book I’ve read myself when I was about four. It was a tiny fairytale made threadbare due to repetitive use. I’ve been used to be read. My grandmother was reading to me during the day and the parents - often at bed times. (Another memory jumped in - it is dark in my bedroom and my father reads to me Robinson Crusoe under the light from the corridor. I hardly understand much, but the colourful parrot is the final image I see before falling asleep.) On that day however, my grandma said that I should read myself as she needed to cook for all of us. I’ve already learned how to read well by that time. But I was very offended. I remember the tears. It was a lot of them. She left for the kitchen anyway. And after a long time crying, al least it seemed like a long time, I understood I have no other way but read myself. I still remember the salt of tears and the abstract patterns of the grey wallpaper I was looking at as I was stubbornly facing the wall for a while. But also I remember forgetting about all my surroundings when I got into the fairytale. Can one remember forgetting?

Image: White geometric patterns on a grey wallpaper (for the fairytale)

I remember earlier my grandma, the same one, reciting me from her memory a piece of prose in Ukrainian. I remember the feeling of hiding behind her warmth in her bed listening. The piece was about a cold autumn fog and a man, or was it a boy, who was looking outside through a small dirty window. I still see the image of that window in my mind. I still can recite the words. It took me more than a few decades to check where the passage came from. I’ve found it. It is from here Fata morgana and other stories. Almost every day now when I wake up to the news of the war ravaging Ukraine, those lines come back to me. I still haven���t read the whole novella though.

Image: Small smudged half-broken window (for Fata Morgana)

I remember arguing with my then best friend when I was fourteen. It was something very important in a way everything was life or death when you were fourteen. She ran off down the staircase from my place and I thought we've stopped being friends. It was a winter break I grabbed Crime and Punishment from the shelf for the first time. I felt I was getting ill and the combination of fever, winter bleakness and the hurt of loss - that is all that stayed with me when I think of that novel.

Image: Empty stairs (for Crime and Punishment).

I do not remember what was the first book I’ve read in English. But I remember the first song I’ve consciously translated, the words of which I understood. It was the first year of my university and I liked a boy. The boy spoke very good English. Did I like him because of that? Maybe, a bit. But I asked him to help to translate “Show must go on”. I cannot believe it now. But it was the case. It was the beginning of spring, it felt like spring for the first time that day. The icicles have started to melt. I remember those drops and we are standing outside our university’s building and he writes the translation for me on the back of a rail ticket and I’ve suddenly have this thought that everything in future will work out as I wish.

Image: Melting icicles (for Freddie Mercury)

It was a very cold and hungry first year at university. Early 90s in Saint-Petersburg. There were no money to buy food, but there were no food to buy either. The one of my professors suggested I come to his home so we can brainstorm how I can find some paid work. I was eighteen. When I came he was not at home. But I’ve met with his girlfriend whose existence I did not suspect. She was about thirty at the time, at least 20 years younger than the professor. She was an artist, little sad and a chain smoker. The apartment was full of books, even the long dark corridor was covered in bursting bookshelves. She made me some tea and we talked about age and art. She said I won’t notice before I would be 25 and everything in my life that I consider now impossible, both good and bad and cringy, would have already happen by then. I did not believe her: seven years seemed to be a huge distance. I know now she was right. I liked her very much. She seemed to be wise and understanding. The professor did not show up but called to rearrange the meeting. When I was leaving, his girlfriend gave me The Letters of Vincent van Gogh to read. I came back another day. It was 10 am; the girlfriend was nowhere to be seen, but the professor has opened the door covered just in a whitish sheet; an opened bottle of “Absolute” vodka was next to the bed missing that sheet. I understood that I would need to reject pretty urgently at least this “job opportunity”. I was not sure how though; I did not have enough courage to be angry; I mumbled something about my jealous boyfriend and managed to escape from that flat. I still have those van Gogh's letters; I’ve never come back to return it.

Image: More than one (for the Letters of Van Gogh)

I remember one summer. Just a few years passed but many things have changed indeed. I’ve got to the stage when I could buy books without thinking too much of the cost. I remember walking out with my friend, who is still my best friend, from a book shop carrying two huge plastic bags of books - 7 volumes of Joseph Brodsky. It was literally hard to carry so we stopped at a bar, got some beers, got a volume out of a bag and start reading random poems to each other:

Evolving backward, a river
becomes a tear, the real
becomes memory which
can, like fingertips, pinch
just the tail of a lizard…

Never-ending summer day it was; never-starting night - the sun practically does not set in June in that city. And two bags of books. We moved from a place to a place. I am surprised I haven’t lost those bags somewhere. I still have these books on my shelves with beer stains on some of the pages. It was so sad a while ago to read a certain political poem by Brodsky that made me feel confused and betrayed by him. But then this was still to come. And it is a totally different story.

Image: Two plastic bags dark-red leather volumes (for Brodsky).

Some more years and countries. And I remember managing to escape from duties after a sleepless night leaving my then baby-son with his grandma. I went to read Anna Karenina in a cafe, but on a way back I was caught by a proper May thunderstorm. I was running, but until I’ve managed to find some cover both the book and I were totally soaked. I remember standing under a tree, with a wall of rain in front of me, clutching the soaking Anna but feeling somehow totally free - just the smell of new rain, thunder, new fresh-green tree-leaves and me… It took Anna some time to dry out before I could get back to her next day.

Image: The wall of rain (for Anna Karenina)

I remember reading The Little Prince to my son when he was about five. And I could not hide my tears. I do not think he realised I was able cry at all before that moment. It was his discovery of the moment - he was amazed and little afraid. For him crying was a sad thing. And he did not think the story was sad. But I could not hold it. Being with my little boy and seeing how the Little Prince was attending the flower made me realise how early in our life we meet with loneliness; also what it means: “You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.”. It is an idea which we find natural during the childhood. But somehow later, it becomes almost impossible to follow.

Image: A blue dot on a yellow wall (for The Little Prince).

Is it time to come back to Murnane?

During much of his life, whenever he heard or read another person’s account of his or her having read one or another book of fiction, he supposed that he was the only person who remembered having read fiction in a way he remembered it. Whenever he remembered his having read one or another passage in one or another book, he remembered not the words of the passage but the weather during the hour when he had read. The passage, the sights or sounds that he had seen or heard around him from time to time while he read, the textures of the cushions or curtains or walls or grasses or leaves that he had reached for and had touched from time to time while he read, the look of the cover of the book contains the passage and of the page or pages where the passage had been printed, and especially the images that had appeared in his mind while he had read the passage and the feelings that he felt while he had read.

In this beautiful passage, Murnane has made a mistake, however: he was certainly not the “only person who remembered having read fiction in a way he remembered it.”

[Marc Lamot · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is now the fourth book by Gerald Murnane that I have read. The Australian continues to surprise and unsettle me, also in this collection of short stories written over a period of more than 20 years (1979-2002). He has the gift of really throwing you off balance as a reader, by taking you along in seemingly dry, factual reflections and descriptions, memories and musings, and then - before you know it - simultaneously juggling with appearance and reality, dream and reality, imagination and sobriety. Enchanting and mesmerizing. Just try to follow this quote (from the story Landdeal):

“The almost boundless scope of the possible was limited only by the occurrence of the actual. And it went without saying that what existed in the one sense could never exist in the other. Almost anything was possible except, of course, the actual. It might be asked whether our individual or collective histories furnished any example of a possibility becoming actual. Had no man ever dreamed of possessing a certain weapon or woman and, a day or a year later, laid hold of his desire? This can be answered simply by the assurance that no one among us was ever heard to claim that anything in his possession resembled, even remotely, some possible thing he had once hoped to possess.”

Murnane knows better than anyone how words and language transport us to another reality, where everything is possible, and where, above all, there are no boundaries, and he does so to such an extent as to make you believe (or at least doubt) that reality isn’t really reality, and that fiction actually could be more real than the real world. Fascinating, certainly, but – as far as I’m concerned – eventually also irritating, yes irritating, you read that right. I found myself reading these stories with both emotional responses: feeling drawn and swept along by the whirlpool that Murnane opened up for me, but at the same time floundering, resisting the force of the current he sets in motion, desperate about where this is actually leading. Perhaps it is a futil attempt on my part to remain in reality (but what kind of reality? And is it even real? Ha, there you have it)? An attempt, also, to resist the temptation that the tremendous power of language, and especially literature, can unleash? And in Murnane’s case that power is enhanced by the rhetorically poetic character of his seething sentences, which – as many have noted – come into their own especially when read aloud. Just try this one:

“Some of us , remembering how after dreams of loss they had awakened with real tears in their eyes , hoped that we would somehow awake to be convinced of the genuineness of the steel in our hands and the wool round our shoulders. Others insisted that for as long as we handled such things we could be no more than characters in the vast dream that had settled over us—the dream that would never end until a race of men in a land unknown to us learned how much of their history was a dream that must end one day.”

Oh, Gerald Murnane, you irritate me to no end, and at the same time you fascinate me to no end.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

"While I was writing the previous sentence, I saw in my mind an image of a bed of tall flowers near a stone wall which is the wall of a house on its shaded side.

I would like to be sure that the image of the tall flowers and the stone wall first appeared in my mind while I was reading Swann’s Way in 1961, but I can be sure of no more than that I see those flowers and that wall in my mind whenever I try to remember myself first reading the prose fiction of Marcel Proust. I am not writing today about a book or even about my reading of a book. I am writing about images that appear in my mind whenever I try to remember my having read that book.

The image of the flowers is an image of the blooms of the Russell lupins that I saw in an illustration on a packet of seeds in 1948, when I was nine years old. I had asked my mother to buy the seeds because I wanted to make a flower-bed among the patches of dust and gravel and the clumps of spear grass around the rented weatherboard house at 244 Neale Street, Bendigo, which I used to see in my mind continually during the years from 1966 to 1971, while I was writing about the house at 42 Leslie Street, Bassett, in my book of fiction Tamarisk Row.

I planted the seeds in the spring of 1948. I watered the bed and tended the green plants that grew from the seeds. However, the spring of 1948 was the season when my father decided suddenly to move from Bendigo and when I was taken across the Great Divide and the Western Plains to a rented weatherboard cottage near the Southern Ocean in the district of Allansford before I could compare whatever flowers might have appeared on my plants with the coloured illustration on the packet of seeds.

While I was writing the previous paragraph, a further detail appeared in the image of the garden beside the wall in my mind. I now see in the garden in my mind an image of a small boy with dark hair. The boy is staring and listening. I understand today that the image of the boy would first have appeared in my mind at some time during the five months before January 1961 and soon after I had looked for the first time at a photograph taken in the year 1910 in the grounds of a State school near the Southern Ocean in the district of Allansford. The district of Allansford is the district where my father was born and where my father’s parents lived for forty years until the death of my father’s father in 1949 and where I spent my holidays as a child.

The photograph is of the pupils of the school assembled in rows beside a garden bed where the taller plants might be delphiniums or even Russell lupins. Among the smallest children in the front row, a dark-haired boy aged six years stares towards the camera and turns his head slightly as though afraid of missing some word or some signal from his elders and his betters. The staring and listening boy of 1910 became in time the man who became my father twenty-nine years after the photograph had been taken and who died in August 1960, two weeks before I looked for the first time at the photograph, which my father’s mother had kept for fifty years in her collection of photographs, and five months before I read for the first time the volume Swann’s Way in the paperback edition with the brownish cover."




- Reading Murnane made me think of McElroy at times, and I realised the connection is phenomenological. I thought of the following passage from Heidegger, which I also quoted years back in a review of Lookout Cartridge I did on Goodreads. I think both writers connect to the idea in this quote in very different ways, yet they both certainly do connect to it. There is also a similar attempt at precision from both authors - an effort to precisely delineate and express experience.




" What is there in the room there at home is the table (not “a” table among many other tables in other rooms and other houses) at which one sits in order to write, have a meal, sew, play. Everyone sees this right away, e.g., during a visit: it is a writing table, a dining table, a sewing table—such is the primary way in which it is being encountered in itself. This characteristic of “in order to do something” is not merely imposed on the table by relating and assimilating it to something else which it is not. Its standing-there in the room means: Playing this role in such and such characteristic use. This and that about it is “impractical,” unsuitable. That part is damaged. It now stands in a better spot in the room than before—there’s better lighting, for example. . . . Here and there it shows lines—the boys like to busy themselves at the table. Those lines are not just interruptions in the paint, but rather: it was the boys and it still is. This side is not the east side, and this narrow side so many cm. shorter than the other, but rather the one at which my wife sits in the evening when she wants to stay up and read, there at the table we had such and such a discussion that time, there that decision was made with a friend that time, there that work was written that time, there that holiday celebrated that time. That is the table—as such it is there in the temporality of everydayness. . . .."

Heidegger - The Hermeneutics of Facticity, 1923

[Justin Evans · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yes, it is that good, but also not something to read straight through. It's a shame the publishers weren't clearer about where the stories came from, so people could read the original collections one at a time, without trawling through the internets looking for tables of contents. Hey, Justin! Maybe perform a public service? Okay, Justin?

As best as I can tell:

Velvet Waters: pp 3-223.
Emerald Blue: pp 247-436.

'White Cattle of Uppington' and 'The Interior of Gaaldine' are stand-alones.
'Invisible yet Enduring Lilacs,' from the volume of that name.

I think the last three stories are from 'History of Books,' but I can't be bothered going to find my copy and make sure. Perhaps owners of VW and EB can correct me if I've made some mistakes here.

[Jim Elkins]

What is the Real World in Murnane? The Case of the Antipodean Archive of Horse Racing

This is my fifth or sixth time trying to understand what Gerald Murnane means by "fiction" and "real," as in "real world." Here I'll just talk about one of the stories in this collection, "The Interior of Gaaldine," and mainly just about the story's second half, which introduces the Antipodean Archive. Thanks to Ben Winch for steering me to this "fiction" in particular, and for several corrections to a draft of this essay.

"The Interior of Gaaldine" can be usefully divided into three parts: a conventional narrative in which an author sets out to a literary conference in Tasmania; a scene in which a woman visits him and gives him a manuscript by an unpublished author, whose story she tells; and a detailed inventory of the contents of that manuscript. Because "The Interior of Gaaldine" was in a collection that didn't sell well, and because it begins with the line "A true account of certain events recalled on the evening when I decided to write no more fiction" (in italics, set off from the body text by a double space), it's reasonable to see it as a hinge between his earlier fiction (the first third of the story) and the project to which he apparently devoted himself (the Antipodean Archive, described in the last third of the story).

An initial problem has to do with the word "fiction" in Murnane's first line. Nominally it refers to the fiction he had written up to that moment, pointedly including the near-travesty of his earlier writing in the conventional opening narrative. But in order to make sense of the word in relation to his later work, I would also like to read "fiction" as applying to work from "Barley Patch" onward, and also to the Antipodean Archive. On that last point, Murnane thought of himself as giving up fiction for the Antipodean Archive—and other texts, such as his logs of encounters with women—but he also called the Archive "fiction."

It's been widely known for several decades now that Murnane's files contain a particularly extensive set of notes for imaginary horse races, which he calls the Antipodean Archive. Mark Binelli's piece in The New York Times Sunday magazine for March 27, 2018 has an excellent description of the files and how they were arranged in Murnane's house. (Or rather, his shed.) It seems likely there will be a printed edition of the Antipodean Archive at some point. *In an interview in the Paris Review, winter 2024, Murnane said he would gladly teach who wanted to learn how to continue the Antipodian Archive after he dies. I hope somone read that and volunteered!) I can imagine it done expensively in color facsimile, the way it's been done for Emily Dickinson's envelopes, Robert Walser's microscripts, Nabokov's notecards for The Original of Laura, and miscellaneous diagrams and lists left behind by Walter Benjamin.

"The Interior of Gaaldine" contains a supposedly fictionalized account of the method and content of the horse racing files. In the story they are a manuscript given to "Murnane" by an unpublished writer. (I'm calling the narrator "Murnane" to distinguish him from Gerald Murnane.) The woman who delivers the manuscript first tells "Murnane" about how the man has led an isolated life, not doing more for his job than he needs to, and moving often to avoid having friends (pp. 454-60). Supposedly Murnane doesn't remember her telling him any of this, but that's probably so Gerald Murnane did not have to write dialogue (p. 454). The man's life is very similar, in its benign misanthropy or autistic pleasure in isolation, to Gerald Murnane's and to what we know of "Murnane."

After the woman leaves, "Murnane" peruses the manuscript. It's 2,000 pages written between "the late 1950s" and the present, which would be sometime shortly after 1987, when "The Interior of Gaaldine" may have been written. (It was published in 1995, in the collection "Emerald Blue.") Binelli reports Murnane began his horse racing file "in secret beginning in 1985." If Binelli is right, "The Interior of Gaaldine" is a report on the early days of the Antipodean Archive, long before it swelled to however many thousand pages it is now.

The place, Gaaldine, is mentioned by Emily Brontë as an imaginary place beyond Gondal, the imaginary setting of the stories she and her sisters wrote as children. There's a hint of that in "The Interior of Gaaldine." In an interview in Music & Literature in 2012, Murnane says this relates to "my seeming discovery, in the 1980s and 1990s, that beyond the fictional landscape that I saw... there was a further landscape of imaginary horse racing" (Music and Literature vol. 3, p. 19). He then goes on to explain that apparently entire unaccountable, private, and irratonal "explanation" with an even weirder one. The woman in the story, he says, wakes the narrator in the middle of the night (and so she's like a dream, and by implication part of his own imagination). Actually he doesn't say the visit happened in the middle of the night, but he makes it dreamlike, saying her knocking was like a sound in a dream. Then, in "Music & Literature," Murnane goes on to explain that an "astute reader" would realize her name isn't Alice but Ellis (a confusion perhaps made easier in Australian English), Emily Brontë's first pen name. "So," Murnane concludes, "if this woman is Emily Brontë, or pretending to be Emily Brontë, she is using Emily Brontë's fictional name to say who she is, and it's all very complicated and twisting and turning, but that is my answer to your question."

It's one of the most openly irrational accounts of literature I have ever seen. In what world, using what logic, is this anything even distantly approaching an explanation for the relation between the Antipodean Archive and fiction? In what world does Murnane imagine that even this simple, truncated version of his full "twisting and turning" explanation could possibly make sense to to any reader or listener?

Murnane is serious: he just cannot find ways to explain his sense of fiction to anyone. I think the best approach here is to leave aside the literary feints (Brontë, the manuscript by an unpublished author, "Murnane") and note that the Antipodean Archive documents a world in the "interior" of fiction, a world more real in crucial senses than fiction, and a world that depends, as I'll describe in a moment, on mechanically ingesting and processing fiction.

At the end of the story, we're given several different reasons why "Murnane" thinks the woman might have wanted him to see the unnamed author's text. One is that "the author of the pages wanted to meet me in order to persuade me to write a different sort of fiction in the future."

So on a first reading, "The Interior of Gaaldine" is a fictionalized account of a new kind of writing Murnane had invented, which made him change his mind about how to write. In this way of understanding the story, he kept writing fiction, but understood it differently.

Three things complicate this. The first is a description we get just before "Murnane" starts explaining the details of how horse races are invented and recorded in the file.

"If the pages comprised a work of literature," he writes, "I might report that the first thousand or so comprise an introduction to the work while the other pages are samples chosen at intervals from the narrative proper."

And then, immediately, an odd repetititon:

"If the pages comprised a work of literature, I might describe that work as a novel with many thousands of characters and a plot of infinite complications." (p. 460)

From what is known about the Antipodean Archive, it has nothing in common with the novel form. Even for Georges Perec it would be a stretch to say the jockeys and horses are "thousands of characters" and the racing seasons comprise "a plot of infinite complications." Identifying the horse racing file as a novel is exactly as incomprehensible as Sartre's comment that "The Family Fool," his 2,600 page nonfiction study of the young Flaubert, is really a novel. If this is what Murnane means by not writing fiction—while still writing novels—it's not something he has done.

A second complication is the role traditional literature plays in the Antipodean Archive, as it is described in this story. "Murnane" says the author buys novels, finds passages that are especially striking, and writes them out, letter by letter, vertically down the columns of his imagined racing forms, so that it's possible to read a series of letters across each row starting from each horse's name. Numerical values attached to the letters of the alphabet yield numbers, which indicate the horse's rank at different moments in the race.

This wouldn't matter, except that the author uses Victorian novels because "the profusion of realistic details in Victorian novels gives to the images of horse-racing that they cause to arise in his mind an unsurpassed richness and vividness." He calls this "decoding" Victorian novels. He then uses the direct dialogue in Victorian novels in the same way in order to find out the winner of each race, and he calls that method the "gutting" of the novel (pp. 464-65). The best writers for this numerological exercise, the unnamed author says, are those that "suppose that the best fiction is the most life-like."

So the Antipodean Archive is an engine for converting a certain kind of fiction, valued for its realism, into a more realistic world of horse racing. It takes realism to create realism, but the original realism must be destroyed to make the new one. This could be a model for not writing fiction, except that it isn't, because it produces stronger fiction.

And third, there's a passage just after these descriptions in which "Murnane" addresses the reader, who he thinks must be wondering why the author went to such trouble to invent imaginary horses, race courses, jockeys, and even uniforms, when he could have written about ones that already exist. "Murnane" answers, weirdly, in the first person, as if he's the author (which of course he is!). He wasn't surprised by this, he says, because:

"I have always been interested in what is usually called the real world but only because it provides me with evidence for the existence of another world. I have never written any piece of fiction with the simple purpose of understanding what I might call the real world. I have always written fiction in order to suggest to myself that another world exists." (p. 466)

This is an idea that's pushed much farther in the novel "Barley Patch," the book that followed "the Interior of Gaaldine" by a decade and re-started Murnane's career. There we're told that what's most interesting in fiction is the fictional lives of the characters, but mainly as they lead them when no one is watching—when they're doing things that aren't described in the novels. In "Barlety Patch" he says he had always "wanted to learn what places appeared in the mind of one or another fictional character whenever he or she stared past the furthest place mentioned in the text that had seemed to give rise to him or her... Now, I was free to suppose what I had often suspected: many a so-called fictional character was not a native of some or another fictional text but of a further region never yet written about."

This is a conventional world-building model for fiction, compatible with work by Frank Herbert, J.R. Tolkein, or George R.R. Martin: it's the sense that the fictional world continues on when the book is closed, when the characters are asleep, or after the last page. Murnane's idea is not quite the same as wondering what a Hobbit does when he walks offstage, because the "further region" isn't a direct extension of the fictional world. But in my experience nothing of this sort, or of the Herbert and Tolkein sort, happens in Murnane's fiction. (I don't doubt it happens for Murnane, but I'm concerned with readers' pausible responses.) The artifice is so intense, and in the case of the Antipodean Archive, so dependent on just one person's hermetic self-imposed rules and ideas, that absolutely nothing continues when the book is closed.

What counts as the "real world" in Murnane's fiction? It's something artificially constructed, using rules that the author himself can barely understand, that are often confused or unexplained, but that he perceives as inevitable, or simply given, or necessary to create realism out of the "decoded" and "gutted" remains of ordinary fiction. They are nothing like Oulipeans' intellectual constraints: they're rules that have to be obeyed in order to make at least provisional, hedged and qualified sense out of the otherwise meaningless world.

[Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

Two images come to my mind as I sit at my dining room table writing this review. The first image mentioned in the previous sentence is of myself after having read an article in the New York Times about the writer of Stream System, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in New York. The article mentioned in the previous sentence portrayed the writer as a brilliant and eccentric Australian who has been producing brilliant and eccentric fiction in Australia for the last 50 years. As a result, I started reading works by the writer. I have now read over 600 pages written by the writer, in which only three minor characters were given a name, two of whom were residents of a psychiatric facility. The first image mentioned in the first sentence of this paragraph is of me giving a one star review of the book mentioned in this paragraph. The writer has put together random thoughts and images throughout the years and is having a good laugh at the Yanks who have suddenly discovered him. It occurs to me that the article was published close to April 1, so perhaps the New York Times was in on the joke. The fiction is nothing more than disjointed musings from a very strange mind.
The second of the images mentioned above is of me giving this work of fiction 5 stars on Goodreads and gushing like a middle school student first reading Vonnegut. This is by far the most idiosyncratic collection of short fiction (hard to call them stories) that I have ever read. The writer uses simple language, repetition and self-referential sentences to create a trancelike rhythm. This rhythm flows throughout the stories, and images and scenes reappear and are transformed like melodies in a symphony. There is a musicality to his use of language that moves the reader forward despite any substantive action or plot. This language serves to focus the themes of his work, which include the art of writing, memory, human connection, longing and isolation. His themes are expansive, yet seem to come entirely from the random images floating through his mind. He can be both poignant, when describing comforting an ill child in ‘When the Mice Failed to Arrive,’ or scathingly funny, as in his send-up of a writer’s colony in ‘Stone Quarry.’ In this later work, aspiring writers participate in a workshop where they cannot acknowledge each other. Any personal connection results with expulsion from the group, so the writers are forced to embed coded messages in their work that is distributed to the group daily. Another piece, ‘Boy Blue,’ purports to explain why his characters are not named, and gives some insight into his creative process. “Other persons may pretend whatever they choose to pretend, but I cannot pretend that any character in any story written by me or by any other person is a person who lives or has lived in the place where I sit writing these words. I see the characters in stories, including the story of which this sentence is a part, as being in the invisible place that I often call my mind. I would like the reader or the listener to notice that I wrote the word being and not the word living in the previous sentence.” Fiction writing devolves to a form of code in ‘The Interior of Gaaldine.’ Writing becomes a tool to advance an elaborate game of horse racing. Specifically, text from Victorian novels are used to determine the winners of the daily races in an intricate made-up world. Novels are not real, they are not remembered, and they are useful only for advancing childish games. Writing is a string of images spawned by other, vaguely connected images, creating more images, some of which are forgotten and some remain but are changed. “I am not writing today about a book or even about my reading of a book. I am writing about the images that appear in my mind whenever I try to remember my having read that book.”

[Ben Winch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Publishing event of the year for me, given the previous scarcity of the collection Emerald Blue, included here in its entirety, and the importance of that collection as a hinge on which Murnane’s work’s two phases turn, specifically the story “The Interior of Gaaldine”. That story—wow! It’s a classic, remorseless, hilarious, black as pitch. That is, until its strange denouement, a wildly improbable sequence in which the horse-racing-obsessed Murnane discovers another writer, still more obscure than him at the time, who is likewise obsessed with horse racing, so much so that he (the other writer) has built up an entire archive (not unlike Murnane’s own famous archive) dedicated to it. I won’t pretend to understand that denouement, or even to think it wise, but then I’m far beyond demanding coherency from a Murnane story, not to mention anything I can fully “understand”. Oh sure, some of the stories I understand. “In Far Fields”, for eg, that’s brilliant, a masterclass in fiction-writing which I guarantee is unlike any other such class you’ll come across. “Fingerweb”, that’s a dark one, gender politics dubious, but thrillingly honest, deep, disturbing. But overall, I just don’t know if I know what to say about Murnane anymore, and by the look of the videos of the recent Goroke Murnane Symposium I’ve got some serious competition. Besides, the truth is I’m a relatively recent convert—didn’t read Barley Patch till 2016, throughout which reading it gradually dawned on me: the guy’s a genius. Another truth: I’d read half of the stories collected here before: Velvet Waters (the other key collection) graced my shelves in the mid-90s. But I couldn’t grasp it! It seemed so slight. I guess I was looking for some un-Murnanian substance in it, and neglecting to note the Murnanian. I remember thinking (this baffles me now) that the man was arrogant. Maybe he just seemed wilful, too sure of himself, unconcerned about any or most of the usual pacts between a writer and a reader of fiction. Whatever the problem, the substance of his stories floated like slightly opaque gas through my head, and I filed it under “bafflement”. Same thing with The Plains and Inland; I just didn’t get it. (The truth is I still don’t. I read both of those so-called masterpieces earlier this year, in the biggest Murnane binge I’d yet known, and thought The Plains drole and pointless and Inland obtuse, maybe from exactly the publisher-pressures Murnane describes as inescapable in his pre-Barley Patch days.) But Barley Patch, that made sense to me. And from that sense I developed a sense, which enabled me to breathe that Murnanian vapour, at least in the form we find it in Barley Patch, A Million Windows, Border Districts and Landscape With Landscape, and in most of these collected stories—which list, for me, constitutes his best and truest (because, I believe, least compromised) work. If you know that list, if you’ve read those titles and enjoyed them, Stream System is a sure thing. In places, it’s brilliant; in places untouchable. Still, if you’re anything like me you may read through the novella “Emerald Blue” (for eg) and finish thinking “Huh?! What the *$ was that about?” despite its beauty. All I can guess is it’s about the journey. Murnane, when he’s on, writes a page you can really sink into. As he says in “Why I Write What I Write” (in Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs):

I write sentences. I write first one sentence, then another sentence. I write sentence after sentence. [...] After I’ve written each sentence I read it aloud. I listen to the sound of the sentence, and I don’t begin to write the next sentence unless I’m absolutely satisfied with the sound of the sentence I’m listening to.

At their best, every one of those sentences is a felt experience for the reader, an entirety, an end unto itself. Yes, there’s the sense that they may never really take us anywhere. But maybe, where they are is good enough. Maybe, as I never seem to tire of quoting, the aesthetic experience really is the “imminence of a revelation that never occurs” (Borges). I won’t lie to you: it doesn’t occur here either. Given the rarity of Emerald Blue and the reputation of “The Interior of Gaaldine” you could be forgiven for hoping otherwise. But while I’ll be re-reading that story as closely as I can I doubt I’ll ever feel again the thrill of anticipation that gripped me as its drunken narrator boarded the boat for Tasmania. Just for its tone and texture, it’s a masterpiece. For the backstory—writer at his lowest ebb gives up writing after this story—it’s a crucial part of a myth, a piece of history. For me, the first half of “The Interior of Gaaldine” was the most potent ten pages of 2018, and this book is a treasure, laced with gems. 2018—the year Murnane broke. I don’t care if he never wins the Nobel, living in a shed out back of his son’s house in a one-horse town five hours drive from Melbourne is an outsider hero. On the home-stretch he’s put in a last spurt, eclipsed the favourites. Stream System shows he was quietly keeping pace all along.

[Kevin Tole · Rating 5 out of 5]

The more I read of the writing of Gerald Murnane, the more I become captivated by his work. He is without doubt a writer’s writer as well as a thinker’s writer and much of his work is about the act of writing – precise, concise, often metafictional with, but we can never be quite sure, portions of autobiography as fiction. Now he has become discovered in America and Europe and is commonly hailed as the next Nobel Laureate. He is also an extremely hard working and prodigious writer, or has been as he says that 'Border Districts' is his last novel however you can hardly expect someone like Murnane to simply retire and stop writing.

From the extensive interview with Mark Binelli in the New York Times Magazine. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/ma... we know that he is a compulsive archivist of his own writing and his past as well as an enthusiastic racegoer and isolationist, revelling in his lack of knowledge of what might be termed ‘modern day appurtenances’. He seems stuck happily in his own world, preferring not to travel or indulge in any other cultural activities apart from his own writing, the local bar and golf club and beer. He must now be considered upon the more extensive availability of his work, a great writer whose work as a canon will stand up to much scrutiny.

Having dipped my toes, so to speak, into the novels it has been more than interesting to read the short stories within this compilation of Stream System. These date back as far as 1980 with the most recent being 2002, so they represent a mature writer happy and skilled with his craft. The short stories are arranged pretty much chronologically. In some ways the short stories are quite separate from the novels. They are like short, sharp shocks against the extended tinctures of the novels. There is a meditative quality in much of the work – in some more than others – but all ask the reader to follow the line, follow the thread, be aware of what is being written. If José Saramago, J.M. Coetzee and Thomas Bernhard are the parable writers then Murnane is the meditation mantra writer.

Stream Systems, the second story in the collection reminds me of an old Rolf Harris song The Court of King Caractacus (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3s0j...) where the story is built up and added to bit by bit and at every round, every repeat we learn a little more. This is a Murnanism and he uses it in several stories. This particular story is somewhat different in that it was written to be read aloud.

Murnane just loves metafiction. It gives him the ability to examine writing by placing a distance between himself the writer, and the work of fiction that he is writing. It is what ties him in exactly with Italo Calvino and Vladimir Nabokov and At Swim-Two-Birds and James Joyce. He also wears his influences out front. You can almost smell Marcel Proust and taste Samuel Beckett and feel Jorge Luis Borges, but he cites others within the stories. Stendahl, Gustave Flaubert and Katherine Mansfield all crop up and from these we learn of Murnane's love of books and writing of a particular style, a Eurocentric love of writing.

If we combine Murnane's 'metafictional' style with the purity of the prose, you end up coming back to the nature of fiction against the nature of autobiography. How much of all these works is autobiography? Where does the fiction or the autobiography start and finish? Are they completely wrapped up in each other? Well of course they are as they always are. The writer cannot write without betraying / imparting / imbuing the work with the sense of himself. But there seems more to it than just that. We know that Murnane is an arch-archivist, he loves horse racing, he studied in a seminary for a time, he worked as a teacher for many years, lived close to Melbourne and is intimate with the plains and bush of Victoria, that he does not like travelling, loves a beer or three and is an avid observer. All these themes occur and are used in these short stories. The autobiography is closely entwined like a skein of wool with the fiction and as we untangle it quite often a beautiful gem will drop out unexpectedly. In Stone Quarry we learn that....

No living author would be read because the reader of a living author might be tempted one day to search out the author and ask some question about the text or about the weather on the day when this or that page was first composed or about a certain year of the author's life before the first sentence of the text came into being.

It is this INTENSE searching and questioning of the whole process of writing and reading and appreciating that just inhabits all his work. These meditations on writing become spellbinding. A story like Precious Bane IS just like a mantra? When is the meditation finished? When does it reach it’s end? Some of these short stories feel like they could just run and run.

Much has been made of Murnane’s lack of interest in character or plot or style. When you read something like Cotters Come No More you realise that this is not exactly true. This is a faultless short story of a bachelor uncle and an orphaned nephew and the connections between them. The form is almost onomatopoeic. There is a palpable tension throughout the piece, certainly rhythmic, almost staccato with sentence following sentence each with a similar form and a similar number of words and syllables. It is fugue-like. This is particularly noticeable when the uncle is discussed but drops when the subject of poetry or the country is raised. This is the closest that any of the short stories comes to the flavour of the novels, particularly The Plains. The writing feels metaphoric dealing ostensibly with one subject but implying another. There is a frisson between the 15 y.o. nephew and the 40 y.o. plus bachelor uncle, a dance between them, a spoken and unspoken dialogue. It captures well the sense of being aged 15. And Murnane is a master of memory and portrayal of youth. This is a particularly strong short story with so much left unspoken.

It is not as if Murnane’s prose is mellifluous and rolling off the tongue – it is actually pretty much the opposite. It requires work from the reader. A seemingly simple sentence and string of sentences may contain multiple ideas and meanings whilst being written quite simply. It is like a subterfuge of superficiality with coiled rings of meaning which have to be scried by the reader peeling away skin after skin of the onion. Are these fictions really fictions or are they simply biographies? A story like The White Cattle of Uppington has you questioning and doubting where the boundary lies. Is Murnane constantly delivering up to us parts of himself, one light followed by another, side elevation followed by plan view and frontage. He also is a great self-referrer quite often pulling the reader back to a previous paragraph in the same short story or even embarking on a theme touched on and used in another short story or in one of the novels. There is a Zen-like austerity in his appreciation of books in that a book can only be appreciated by the reader – not by a review, not someone else’s view, not by a discussion, not by a critic, not by a book group – but simply alone and by the reader.

Pink Lining, Boy Blue and to a degree Emerald Blue describe the way Murnane thinks about his writing – never naming characters, waiting for the title to present itself but always the story containing the title and even being the reason for the writing. Each presents us with some knowledge but then heads off somewhere else to give us a further insight through a meditation upon another feature suggested as the writing proceeded. If anything the later stories in the collection become stronger and stronger and more and more personal and about less and less.

Murnane is direct to the reader. He is writing FOR us (and of course for himself). It seems not to be Murnane’s characters appealing to us but Murnane himself. Most authors tend to utilise the artificiality of characters and we are drawn into this through the concept of plot. There is little plot in a Murnane fiction but great great depth and simplicity and a directness. His sentences are simple and beautiful.

The boy’s name was David. The man, whatever his name was, had known, as soon as he read that sentence, that the boy’s name had not been David. At the same time, the man had not been fool enough to suppose that the name of the boy had been the same as the name of the author of the fiction, whatever his name had been. The man had understood that the man who had written the sentence understood that to write such a sentence was to lay claim to a level of truth that no historian and no biographer could ever lay claim to. There was never a boy named David, the writer of the fiction might as well have written, but if you, the Reader, and I, the Writer, can agree that there might have been such a boy so named, then I undertake to tell you what you could never otherwise have learned about any boy of that name.

I can't get enough of Murnane. Every book I have read of his always contains a part where I wonder what on earth he is doing and where this is leading. But each time this occurs there is a desire to keep on following the line. Murnane has given me a far greater understanding of metafiction that I ever had before encountering him. And if truth be told, a better understanding of the craft of the writer and what writing IS!

[Josh Friedlander · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's hard to imagine a country less likely to produce writers than Australia: a soulless, alcoholic, colonialist nanny-state on a desert island in the furthest edge of the world. But Murnane is the real deal. Many, but not all, of these collected fictions (spanning from 1985 to 2012) form a bildungsroman, in which the author, raised by pragmatic Catholic parents in a remote town, struggles to understand his place in the world, wrestles with religious doubt, and gropes towards a bohemian lifestyle he is only dimly aware exists.

But what will immediately strike the reader is Murnane's highly idiosyncratic writing style. In a clipped and detached monotone, he stretches out long sentences which scrupulously avoid names, and almost all proper nouns (excepting place names in Australia, somehow). Everything is instead described in laborious, backreferential terms. So the result sounds something like this (not a real sentence, but a basically representative pastiche): "The person referred to in the last paragraph, whose surname ended in the 15th letter of the English alphabet, regretted that he had never been able to become connected sexually with the female person mentioned at the end of this piece of fiction."

In some ways, Murnane's cold anti-humanism reminded me of his elective compatriate Coetzee. Both are cold and mechanical misanthropes; but Coetzee seems to possess more active antipathy to humans. (I'm thinking of his fiction and essayistic writing on animal rights, and his frequent theme of the barbarity of humanity). Murnane just seems disconnected; a regional, isolated writer even within Australia, living in a remote hinterland, writing jarring, defamiliarising prose.

A description I found revealing was of an ex-Catholic poet manqué working as a government clerk, finding it impossible to relate to his colleagues' pub chat, unable to share his own world, living an intellectual world he keeps to himself. He is both embarrassed by and jealous of their talk about sex and more active active sexual past. I can't remember if this comes from one of the stories or from several; this is what happens when one reads this entire book (some 600 pp.) in order. It is long, and maybe contains too much of the same style. (Should I have tried one of his novels instead?) There is also some material about Hungary, horse-racing, Aborigines, and an experimental Catholic commune. At times the style did start to wear on me. But this Antipodean oddball is a unique, important voice in the postmodern canon.

[Harooon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fiction has the ability to transform our lives. Any bibliophile can tell you all the ways in which he has been personally affected by the books he loves. But as Helen Garner puts it in Woman in a Green Mantle, he is unlikely to remember the actual words he read:

I’ve been asking around: I knew I couldn’t be the only person capable of forgetting the contents of a novel only minutes after having closed it. I’ve found that people bluff when they talk about books. They pretend to remember things that they don’t remember at all. Intense anxiety and guilt cluster round the state of having read. Press the memory of a book, and it goes blurry.

All that remains is the book’s impression, its effect on the mind. It is this mysterious phenomenon which Gerald Murnane wields against us in Stream System, a compilation of his short fiction.

I found out about Murnane from a New York Times piece, Is the Next Nobel Laureate in Literature Tending Bar in a Dusty Australian Town? Like the narrators in his stories, he is somewhat reclusive, charmingly eccentric, and deceptively complex.

His stories follow odd tangents which revolve around the same motifs: horse-racing, plains, maps, books, Catholicism, sexual frustrations. While you could place their events chronologically, that isn’t really how they unfold. At first they seem tedious and elliptical, without a plot, almost pointless. But lurking in them are hints for how we might approach Stream System—and fiction—as a whole.

In Boy Blue, the narrator recalls when his mother read him the poem Little Boy Blue when he was a child:

The little toy dog is covered with dust,
 But sturdy and staunch he stands;
 And the little toy soldier is red with rust,
 And his musket molds in his hands.
Time was when the little toy dog was new,
 And the soldier was passing fair;
And that was the time when our Little Boy Blue
 Kissed them and put them there.

"Now, don't you go till I come," he said,
 "And don't you make any noise!"
So, toddling off to his trundle-bed,
 He dreamed of the pretty toys;
And, as he was dreaming, an angel song
 Awakened our Little Boy Blue
Oh! the years are many, the years are long,
 But the little toy friends are true!

Ay, faithful to Little Boy Blue they stand,
 Each in the same old place
Awaiting the touch of a little hand,
 The smile of a little face;
And they wonder, as waiting the long years through
 In the dust of that little chair,
What has become of our Little Boy Blue,
 Since he kissed them and put them there.

As he hears the words of the poem, the boy imagines a toy dog and a toy soldier sitting in a lonely room, wondering what happened to Boy Blue, and he starts to cry:

The father as a boy pretended that the room in his mind was a room in the place called the real world so that he could further pretend that a person who lived in the place just mentioned would come into the room at some time in the future and would explain to the dog and the soldier mentioned previously why they had to wait and to wonder for so long and so that he could further pretend that he would never again begin to weep while his mother read the poem and would never again pretend to be comforted after his mother had read to the end of the poem and had then looked at his face and had then told him that he dog and the soldier and the room where they were waiting were only details in a story. (330)

This final run-on sentence—which mimics the breathless cadence of an upset child—expresses the futile wish of fiction. Even though a story is just a story, we like to imagine it taking place in a world like our own, because when we read it, we are seeking in it what we are already seeking in our own lives.

Fiction isn’t just make believe, though, or it would have no effect on us. Fiction not only reflects, but shapes the reality we inhabit. In this way, reading is like recalling a memory. Something happens, and we have a response or a feeling about it. Eventually that response, which might appear in our head as an image, begins to distort our understanding of the truth of what happened—or, in Helen Garner’s case, it distorts our recall of the actual events and words in the story we claim to remember.

This is the key to understanding Murnane's writing. He is interested, above all, in the mental landscape of the reader as it interacts with fiction.

His stories are like maps of such mental landscapes. The narrator reports those impressions which stood out to him for no reason other than their own felt significance. He does this in a careful, affectless, matter-of-fact tone. None of his characters have names; they are simply referred to as “the main character of this story” or “the main character’s father” or “the previously mentioned man” or “the woman mentioned in the second sentence of this story,” emphasising the connections between them and the narrator’s memory.

When the narrator reports something, he will then report how reporting it made him feel, before leaping to another event he associates with that thing. The effect is to blur the boundaries between event and response, putting them both on equal footing—first class phenomena.

So a story will reference its own sentences, encouraging you to stop, go back to that sentence, and remind yourself of the impression you had when you first read it. This way of reading mimics how the narrator obsessively trawls through the facts of his life, linking them by means of common associations.

Objects made up of numerous interconnected parts appear over and over in Murnane’s fiction: systems, houses, monastic passageways, forests, maps, archives, honeycomb. You can think of Murnane’s stories as being another one of these objects. Rather than describe some events which happened in a fictional world in a slice of time, they are constellations of experience, impressions and feelings linked by nothing more than a central motif.

In Emerald Blue the motif is a dark-blue forest on the horizon of a pale-green plain. It evokes the scenery of Victoria, where the narrator grew up. It also reminds him of the Gippsland forest, which he supposes is but the remnant of some more vast, primordial forest which once stretched across the entire continent.

Long before the narrator was born, there was a massive fire in the Gippsland forest. For a long time, he assumed this event had some apocalyptic significance to its inhabitants. Yet when he asks his parents, neither of them seem to recall it in any great detail.

Nor does anyone but the narrator recall the holidays the family used to take in the forest. His father, a horseracing fanatic with a gambling problem, would take them to a shack with no comforts and few amenities. For no particular reason, he would spend the holidays clearing trees and chopping wood, as if to silently prove to his own father in turn that he was more than just a gambling addict.

The narrator’s mother was also born in the forest, in a small town on a newly cleared block. This chance association fires up the narrator’s imagination: he doesn't know how his parents met—and they are dead now—but he can conclude something about how it happened based on their mutual connection to the Gippsland forest.

Reading these stories, one gets the impression that time is at a stand-still. The narrator’s memories pour forth in non-chronological order; indeed, what is described in the story has already happened, and the narrator is merely connecting the dots in the present day.

But despite his attempts to reorder his past into a timeless archive, a static object that contains his entire reality, time does move forward. We are reminded of this when the narrator explains how a memory or an image was lost due to the irruption of the real world. We are also reminded of this when, despite the narrator’s emotionless, evasive tone, we get a sense of the lingering pain of death and rejection.

A parallel plot-thread in Emerald Blue concerns the narrator’s ineptitude with women. Throughout his life he sees an image of a woman in his head, whom he calls the wife-in-his-mind. Her exact face is indistinct and changes as he falls in love with different people. Every time the crush goes nowhere, or it ends in rejection or humiliation, and the narrator resigns himself to his loneliness. At times he seems to want nothing more from the opposite sex than the platonic love he has for the wife-in-his-mind.

His sexual desire is frustrated by the guilt of a Catholic upbringing. As a child he masturbates in the bush outside his house while imagining the girls in his neighbourhood rebuking him. As he gets older, their imagined rebukes become more playful and provocative. He comes to associate the prickle of gorse on his skin with their taunts.

This association is not just the elevation of his rejection to a sexual fetish, it is an attempted religious flagellation, like what the monks of the middle ages would do to purify themselves. Indeed, the narrator admires those Carthusian monks who live their life in silence, and longs for his own solitude, by means of which he might strengthen the precious images which flicker in his mind. To that end he refuses to watch movies, has never been on a plane, and doesn’t travel much beyond where he was born, lest those experiences clutter his mind:

Whenever he was invited to a house that he had not previously visited, he would see in his mind at once the house as it looked from the front gate, the interior of the main room, the view of the back garden from the kitchen window. Then he would visit the house, and the other house would have followed Helvetia into oblivion. (335)

He outlines his solitude as a necessary part of his artistic vision. But it is also a coping mechanism. When the narrator feels rejected or unloved, he tends to withdraw into his mental games. He reaffirms his love for the wife-in-his-mind and starts to imagine his unpublished writings are being reserved for an audience of gentlemen scholars in a made-up nation. In his deepest solitude, the mental landscape grows more vivid, and becomes more alluring than reality.

This idea of a vibrant inner life which gains significance from its obscurity is also explored in The Plains. “How might a man reorder his conduct,” asks the filmmaker, “if he could be assured that the worth of a perception, memory, a supposition, was enhanced rather than diminished by its being inexplicable to others?”

In enhancing his own memories to a mental landscape, the narrator takes inspiration from his uncle. A lifelong bachelor, his uncle’s eclectic, fundamentalist views comprise what the narrator calls a private history of the world.

Their relationship is explored in Cotters Come No More. The narrator’s father has been dead for four years and he is struggling with feelings of loss and abandonment. Though he is close to his uncle, he stubbornly resists seeing him as a father figure, even though it’s what he needs—and perhaps what his uncle needs too.

They embark on the kind of outdoor adventure boys find wonderful. His uncle leads him across grassy paddocks, stopping on a hilltop to tune his radio and point out the name of a horse in a racing magazine. Then the narrator is “just able to hear, above the crackle of static and the buzzing of insects in the grass, the call of a race more than a hundred miles away with the horse that my uncle had brought to my notice in the thick of the finish.” (100)

The narrator adopts his uncle’s idea of a private history for the project of his own mental landscape, but despite his attempts to withdraw into it, the real world moves forward without him. Reality overwrites fantasy, which he tries to respond to—unsuccessfully—by withdrawing even further into his mind.

Like the boy who cries imagining the toy soldier and the toy horse waiting for Boy Blue, fiction seems more real to the narrator than reality. But though fiction is not real, it can still guide and structure and soothe our mind. For the narrator, it is a means of reliving, and thereby overcoming, his losses.

Sometimes the full impact of a death is only felt years after the fact. That we feel a person’s absence despite this distance speaks to their significance. With time, we begin to feel their absence as a kind of lingering melancholy—saudade—in which their loss is inseparable from our happy memories of them.

In Pink Lining the photo of a pink sunset on a card reminds the boy of his favourite aunt. She was a pious woman who fastidiously attended to the purification of her sins. She was also paralysed from the waist down. The boy fondly recalls coming into her room and sitting beside her to have long chats for hours and hours.

As with all his stories, Murnane is careful about what he puts in our heads. He wants to build a clear, static image in our minds, so when the parts in it move, they carry great importance. The exact image is this: the aunt is lying down in her bed, leaning on her right-side to alleviate the pain, while the boy sits next to her.

When the boy goes to see his aunt and the door is shut, he enters the room anyway. She is not lying down in her familiar pose. We know from the disturbance of the image that something is wrong: her death—which is not explicitly told in the story—is a given.

The boy catches a glimpse at her strange, broken body as she leans over an enamel dish. He sees her areolas—the same colour as the pink sunset—surrounding “the nipples of a girl whose breasts had not yet begun to grow.” (310) Despite her age, the aunt’s upper body is impossibly young and undeveloped. This incongruency could be a monstrous deformity; it could also be a girlish purity.

The narrator is shocked and unsure of what he is seeing. Only later does he make the connection with angels: “He understood that angels lived in the district of heaven. He understood also that the angels were spiritual begins who were without bodies and were, therefore, neither male nor female.” (317)

His aunt is not long for this world. But how can he be sure that, in spite of her piety, she will actually make it to heaven? How does he know that salvation will come for the faithful? Is this just another image in his mind, like the toy dog and the toy solider waiting in the room for Boy Blue?

Because Murnane is such a patient writer, taking the time to build up these correspondences in one big image, when the narrator finally declares to his father that he does not believe in the teachings of the Catholic church, we know—without a single word being written—that he is afraid. These aren’t just words escaping his mouth. He is tearing a hole in the fabric of everything he knows to be real so he might have a chance of escaping it, despite not knowing what lies beyond it.

Can a man disappear into his own private history? Can he renounce the world, and in doing so, spend the rest of his life in his own reality, his own private history of the world?

In Murnane’s stories the narrator uses fiction to broach his traumas: the humiliations of childhood, the fear of death, the feeling of being unloved, his unreachable dreams. The world is unfair and it can annihilate us. But fiction is a way out of these pains. It helps us navigate them, not by fixating on the content of an experience, but in offering us a chance to reshape the mental landscape our thoughts and feelings inhabit.

Place, not time, is the organising principle in Murnane’s writing. This idea also pops up in The Plains: the filmmaker, having failed to grasp the essence of the plains, settles into a personal comprehension of it, based on his own irreducible connection to it.

Like the filmmaker, I sometimes found myself bewildered. It wasn’t until halfway through Stream System that something clicked. In a 550 page book, I wouldn’t fault anyone for stopping before that point.

Murnane can write. Certain passages prove that. But he doesn’t do flashy or pretty writing. He prefers the slow accumulation and repetition of specific images. His stories often end in one final re-assertion of the motif which ties it all together. In Emerald Blue, this is the same description of the dark blue trees and the pale green plains we’ve read for the last hundred pages, only now it is charged with loss and memory.

Thankfully, many of Murnane’s stories include lengthy reflections on writing and reading. Once you’ve read enough of them, you’ll have the methods you need to figure out what he is doing. Getting to that point can be challenging though.

Sometimes, as the narrator tells his story, you feel like you are on the cusp of a breakthrough. Yet, at the point where you think you understand his private revelations, the details tend to blur into the background just as quickly as they came into focus.

Stream System doesn’t impress you with exuberant or mellifluous writing, but grows in power as you reflect on its stories. What remains in your mind are those images which seem timeless in their own felt significance: the father chopping wood as a self-imposed penance; the boy scratching himself on gorse as he masturbates; the angelic body of his disabled aunt; and his uncle, stopping on the hillop to tune his radio just in time as a horse race is called more than a hundred miles away.

Read this review and others on my blog.

[Adam · Rating 3 out of 5]

I admire Murnane's ideas about life and fiction more than I do the style through which he conveys them. I understand the choice at a theoretical level (to persistently foreground the fact that one is reading only fiction, that the words are never to be conflated with real entities) but the device becomes wearisome after 500+ pages of discrete stories, most of which share a quasi-autobiographical bearing. The prose rarely strays from a clinical/technical tone, a kind of autopsy of the No-Survivors collision of life and literature. The longer stories--"Emerald Blue" and "Velvet Waters"--can be appreciated as novellas on their own, and it gives me hope that Murnane has achieved something greater in his standalone works.

[Aloke]

“For newcomers, the wide-ranging “Stream System” is the place to begin. Some of the stories assume more recognizable forms — for instance, the entire history of Australian colonialism becomes a concise, Borgesian parable about desire in “Land Deal.”

NYtimes https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/03/27...

[Nick Grammos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Land Deal reads like the foundational document for the settlement of Australia.

[Juliano Dutra · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

[Daniel KML · Rating 5 out of 5]

This review is not a piece of fiction, this review is not actually a review but just a collection of the passages that I believe that best summarize Murnane's approach to reading, writing and living.

I have only one minor suggestion for the reader interested in this specific Murnane's work: Stream System is a quite long collection of short stories with themes, reflections and narratives that overlap with each other - therefore I advise this same potential reader to read it slowly, taking the time to savor and digest each story, one at a time.


The theory behind the vow of silence is that talk—even serious, thoughtful talk or talk about writing itself—drains away the writer’s most precious resource, which is the belief that he or she is the solitary witness to an inexhaustible profusion of images from which might be read all the wisdom of the world.

In all the world there has never been, there is not, and there will never be any such thing as time. There is only place. What people call time is only place after place. Eternity is here already, and it has no mystery about it; eternity is just another name for this endless scenery where we wander from one place to another.

If, as I believed, those persons lived longest who had large or never-ending tasks to occupy them, then I was assured of a very long life. I could foresee no end to my task. For as long as I was alive, I would remember something at least from each of a small number of books. My life would have been one continuous experiment as to the worth of books. Of course, I would record in writing the results of the experiment.

. After I had become a writer of books, I was more wary of talking about books. I understood by then that each book I had written was not the book I had read in my mind before I had begun to write. I began to suspect that a book, and especially a book of fiction, is too complicated a thing to be talked about, except by a person talking to himself or herself. I began to suspect that a book, and especially a book of fiction, ought to be read in private and then put on the reader’s shelves for five or ten or twenty years, after which time the reader ought to stare at the spine of the book.

He had come to believe that he was made up mostly of images. He was aware only of images and feelings. The feelings connected him to the images and connected the images to one another. The connected images made up a vast network. He was never able to imagine this network as having a boundary in any direction. He called the network, for convenience, his mind.

I have never written any piece of fiction with the simple purpose of understanding what I might call the real world. I have always written fiction in order to suggest to myself that another world exists.

I have read many texts during my lifetime: many more texts than I have written. Whenever I have read any text, I have had in my mind an image of the personage who caused the text to come into existence: the implied author, as I call him or her. The ghostly outline of this personage has arisen in my mind as a result of my having read certain details in the text. While reading many a text, I have begun to mistrust and to dislike the implied author. As soon as I have begun to do this, I have stopped reading the text. While reading other texts, I have begun to like and to trust the implied author. When I have begun to do this, I have gone on reading and have sometimes felt so close to the implied author that I seem to have understood why he or she wrote the text that I was reading.

My father might be disappointed to learn that the place that matters most to me is a district of my mind rather than a district of the country where he and I were born, but he might be pleased to learn that I have often supposed that the place in my mind is grassy countryside with a few trees in the distance.

During that conversation, the man and I had agreed that the chief benefit to be got from the writing of a piece of fiction was that the writer of the fiction discovered at least once during the writing of the fiction a connection between two or more images that had been for long in his mind but had never seemed in any way connected.

You will believe me, niece, when I tell you that I learned, in time, that all the contents of all the books that I had read or would read were invisible. Whatever personages I had loved, or would love in the future, were forever hidden from me. Certainly, I saw as I read. But what I saw came only from my poor stock of remembered sights. And what I saw was only a scrap of what I believed I saw.

I have come to hope, dear niece, that the act of writing may be a sort of miracle as a result of which invisible entities are made aware of each other through the medium of the visible.

On a day long ago, when I was somewhat cast down from thinking of these matters, I wrote my first letter to you, dear niece. I sought a way out of my isolation by means of the following, admittedly simplistic, proposition: if the act of writing can bring into being personages previously unimagined by either writer or reader, then I might dare to hope for some wholly unexpected outcome from my own writing, although it could never be part of any book.

[Sini · Rating 4 out of 5]

Inmiddels heb ik aardig wat gelezen van de merkwaardige Australiër Gerald Murnane. In 2018 genoot ik uitbundig van "The plains" (volgens velen zijn meesterwerk) en las ik ook "Landscape with landscape" met plezier. En de laatste weken genoot ik hevig van "Barley Patch" en "Border Districts", en las ik "A history of books" met genoegen. Meteen daarna las ik ook zijn verzamelde korte werk. Voor veel mensen zullen Murnanes verhalen te saai zijn: er is geen plot, er is nauwelijks dialoog, en de taal is vaak wonderlijk abstract en afstandelijk. Bovendien draait elk verhaal alleen om een verwonderde blik naar binnen, die dan leidt tot associatieve mijmeringen en beschouwingen over de ongrijpbare beelden in het eigen hoofd. Al die verhalen mijmeren ook nog eens op dezelfde wijze, zodat ze qua toon, stijl en thematiek erg op elkaar lijken. en ook erg lijken op de romans die ik boven noemde. En toch verveelde ik mij bepaald niet.

In een van de verhalen, "Stone Quarry", wordt met instemming een uitspraak van Kafka aangehaald: "I hate everything that does not relate to literature, conversations bore me (even when they relate to literature), to visit people bores me, the joys and sorrows of my relatives bore me to my soul. Conversation takes the importance, the truth, out of everything I think". Dat citaat laat voor mij mooi de gepassioneerde inzet zien van Murnane: in alledaagse taal beroeren we alleen het oppervlak der dingen, terwijl de radicale blik naar binnen juist de diepten peilt, de raadselachtige resonanties van dingen en landschappen en personen in ons innerlijk. En die laten zich alleen maar via fictie benaderen, niet via de taal van de feitelijkheid. In "Stone Quarry" wordt dan ook verlangend gesproken over "the deep sources of fiction"., en over "the writer's most precious resource, which is the belief that he or she is the solitary witness to an inexhaustible profusion of images from which might be read all the wisdom of the world". Het menselijk brein, zo mijmert de verteller in een ander verhaal, is een enorme reeks kloostercellen met in elke cel een studerende monnik. En ook die monnik heeft zich helemaal over aan beelden en dromen: "a monk in his cell might spend a year reading a certain book or copying and embelleshing a certain manuscript and thinking of it for the rest of his life as an enormous pattern of rainbow pages of capital letters like the streets of other monasteries inviting him to dream about their cells of books and manuscripts". Dus elke monnik in elke kloostercel symboliseert voor de ik- figuur een veelheid van veelkleurige dromen, en denkend aan zijn eigen brein ziet de ik- figuur een eindeloze hoeveelheid van zulke kloostercellen en monniken...…

In alle verhalen peilt Murnane de raadselachtig vreemde rijkdom van beelden. En die beelden zijn niet op een of andere wijze grijpbaar aanwezig in de geest, maar ZIJN de geest. Wat mooi naar voren komt in de volgende passage: "In his fifties, he could have said no more than that an endless series of images of water- filled ruts beside country roads existed in a part of himself. He had come to believe that he was made up mostly of images. He was aware only of images and feelings. The feelings connected him to the images and connected the images to one another. The connected images made up a vast network. He was never able to imagine this network as having a boundary in any direction. He called the network, for convenience, his mind". De geest als een oneindig netwerk van raadselachtige beelden..... Het brein als oneindige reeks van kloostercellen met studerende en dromende monniken...… Zo kijkt Murnane aan tegen onze geest, ons ik, onze even spontane als ontembare verbeeldingskracht die ons helemaal doordesemt van raadselachtige beelden. Wat we in het leven van alledag meestal niet merken, maar wel als we, zoals Murnanes personages, ons met radicale aandacht en ontvankelijkheid open stellen voor de vreemde beelden in ons hoofd.

Die beelden worden in Murnanes verhalen bovendien niet bewust verzonnen, maar ontstaan als het ware buiten de wil van de personages om. Zoals ook dromen ons verrassen en overvallen buiten onze actieve wil om. Actieve controle over die beelden en dromen heb je niet: je kunt er alleen aandachtig en gefascineerd naar staren, zonder ze ooit te bevatten. In een mooi essay over Murnanes romans en verhalen (opgenomen in "Late essays") zegt Coetzee dan ook: "If there is some guiding, shaping force behind the fictions of the mind, it can barely be called a force: its essence seems to be a watchful passivity". En in Murnanes verhalen volgen we hoe de personages zich vol "watchful passivity" verbazen over hun dromen en beelden. Over hoe de blauwe kleur op een landkaart onwillekeurig allerlei associaties in beweging zet, ook door de contrasten van die blauwe kleur met de feitelijke kleuren van het water dat afgebeeld wordt. Over "female presences" die als vage zinnebeelden in iemands fantasie bestaan, en die op vreemde wijze invloed hebben op hoe die persoon zijn liefdes beleeft en herinnert. Wat liefdes en erotische dromen in beweging zet die nog zinnebeeldiger zijn en nog ongrijpbaarder dan bij Vestdijk of Proust. Over hele werelden in onbekende en onbenoembare kleuren die opstijgen uit een postzegel en het raadselachtige woord "Helvetia". Zodat het gedroomde Helvetia een wereld aan gene zijde van de wereld wordt, waarin de kleuren en landschappen uit de kindertijd op raadselachtige wijze en in getransformeerde vorm terugkeren.

Als brave burgerman heb ik niet de "watchful passivity" die Murnanes personages hebben, en heb ik veel minder aandacht dan zij voor de raadselachtige beelden en dromen in mijn hoofd. Maar tijdens het lezen van Murnane was dat voor even anders. En daarom had ik ook met deze verzamelde verhalen van hem weer plezier.

[Stephen Haines · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is more like a 3.5 star review. (I really wish that was an option in this case.) I'm tempted to round it up to a 4, but that would be dishonest on my part.

By the end of this collection, I was ready to be done with Gerald Murnane, so I can't claim that I enjoyed this tome from cover to cover. But there were many, many moments in here where I understood what all the praise is about when it comes to this author. And I am very glad that I gave it a chance.

I haven't read any novel by Murnane, just this book of collected short fiction, so I can't speak about him in that sense; but I can say that his style is certainly a distinct one, and that he is always intentioned with what he puts on the page (even when it is incredibly repetitious, and you want to tear out your eyeballs). 80% of the time, you come to the conclusion of these stories, let out a sigh, and think: wow, that was really beautiful, actually. Simple things built atop the other one after the other feels like a slowly spinning web; surreal narratives that are biographical and yet still fiction; adventures occur in the mind as well as through nameless characters in places through decades of time, and suddenly I'm reminded of Borges more than Hemingway.

The issue I guess is that sometimes it's difficult to get to the end without becoming a bit frustrated. This is not flowery prose most of the time. Murnane writes with simple, direct sentences the vast majority of the time, and builds on them with other simple, direct sentences (and then other, simple, direct sentences); he's not out to impress anyone with his vocabulary, and he seems uninterested (mostly) in wowing with a sentence. Even in the shorter pieces, it's all about the piece as a whole, and it takes the length of the piece to realize the genius of it.

All that being said, this repetitious style does not necessarily lend itself (IMO) to length. The longer pieces of fiction contained in this work are at times a slog to get through, and by the time you reach the end, you kind of just don't care anymore about what is being said. However, in the shorter pieces, this style shines brilliantly (like in Stone Quarry, Stream System, There Were Some Countries, First Love, etc). Basically, as soon as a story of Murnane's passes the 25 page limit, beware. Anything up to that and below in the collection is excellent, and a unique experience to read.

In a pure, honest sense, I just don't like Murnane's technical style all that much. This is not the sort of writing that blows my skirt up sentence to sentence, even though I often enjoy the end product. This is a complete preference, and does not reflect on the probable genius of this writer.

[Tyrone_Slothrop (ex-MB) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Visioni e ossessioni dal Bush



Non è sicuramente un autore consigliabile al "lettore quadratico medio" odierno, Murnane - sembra anzi che quasi punti a rendersi ostico, sfuggente, pesante e ad allontanare dalle sue pagine chi intende la letteratura come intrattenimento, relax, coinvolgimento fatto di plot appassionanti, scrittura scorrevole, leggibilità e comprensibilità.
Quindi, voi che leggete "per piacere", lasciate perdere questo scrittore australiano e dedicatevi ad altro - non credo ci sia scarsità di offerta al giorno d'oggi.

Ciò che scarseggia negli scrittori contemporanei è invece l'originalità espressiva ed una poetica personale - e Murnane invece è autore unico ed inconfondibile. E' però necessario tempo ed impegno al primo incontro: lo stile di scrittura è ossessivo e ridondante, l'assenza di punti di riferimento e il disinteresse per la "leggibilità" richiedono al lettore di sforzarsi per cogliere le capacità creative e l'espressività dell'autore (sì, sono convinto che è il lettore che deve fare lo sforzo per andare incontro allo scrittore e non il contrario).
La scrittura è infatti piena di ripetizioni e di strani pensieri quasi ossessivi che confondono e disturbano - altro elemento stilistico che contribuisce ad una sorta di "alienazione del lettore" è l'assenza di nomi propri, con i vari personaggi identificati con strane locuzioni continuamente ripetute: uno zio viene chiamato "l'uomo", lo stesso protagonista voce narrante in alcuni racconti diviene "l'uomo menzionato nel paragrafo precedente".
Si viene così a creare un'atmosfera straniante che molto ricorda lo stile di Thomas Bernhard. E l'altro nome direttamente citato da Murnane è quello di James Joyce (e questo dovrebbe far capire già molto): siamo dunque di fronte ad una scrittura concepita come creazione di finzioni e di mescolamenti di piani narrativi dove tutto è invenzione e visione (e nulla reale)

una copia dell’Ulisse di James Joyce. Dopo aver letto quel libro decisi di diventare un autore di narrativa.

Le motivazioni artistiche di Murnane sono sempre chiaramente espresse: una delle tematiche fondamentali di questi racconti è infatti la sua idea di letteratura. La scrittura come costruzione di immagini necessariamente finte, come creazione dal nulla di personaggi, eventi, visioni che mai sono esistite e mai esisteranno tranne che nella mente dello scrittore (e del lettore). C'è quindi anche un pensiero filosofico finissimo in Murnane quando ci dice che nella scrittura nulla esiste se non la mente dello scrittore, anche il lettore stesso è creazione mentale di colui che scrive (e, specularmente, ci vuole poco per concludere che, per noi che leggiamo, anche l'autore stesso è creazione della nostra mente).

il mio sospettoso lettore, come tutti i miei lettori, è solo una persona che ho creato stamattina in veranda

non sarà necessario ricordare a chi legge che l’uomo menzionato in quella frase e in quelle ancora prima è il personaggio di un’opera di finzione

So che questi miei pensieri sono, per certi versi, falsi. Ma mi fido lo stesso di quei pensieri, perché sono sicuro che è il mio cervello ad aiutarmi a pensare

un uomo che può amare solo persone che sono argomento di frasi di testi che pretendono di essere altro dalla realtà.

ecco quindi che le chiavi della scrittura di Murnane, che diviene quasi una litania ossessiva, vanno trovate in questa poetica, che risuona continuamente in tutte le pagine, declinata in varie espressioni che possono essere tutte racchiuse nel concetto di vedere nella mente e sentire nella testa. Il centro di tutto lo scrivere sono quindi non "le storie", ma le immagini mentali .

La sua vita interiore, se così si può chiamare, è un continuo vagare in un labirinto le cui pareti sono immagini dei posti dove non è mai andato.

Mi rendevo conto di quelle cose come mi rendo conto di molte cose che ho poi la sensazione di aver visto o udito in sogno.

Ogni sequenza d’immagini mi appariva come sullo schermo di un cinema nella mia mente, ma mentre guardavo le immagini mi sembrava anche di scrivere nella mia mente certi passaggi di un libro

Per me i personaggi delle storie, compresa la storia di cui questa frase fa parte, si trovano nel luogo invisibile che spesso chiamo la mia mente.

considerava la lettura un viaggio. Aveva detto che i libri migliori lo facevano sentire come se stesse esplorando le terre di confine del paesaggio della conoscenza

l’unico argomento di cui poteva scrivere era la sua mente: e in una maniera tale per cui l’unico luogo in cui le sue opere potevano essere considerate adatte alla pubblicazione era l’Helvetia.

Quello che viene solitamente chiamato il mondo mi ha sempre interessato, ma solo nella misura in cui mi fornisce prove dell’esistenza di un qualcosa per ribadire a me stesso che forse dietro il mondo che l’opera lasciava intravedere se ne poteva intravedere un altro,

Ma, incredibilmente, il materiale con cui Murnane crea questa letteratura quasi "astratta" è molto concreto e vitale - la terra della provincia di Victoria, i suoi familiari e conoscenti, la sua stessa biografia diviene l'argilla che viene manipolata e deformata per creare le sue immagini mentali. Non per narrare eventi biografici, ma per esplorarne i significati profondi e reconditi.

posso anche assicurare all’uno e all’altra che il prossimo paragrafo e molti di quelli a venire non presentano la narrazione di dati eventi ma un compendio del significato di quegli eventi e di altri ancora

Uno scrittore unico e particolarissimo, quindi, completamente alieno alla "produzione letteraria" odierna, che chiede molto al lettore, ma che dà sempre qualcosa di introvabile in altri libri - ed è confortante scoprire che anche dall'altra parte del mondo esistono ancora gli "autori".


Certo, vedevo mentre leggevo

[Paul H. · Rating 3 out of 5]

He has talent and a relatively unique style (basically = an Australian Beckett with the autism turned up to 11), but I’m just not seeing greatness here.

[Patrick Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

'Clarrie Long's jacket and the jackets of the five other drivers are the first racing colours I have seen, but I know already that I am going to study racing colours for the rest of my life. I will still stare at skies and lilac bushes, but only to help me understand racing colours.'

'From that time onwards also, the man was anxious to find a group of people among whom he could behave as the narrator of On the Road behaved among his friends.'

I would have to reserve a five star rating for the poetic tightness of Murnane's The Plains, which was where I caught the bug, but copious are the wild ideas, tender admissions and slow burns in this one. Perhaps it rewards dipping into, rather than blitzing through like I just have. There are a few novellas in here which need the slow attention more often reserved for novels.

There is a temptation to read quickly because the narrators (or sometimes it thirds out to a main character) and their interests are repetitive, and yet the limited nature of Murnane's focus is also what makes him exciting and different. We're often a writer who used to teach writing, and who at another time worked a boring job, or some slightly differing shade of that, and we're exploring why pieces of imagery have captured the imagination or lingered in the memory throughout life. There's quiet Catholic childhoods, teenage sexual confusion, work and family early in adult life, and then the squeeze of writerly awakening usually a bit later. That emphasis on older people having artistic revelations in some of the stories felt particularly refreshing, even validating to this 30+ reader.

What I most loved was the presentation of writing and reading which sucked the mystique out of both. Here, within the worlds of the stories, we have references to books liked and barely remembered, books judged on the basis of an imagined horse race between the letters, writing done to understand why you can't stop thinking about a particular thing or why you relate two things to each other, and once that connection's made the story's over. Stories never read if the title has even one noun in it that refers to something which is not an object or person.

The plainness of the landscapes the characters look out at captures a certain kind of rural/suburban stimulus-dearth many will relate to, if you're from somewhere like that. These broad strokes of sky and bush also contribute to the Rothko-like effect brought about by these panes of text (the paragraphs are long) which elucidate thoughts that would ordinarily seem simple, or to be a given.

The Peter Jefferies album 'The Last Great Challenge in a Dull World' was a good pairing for reasons that are probably hokey and lame really (GM - Aus, PJ - NZ), but alternating between listens to that and dips into this on a long train journey through East Anglia recently seemed to take each experience a bit further out.

My three favourite stories were 'When the Mice Failed to Arrive', 'Velvet Waters' and 'The White Cattle of Uppington'.

[Sanjay Varma · Rating 4 out of 5]

In pursuit of the latest literary trend, I picked up my first Murnane book and read a few stories. His authorial voice reminds me of Borges, but also Neil Stephenson's novel "Anathem" and WG Sebald's "Vertigo." The striking quality in this voice is the sincerity of the characters when describe their interpretation of events and revealing the broader cultural epistemology that shapes their understanding.

If you want a taste of Murnane's writing, read this two page story Land Deal posted online. It describes the way that a band of aborigines interpret their encounter with white settlers who arrange to purchase land.

[Michelle Hogmire · Rating 3 out of 5]

Can't believe I'm saying this, because I absolutely adore The Plains, but this collection was quite a slog for me overall. Most stories boil down to: lonely man/boy is sad/angry that he can't get woman/girl (read: object) to fuck him, so he masturbates in the woods/a shed/etc. Not for me, thanks.

[George Bachman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Superb metafiction that, unlike some, gives all the pleasures of traditional fiction while never failing to remind you that you are looking over the author's shoulder as he is writing. A good introduction to Murnane if you have not dived into The Plains for some reason. Excellent. Go, read.

[David Rice · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nothing short of life-changing. Among the top 10 greatest books I've ever read.

[Adrian Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

These stories by Gerald Murnane, a most singular writer, are mesmerising. The recursive style, using repetition and motifs which continually fold back on themselves, generate a form of dream-like reflection on each storyteller's past. The tales weave together highly specific memories in a way that surely mimics the manner of the mind's rumination. And yet if the stories at times seem to have a shaggy dog rambling quality, they are of course constructed with those memories and motifs skilfully knitted into a narrative. Murnane is rooted in place - usually a relatively small area of the state of Victoria (including , by the by, the area in which the recent mushroom murders occurred), a region which provides him with recurrent images that crop up in the stories- often a scene of flatland of blue grass with mountains in the distance. If you want neat, quirky, New Yorker style writing of urban life, Murnane is not your man. These are stories which require a commitment to read, not least to follow convoluted but rewarding sentences which roll back into themselves as they search for a resolving clause or final verb. The joy here is definitely in the sentences. Echoes of Beckett's fiction perhaps, or Thomas Bernard and WG Sebald,but in the end I see Murnane as a writer who goes his own way, who writes to please himself, where the form entirely suits the function and where, I would also note, there is great humour as he deploys his repetition and recursiveness to witty effect, teasing us with his long sentences that arrive at a pay-off that we crave.

[Adam Krasnoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful reading experience. Did it slowly over nearly a month, fitting in a story when I could. It’s 11:31 and I’m not going to write an essay here. Several of the stories, though, are masterpieces: “The Interior of Gaaldine,” “Finger Web,” “The Boy’s Name Was David.”

Like reading Borges, after four or five stories it’s easy to feel you ‘get’ Murnane. You don’t.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Collected Short Fiction offers an entrée to Gerald Murnane's fiction for the newbie. I've been reading his books for years now, and am a confirmed enthusiast only too delighted by his more recent prominence both here in Australia and overseas. But I'm no closer to 'understanding' Murnane, only more comfortable with the effect his writing has on me.

(This is what I wrote in a comment on my post about The Plains, back in 2009 when I was reading Inland:

I keep going backwards and forwards and re-reading…and then spinning off with thoughts and ideas of my own that seem to be couched in his kind of circular sentences, as if he has colonised my mind. It is a bizarre experience to read something like this, floundering around trying to work out what’s happening even though it seems unlikely that anything is actually happening.

These days I don't flounder, I surf along whatever wave I can catch. And yes, it's exhilarating.)

The blurb for Collected Short Fiction has this to say:

This volume brings together Gerald Murnane’s shorter works of fiction, most of which have been out of print for the past twenty five years. They include such masterpieces as ‘When the Mice Failed to Arrive’, ‘Stream System’, ‘First Love’, ‘Emerald Blue’, and ‘The Interior of Gaaldine’, a story which holds the key to the long break in Murnane’s career, and points the way towards his later works, from Barley Patch to Border Districts. Much is made of Murnane’s distinctive and elaborate style as a writer, but there is no one to match him in his sensitive portraits of family members – parents, uncles and aunts, and particularly children – and in his probing of situations which contain anxiety and embarrassment, shame or delight.

When the Mice Failed to Arrive' was originally published in the Autumn 1989 edition of a periodical called 'Sport' and then in Velvet Waters (McPhee Gribble 1990). The excruciating depiction of the narrator's childhood anxiety spills into what seems to be a deeply personal account of parental failings and guilty memories from a teaching career. And it's true: even if you're Gerald Murnane and perhaps not temperamentally suited to teaching, it's a career that's like parenthood, it's filled with guilt about the times you failed to meet a need, or weren't prepared, or you lost your temper, or let a child down when they needed you most. Those times do haunt teachers who care...

Guilt also seeps into 'Stream System' which was first published in The Age Monthly Review 8, no 9, December 1988-January 1989:

When my brother first went to school I used to hide from him in the schoolground. I did not want my brother to speak to me in his strange speech. I did not want my friends to hear my brother and then ask me why he spoke strangely. During the rest of my childhood and until I left my parents' house, I tried never to be seen with my brother, If I could not avoid travelling on the same train with my brother I would order him to sit in a different compartment from mine. If I could not avoid walking in the street with my brother I would order him not to look in my direction and not to speak to me.

When my brother first went to school my mother said that he was no different from any other boy but in later years my mother would admit that my brother was a little backward.

My brother died when he was forty-three years old and I was forty-six. My brother never married. Many people came to my brother's funeral, but none of those people had ever been a friend to my brother. I was certainly never a friend to my brother. On the day before my brother died I understood for the first time that no one had ever been a friend to my brother. (p.39)

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/02/10/c...

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you have never read Murnane before I would suggest looking elsewhere for your first taste of this unique and unusual writer. This is not a bad book, far from it, but it is very long and a little Murnane goes a long way and should be given its space. If you have never read Murnane and are wondering if he's for you can I offer up two sentences selected without much thought from one of the pieces of short fiction contained in this volume:

If this piece of fiction were a more conventional narrative, the reader might be told at this point that the parenthetical passage that began in the fifteenth paragraph before this paragraph has now come to an end and that I, the narrator, am about to continue narrating the events of the Sunday when the chief character of this piece of fiction was walking with his father after having seen an hour beforehand at the Farm a pale and plumpish young man who was the first of the settlers at Outlands that the chief character had seen. Instead, the reader is hereby assured that nothing of significance took place during the rest of the Sunday just mentioned, and the same reader is further assured that the next paragraph and many subsequent paragraphs will contain not a narrative of certain events but a summary of the significance of those events and of much more.

As you can see there is a precision to the writing. One might've wondered if Murnane had been engaged in the legal profession at some time in his life but, no, that's not the case although I have no doubt he would've been well-suited to work of that ilk. If you've had to read any legal documents in your life, a contract most likely, you know as well as me that after a paragraph or two it becomes increasingly hard to hold what you've read in your read. Murnane's work gets around this by frequently reminding us of who's talking, where they are, where they've been and so on and so forth. To my mind he overdoes it but if there's one thing I can say about him is that you really only need read a sentence of two of any piece of writing by him and you know you're reading Murnane.

Over eleven years I've read 7 books by Murnane before this one: The Plains [3 stars] , Inland [4 stars] , Tamarisk Row [4 stars], Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs [4 stars], A History of Books [5 stars], A Million Windows [5 stars] and Landscape with Landscape [4 stars]. I expect to read the remaining six books before I die; I expect to have time for that. That says something.

It took me a long time to get through this book. A story a day is quite enough in fact I half-regret not reading another book and alternating authors. Something to bear in mind if you do decide to have a crack at this one.

I do recommend you read something by him. Like, say, Anita Brookner (I've also read eight books by her), he's a bit of a one-trick pony but, as with Brookner, he's mastered that trick and some.

If you're swithering after reading the above let me leave you with another few sentences that really embody this author:

In all the world there has never been, there is not, and there will never be any such thing as time. There is only place. What people call time is only place after place. Eternity is here already, and it has no mystery about it; eternity is just another name for this endless scenery where we wander from one place to another.[…] My world has no forward and no back, only a place here and a million million other places near or further away.

[Marc · Rating 3 out of 5]

(true rating 3.5) “In all the world there has never been, there is not, and there will never be any such thing as time. There is only place. What people call time is only place after place. Eternity is here already, and it has no mystery about it; eternity is just another name for this endless scenery where we wander from one place to another.” For better or worse, Murnane is writer like none else. A narrative, a fiction, a novel is an elaborate thing, a delicate thing - a construct, like a timepiece. It has function and purpose, internal pieces keeping it moving in order to perform its function and purpose. Murmane is a tinker - he not so much wishes to make or construct the narrative timepiece of his own, per se, but rather open the chrome underbelly of the narrative timepiece and pry out the gears and springs and batteries, the numbers and hands, remove them, look at them, and present them as they are, whole and complete, neither a part of something nor something in and of themselves. This is a fine art that can be failed as many times as it is achieved. A process repeated in sequence in order to produce a perfect form that will never be. There is futility here and beauty. And genius.