Border Districts: A Fiction

by Gerald Murnane

A bittersweet farewell to the world and the word by the Australian master

“The mind is a place best viewed from borderlands . . .”

Border Districts , purportedly the Australian master Gerald Murnane’s final work of fiction, is a hypnotic, precise, and self-lacerating “report” on a life led as an avid reader, fumbling lover, “student of mental imagery,” and devout believer―but a believer not in the commonplaces of religion, but rather in the luminescence of memory and its handmaiden, literature.

In Border Districts , a man moves from a capital city to a remote town in the border country, where he intends to spend the last years of his life. It is time, he thinks, to review the spoils of a lifetime of seeing, a lifetime of reading. Which sights, which people, which books, fictional characters, turns of phrase, and lines of verse will survive into the twilight? A dark-haired woman with a wistful expression? An ancestral house in the grasslands? The colors in translucent panes of glass, in marbles and goldfish and racing silks? Feeling an increasing urgency to put his mental landscape in order, the man sets to work cataloging this treasure, little knowing where his “report” will lead and what secrets will be brought to light.

Border Districts is a jewel of a farewell from one of the greatest living writers of English prose.

Genres: Fiction, Australia, Novels, Literary Fiction, 21st Century, Literature, Religion

144 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2017

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

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

The inner world… An anonymous narrator is synonymous with the author…
Living on a borderline… Marginal existence… Seclusion… Loneliness…

I moved to this district near the border so that I could spend most of my time alone and so that I could live according to several rules that I had for long wanted to live by.

Recollections… Memories… Mementos… Books… Religion… Crisis of faith… Broken beliefs…

I got some of my schooling from a certain order of religious brothers, a band of men who dressed each in a black soutane with a bib of white celluloid at his throat. I learned by chance last year, and fifty years since I last saw anyone wearing such a thing, that the white bib was called a rabat and was a symbol of chastity.

Meditations… Thoughts… Contemplations on the way of the world… Shards of stained glass…

…men travelled throughout England during the years of the Commonwealth smashing stained-glass windows. The men stood on ladders and used staves or axes to smash the glass. They reported in their diaries the names of each church that they visited and the numbers of windows that they smashed. They declared often in the diaries that they were doing the work of the Lord or promoting his glory.

Those who create and those who destroy what was created do it in the name of God.

[Fionnuala]

One of the curious things I've noticed while making my way through the set of mental landscapes in Gerald Murnane's various works is the tendency of the pieces to merge in my mind so that they become one long book set in one continuous landscape, a landscape I've taken to calling Murnania, and which now belongs in my own set of mental landscapes.

Take the book I'm reviewing here for instance. Border Districts is set far away from the landscapes of most of his other books but I've just been looking at what Murnane says about it in his final book of essays, Last Letter to a Reader: he thinks that the idea for Border Districts (which is his final fiction) may have come to him after a dream about stained glass.

In the previous Murnane book I read, Barley Patch, I thought I discerned so many images of stained or colored glass that I centered my review entirely around those images. But the thing is, I was already reading Border Districts while I was writing the review of Barley Patch which makes me wonder if I was thinking more about what I was currently reading than what I was trying to review.

I say that because now that I'm trying to write my thoughts on Border Districts, and even though I know it's set near the border of the the states of New South Wales and South Australia and features an elderly main character who has just moved there, I keep thinking of the title and the content as referring instead to Tamarisk Row, which is Murnane's first novel, set near Melbourne, and which I'm currently reading.

In particular, I keep thinking of the mini-farmstead that the child character in Tamarisk Row traces in the dusty backyard of his parents' house just where it borders their neighbour's yard. The mini-farmstead is constructed using bits of wood and a collection of pebbles, but even so it features a two story dwelling, paddocks for horses, and a long approach through the surrounding 'plains'. That description of the child's mini-world resembles the landscapes described in many of Gerald Murnane's later fictions which makes it a kind of key for me, not only to Border Districts (full of large farmsteads which border another state) but also to many other of his works including his most famous one, The Plains, and especially to Barley Patch which I mentioned earlier.

Because in Barley Patch, you see, there is only one tiny reference to the barley patch of the title, and a reader might easily miss it. But that reference is significant to what I'm trying to work out here. The reference occurs when the narrator recalls a house he lived in as a child and how the yard had a row of Tamarisk trees along the border with the neighbour's yard just where his child-self had created a mini-farmstead, and that on the other side of that border was a patch of barley (the neighbour grew barley to feed his poultry) which the pretend people from the mini-farmstead would like to have investigated—just as the elderly protagonist of Border Districts dreams of investigating the area across the border with South Australia.

And a further significant detail about the mini-farmstead in the mini-border district as described in Tamarisk Row is that it has a mini-racecourse attached to it and that the child character stages a series of pretend horse-races in such detail that he knows the names of each horse and the exact colours of the silks each jockey wears. I mention that because horse-racing and jockeys' colours are such a recurring theme in many other of Murnane's essays and fictions, but especially in Border Districts.

So what I'm seeing now, as I read my final Murnane fiction plus his final essay side by side, is that all of his writing contains themes that may be traced back to the pretend world of the six-year-old main character of his very first fiction. And furthermore, that the pretend world may itself be the detailed map of the merged landscape this reader has filed away in her mind as the country called Murnania.

[Justin Evans · Rating 5 out of 5]

Studies show (I'm being serious) that books that win big prizes sell far more copies after winning the prize, and also see a major dent in their critical reception, because people who would not otherwise be interested in the book start to read it and review on, e.g., goodreads. I've started to take account of this for myself, and I now try to avoid reading prize-winning books, even if everyone else is reading them, unless I know that I care about what the author is doing. I bring this up because this is quite literally Gerald Murnane's last book. It was very nice of FSG to publish this and his collected short fiction, and it was fun to see Murnane, of all people, in the pages of the New York Times, but it also means that more than a few people who have no interested in what Murnane is doing have read this book (of all the places to start!) and are now apparently complaining about how the writing is nice but it's 'stream of consciousness' and the narrator is easily distracted and why is he writing about light and stained glass, anyway?

Two things to note: this is not stream of consciousness, it's just essayistic, first person narration. You can see that, because stream of consciousness doesn't use first person pronouns very much, and Murnane uses them all the time. SoC is meant to mimic the thoughts that flow through our heads; Murnane is reconstructing and writing, not trying to trick you into thinking you have direct access to his feelings. Stained glass is important because it is very common in churches (you don't say? But the key part is that you can't see stained glass from outside the church) and in early 20th century Australian homes (which are now thought of as wonderful little gems of this-worldly taste), and this is a book about being old and dying, and wondering what heaven might look like--although, of course, you can't see heaven from the outside.

If that doesn't sound interesting to you, I recommend you not read the book. You'll be missing the final piece in one of the great literary careers of your lifetime--Murnane has expanded the Proustian vein of modernism in astonishing ways; his prose is unique and fascinating; his thinking is charming and odd and capacious. But for god's sake, please do not read it and then complain about it, loudly, online, because you don't care about or are not interested in what he's doing. Instead, start with one of his earlier books, and then come to this one a bit later.

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shortly after I finished my undergraduate degree, I watched a short film made about Gerald Murnane. Having studied in his ‘Innovations in Fiction Writing’ course at Victoria College (at least, I think it must have been called that, as I think most of the courses in the Professional Writing and Editing strand in my degree started with the words ‘innovations in’) I was keen to watch this film about him.

I can’t remember if I went to see the film at a cinema with my ex-wife or if it was perhaps shown on the ABC late one night. In fact, now that I think about it, I may have even seen it twice, a couple of years apart. All this was a lifetime ago - the lifetime of my oldest daughter who was born in the last year I ever saw Gerald Murnane. It was the year I walked across the stage to receive my degree while Gerald sat in his regalia on the stage. While I was waiting in the queue by the stage for my name to be called, I caught Gerald’s eye and we exchanged a smile.

Except none of that is what I need to say. What I wanted to say was that in the film I watched all those years ago Gerald said that to write one of his books, the book called Tamarisk Row, he had to draw up a kind of map of the text. They showed that map in the film. It was drawn on what looked like a sheet of fullscape paper and consisted for a grid pattern that had tiny coloured drawings inside each square. Or at least, that is my memory of the page, which I guess I have only seen twice in 28 years and the last time over 20 years ago.

After reading this book I could easily be convinced that the sheet of paper that mapped Tamarisk Row did not have multiple little drawings, arranged as a kind of storyboard you might used in constructing a film, but rather that it may well have had, say, 20 or 30 squares each containing non-representational shapes and particularly colours, or perhaps various mixtures of colours showing especially boundaries marked between distinct colours.

This is a book where the narrator, which I take to be a version of Gerald Murnane, is trying to explain not merely how he believes his own memory works, but also the relation his memory holds to his emotional responses as they are caused by his memories which are, in turn triggered by seeing various hues and then variations in light and colour.

If I had been writing this book, I would have needed to have used the word synesthesia at least once, as I think this is nearly what is happening here. We are begin presented by a kind of emotional synethesia of the memory world of the author. In his world, emotions have their own hue and the narrator has spent his lifetime believing that if somehow he could capture that hue or the tone of light associated with a particular memory, then the emotional power of that experience would return to him in full force. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, this is especially true of memories linked, in various ways, to the experience of light he remembers that has passed through pieces of coloured glass at various times in his life, although, one should beware of the absolute literal in works of fiction.

The overwhelming power that we experience where memories flood back to us seems, to me at least, more likely to be induced by our sense of smell than of sight.

Reading Murnane, I find, is always an odd experience. Having known him and not really known him makes reading his work strange. For instance, in this book he discusses a lecturer and writer who had also taught me at Victoria College - oddly enough, one I mentioned recent in another review only a month or so ago. Prior to writing that review I had not thought of John Hanrahan for most of the quarter century since he taught me innovations in literary criticism in my undergraduate degree. John does not come out of this book particularly well - and since I’ve never read any of John’s fiction, I have to take Gerald’s word for its weaknesses. Murnane’s point is that Hanrahan wrote two kinds of fiction: either short fiction that was a bit cute - the story Murnane repeats in summary here has John as a young priest needing to urinate into a bottle of altar wine because he is too embarrassed to tell the woman showing him around the church that he needs to use the toilet - or that John wrote fiction that Murnane feels was basically a series of angry justifications (self-righteous justifications) setting out the reasons why he left the priesthood. Neither of these forms of fiction seem worthy for Murnane. Not least because they hide what fiction could rather be used to illuminate - that is, the images in the mind of a man who had fallen so much in love with their God that they at first dedicated themselves to the church, only to then have lost that love. What images might these have brought forth?

Murnane never allows you to ignore the fact you are reading something crafted. He demands you think back to the last paragraph, or to a paragraph many pages before, where he had introduced a theme he now needs to return to. I remember him saying in class that one of the things he particularly liked to happen in a work of fiction was for the writer to be telling the reader a certain story and, in the middle of telling it, the writer discovers they have an overwhelming need to explain something else, to relate a kind of side story, something that can not wait and so need to be interposed within the narrative of the current story.

In a sense, this book is an exercise in precisely that. On one level this is a book about the thoughts and feelings experienced by a writer as he sees light passing through the stain glass windows of a church he has never entered as he walks past it in the new town he currently lives in and expects to die in. This frames the narrative, although the second time this church is mentioned is about 100 pages after the first time - a significant digression, then, composed of the vast majority of the work.

This interest in the effect of light passing through glass might not seem enough to hold the interest of a reader through an entire work of fiction - however, it leads to a remarkable series of reflections that unfold in intricate patterns and all of which are related to various aspects of Gerald Murnane’s obsessions: from coloured glass, to plains, horse racing, marbles and his highly personal theory of optics as a kind of life-metaphor. All of which have something interesting to say about the nature of memory as both a thing that happens to us and as something that we actively seek to recollect, reconstruct and reinterpret.

A few years after I finished studying professional writing at the university where Murnane taught, and while I still imagined I might one day become a writer of fiction, I had a dream and in that dream he encouraged me write a short story about the racetrack that is located in the adjacent suburb to the one where I’ve lived most of my life. The racetrack itself appears in various stories Murnane has written over the years. As a child, shortly after I arrived in Australia, my uncle rented in church house a few streets from the race course and where Murnane would have attended many race meetings over this time. In fact, it is not impossible that he may have walked up the very street my uncle lived in with his wife and four children while they were still living there.

As I said, the short story I wrote came to me in a dream. The house my uncle lived in was beside a laneway. That suburb has many laneways, whereas the suburb where I’ve spent most of my life has very few. That fact, and the very different street trees between the two suburbs make it immediately obvious which suburb you are in, almost as if a border had been drawn on a map. In the dream, I am playing in the garden of my uncle’s house with my cousin who is. closest in age to me, and who, like me, shares his own father’s name. While we were playing, Murnane put his head over the fence and said directly to me, ‘write about this house, write about the woman who died here’. I never have such vivid dreams, nor do I usually remember them in the morning. So, I wrote the story.

I’m not sure Murnane would have approved of it - from memory it contained a series of improbabilities he would have frowned upon, much as, I guess, I now would too where I to find and reread it. But the parts of the story I liked most were those where I sought to capture how I remembered that house. And more, to capture a kind of portrait of what I think of now as the jokey character of my uncle who, although I don’t remember him ever telling me what would have been called in my family a ghost story (which was the central theme of my short story), since writing the story it does seem something he might have done, even if he never actually did.

Like Murnane, I have not seen my uncle since that time, my daughter’s lifetime ago, even if I am less certain as to why that is the case. I assume there was some incident, a story that tore asunder our two families I’ve never been told.

One of the windows that the narrator of this work of fiction, that I take to be Gerald Murnane himself, can’t recall and yet seeks to within the pages of the pages of this book, are those from his old Catholic high school. I mentioned earlier that Murnane’s and my life have curious intercepts. Although, really these are intercepts for me, rather than for him - since such are the gifts a reader receives from a writer. One of those is that my eldest daughter, the daughter whose life counts the years since the last time I saw Murnane, now lives in a flat across the road from the high school Murnane attended and which mentions without naming in this work of fiction.

All of this makes it hard for me to recommend this book as I might recommend other books I read and enjoy. I can’t tell if my reading of this has been impacted by some of the things I feel I am able to see that other readers can not. And this is not terribly different from Murnane’s comment that the colours that illuminate past experiences and the emotions he associates with them, come as much from inside his own eyes (like lines of light emanating from him) as they do from the light as it shines upon the outside world and makes its way into his eyes.

A lot of this book self-consciously explains to the reader what might be called the ‘games’ of literary fiction that the narrator is playing - in much the same way that a magician might tell you how they are performing a trick as it unfolds before you. But one of the things I’ve always loved about fiction is the kind of pairing that occurs throughout works. I love when an image occurs at one point of a story, only to reappear later in a way that casts new light upon that first image, both presenting a slightly distorted vision of the original, but also subtly transforming our memory of the previous occurrence too - shifting it slightly sideways along the spectrum. So that, in this work of fiction, a writer who once lived on the other side of a hill from where another and now died writer had lived and who had influenced or affected her, might now live close to the writer of this work of fiction who is in turn influenced in curious ways now by her.

I used to write to Gerald Murnane - I used to enjoy the letters that he would write back very much.
But I became obsessed with educational sociology and started my PhD and then the time between his last letter and the window where a reasonable response from me might have been expected got so narrow, as if curtains were being drawn, that I was too embarrassed to write again. I read this novel almost as one of those letters. Part of me assumes that this is a book people may not enjoy, that people might think is a book in which nothing happens - and yet this is a book overflowing with things to think about and to consider, a book that is powerfully moving. It is incredibly rare for anyone to be quite as honest about their inner thoughts and feelings as Murnane is. He has spent a lifetime drawing connections between powerful images and he returns to them again and again, but always in ways that seem new. Over the years people have told me they dislike his clear and clean sentences, that they struggle with his talk of horse races or are bored by his little boys playing with marbles or of grown men searching for their ideal racing colours for the horses that will run upon their dream race courses - and while none of these are obsessions I share, I could read him telling me about them more or less forever.

[Marc Lamot · Rating 3 out of 5]

“In the beginning was the image.”
Just like in his best-known novel, the early The Plains (1982), this recent story (2017) by Gerald Murnane begins with the arrival of the protagonist in an (Australian) rural area. We do not get to know the precise location, and it turns out not to be really relevant, because it soon becomes clear that we must interpret 'Border Districts' primarily in a metaphorical sense. The narrator treats us to continuous observations and memories, an endless stream, both in the present and in the past. The man appears to be obsessed with the imaginary world, which even seems more real than the real one, and which is often evoked by reading books, by rays of light or by memories of earlier times. You can safely call this book a shorter variant of “A la recherche du temps”, and the sometimes widely drawn-out sentences also automatically remind you of Proust. Murnane has turned it into a meandering and increasingly complex network of imaginations, which is intriguing, but in which as a reader you eventually become completely lost. It seems as if reality has become completely imaginative, and perhaps that is exactly what Murnane intended.

[cycads and ferns · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Two months ago, when I first arrived in this township just short of the border, I resolved to guard my eyes….I do this so that I might be more alert to what appears at the edges of my range of vision; so that I might notice at once any sight so much in need of my inspection that one or more of its details seems to quiver or to be agitated until I have the illusion that I am being signalled to or winked at.”
An unnamed narrator moves from the city to a quiet township in an unnamed country. The man recalls that while a young boy he would read passages from the books on his father’s and mother’s nightstands. He read of fictional characters, wealthy young women and men, in fictional settings, in large houses with manicured lawns. As he read, one passage flowing into another, the boy became convinced he was reading a “never-ending book”.
“The remembering man remembered….”
The man remembers that when he was a boy he observed the colors and patterns of the panels of stained glass windows in churches and in private homes, the marbles in his collection, and the kaleidoscope he looked through. His memories from his childhood were so vivid that he remembers the hue of the colors from his colored pencil set and the name given to each color.
“…to read aloud one after another of the tiny printed names…to let each colour seem to soak into each word of its name or even into each syllable of each word of each name so that I could afterwards call to mind an exact shade or hue….Deep cadmium, geranium lake, imperial purple….”
Visiting a friend that he knew from his childhood, the narrator photographs the panels of stained glass in his friend’s home. Looking at the photographs later he perceives that the stained glass panels were more vibrant when he saw them in person.
“Ignorant as I am in the fields of optics and physics, I might have decided that no photographic film is quite so sensitive to light as is the human retina. I might simply have decided that I imagined rather than recalled the sight of the actual windows: that this was one more example of the unreliability of memory….when I decided that my seeing the panes of glass in the early morning had consisted of much more than my registering, as it were, certain shapes and colours; that a part of my seeing was my investing the glass with qualities not inherent in it qualities probably not apparent to any other observer and certainly not detectable by any sort of camera; that what I missed when I looked at the photographic prints was the meaning that I had previously read into the glass. And if I could give credence to such an eccentric theory, then I might as well go further and assert that I saw in the glass part of the private spectrum that my eyes diffused from my own light as it travelled outwards: a refraction of my own essence, perhaps.”

It took me about a month to finish this slim novel. I found it necessary to put it aside often because the text at times became overwhelming. I especially loved the passage where the narrator described the photograph of the author on the back of a George Gissing biography that he read years ago. In the author’s photograph, the narrator noticed a possible door in the distance and a light, the source unidentifiable. This novel was about memory and light or the memory of light. Therefore it serves as a record of perceptions, lived experiences, rather than facts. I wasn’t sure how to rate this book, possibly 4 stars since I enjoyed it less than Inland. I then realized that I would reread this book before any other 4 star book I had read this year. I remain, continuing in the glow of Murane’s light.

[Hugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gerald Murnane has been respected in Australian literary circles for years, but until recently his work had not been published in the UK for many years. This is his most recent book, and has been picked up by And Other Stories for UK publication along with the earlier Tamarisk Row.

The book is subtitled "A Fiction", but for most of the book it could easily be read as a factual examination of the author's memory and the way his subconscious associations work - indeed the narrator describes it as a report written for personal reasons, only conceiving an audience for it towards the end.

The narrator, like Murnane, has spent most of his entire life in the capital of an Australian state (Victoria and Melbourne for Murnane) and has moved to a small country town near the state border in semi-retirement. He is an atheist, but his thoughts are still largely shaped by his Roman Catholic education - the early parts of the book establish this, and later parts make connections between different memories, predominantly visual memories, and stained glass is a recurring motif, as is horse racing.

Towards the end the fictional element becomes stronger, as he imagines a sort of soul sister who shares much of his background and interests, and develops various possible paths she could have taken. He also imagines the life of an English writer who he has overheard on the radio talking about setting up a retreat for certain tightly controlled types of writer on the other side of the border (presumably South Australia).

The book is short but quite challenging to read, as Murnane's thoughts appear to meander, while every now and again he makes reference to something he talked about a number of paragraphs earlier, which makes one realise there is nothing random about the structure. The style is a little reminiscent of Thomas Bernhard, but his attitude and world view are very different. Overall I found it a book which is easier to admire than to love, but I am looking forward to discussing it with the 21st Century Literature group in June.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Does precisely what I most love books to do. What follows are the first couple of pages. Either this voice will entice and interest, or it will not. For me, it is the way in which such a text allows us to move along with another thinking mind, in a manner and direction our own thinking mind may not usually move, that makes it so valuable:

"Two months ago, when I first arrived in this township just short of the border, I resolved to guard my eyes, and I could not think of going on with this piece of writing unless I were to explain how I came by that odd expression.

I got some of my schooling from a certain order of religious brothers, a band of men who dressed each in a black soutane with a bib of white celluloid at his throat. I learned by chance last year, and fifty years since I last saw anyone wearing such a thing, that the white bib was called a rabat and was a symbol of chastity. Among the few books that I brought here from the capital city is a large dictionary, but the word rabat is not listed in it. The word may well be French, given that the order of brothers was founded in France. In this remote district, I am even less inclined than I was in the suburbs of the capital city to seek out some or another obscure fact; here, near the border, I am even more inclined than of old to accept as well-founded any supposition likely to complete a pattern in my mind and then to go on writing until I learn the meaning for me of such an image as that of the white patch which appeared just now against a black ground at the edge of my mind and will not be easily dislodged.

The school where the brothers taught was built in the grounds of what had been a two-story mansion of yellow sandstone in a street lined with plane trees in an inner eastern suburb of the capital city. The mansion itself had been converted into the brothers’ residence. On the ground floor of the former mansion, one of the rooms overlooking the return veranda was the chapel, which was used by the brothers for their daily Mass and prayers but was available also to us, their students.

In the language of that place and time, a student who called at the ­chapel for a few minutes was said to be paying a visit. The object of his visitation was said to be Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament or, more commonly, the Blessed Sacrament. We boys were urged by teachers and priests to pay frequent visits to the Blessed Sacrament. It was implied that the personage denoted by that phrase would feel aggrieved or lonely if visitors were lacking. My class once heard from a religious brother one of a sort of story that was often told in order to promote our religious zeal. A non-Catholic of goodwill had asked a priest to explain the teachings of the Church in the matter of the Blessed Sacrament. The priest then explained how every disk of consecrated bread in every tabernacle in every Catholic church or chapel, even though it appeared to be mere bread, was in substance the body of Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity. The inquirer of goodwill then declared that if only he were able to believe this, he would spend every free moment in some or another Catholic church or chapel, in the presence of the divine manifestation.

In our school magazine every year, in his annual report to parents, our principal wrote at length about what he called the religious formation of us boys. In every classroom, the first period of every day was given over to Christian Doctrine, or religion, as we more often called it. Students recited aloud together a short prayer before every period of the daily timetable. I ­believed that most of my classmates took their religion seriously, but I seldom heard any boy make any mention, outside the classroom, of anything to do with that religion. The chapel was out of sight of the playground, and so I was never aware of how many of my classmates paid visits there. However, I went through several periods of religious fervor during my school days, and during each such period I paid several visits daily to the Blessed Sacrament. Sometimes I saw one or another of my classmates in the chapel, kneeling as I knelt with head bowed or eyes fixed on the locked tabernacle, within which, and out of our sight, was the gold-plated ciborium filled with the white wafers that we thought of as the Blessed Sacrament. I was never satisfied with my attempts to pray or to contemplate, and I often wondered what exactly was taking place in the mind of my devout-seeming classmate. I would have liked to ask him what he seemed to see while he prayed; how he envisaged the divine or canonized personages that he addressed in his mind, and much else. Sometimes, by chance, a classmate and I would leave the chapel at the same time and would walk together along the return veranda and then through the brothers’ garden towards the playground, but for me to have questioned the boy then about his devotions would have been hardly less disturbing than if I had made him an indecent proposition.

In the quiet street where I now live is a tiny church that I pass every weekday morning on my walk to the shops and the post office. The church belongs to one of the Protestant denominations that I pitied as a schoolboy on account of the drabness of their services, which consisted, I supposed, of mere hymns and sermons and none of the splendid rituals enacted in my own church. Whenever I pass, the grass around my neighborhood church is always neatly mown but the church itself is closed and deserted. I must have passed countless Protestant churches in suburbs or in country towns and scarcely glanced at them, and yet I can never pass the nearby church without my thoughts being led in surprising directions.

I have always believed myself to be indifferent to architecture. I hardly know what a gable is or a nave or a vault or a vestry. I would describe my neighborhood church as a symmetrical building comprising three parts: a porch, a main part, and, at the furthest end from the street, a third part surely reserved for the minister before and after services. The walls are of stone painted—or is the correct term rendered?—a uniform creamy white. I am so unobservant of such details that I cannot recall, here at my desk, whether the pitched roofs of the porch and the main part are of slate or of steel. The rear part has an almost flat steel roof. The windows aren’t of much interest to me, except for the two rectangular windows of clear glass, each with a drawn blind behind it, in the rear wall of the minister’s room. The main part of the church has six small windows, three on each side. The glass in each of these windows is translucent. If I could inspect it from close at hand, the glass might well seem no different from the sort that I learned to call as a child frosted and saw often in bathroom windows. The glass in the six windows is by no means colorless, but I have not yet identified the shade or tint that distinguishes it. On some mornings when I pass, the glass in question seems an unexceptional gray green or, perhaps, gray blue. Once, however, when I happened to pass the church in the late afternoon, and when I looked over my shoulder at a window on the shaded, southeastern side of the building, I saw the glass there colored not directly by the setting sun but by a light that I was prevented from seeing: the glow within the locked church where the rays from the west had already been modified by the three windows on the side further from me. Even if I could have devised a name for the wavering richness that I saw then in that simple pane, I would have had to set about devising soon afterwards a different name for the subtly different tint in each of its two neighboring panes, where the already muted light from one and the same sunset had been separately refracted. The porch has one window, which looks towards the street. This is the window that mostly takes my notice as I pass and may well have been the cause of my setting out to write these pages. The glass in this window is what I have always called stained glass and almost certainly comprises a representation of something—a ­pattern of leaves and stems and petals perhaps. I prefer not to draw attention to myself when I walk in the township, and I have not yet been bold enough to stop and stare at the porch window. I am unsure not only of what is depicted there but even of the colors of the different zones of glass, although I suppose they are red and green and yellow and blue or most of those. The outer door of the church is always closed when I pass, and the door from the porch to the church is surely also closed. Since the tinted window faces northeast, the near side of the glass is always in bright daylight while the far side is opposed only to the subdued light of the enclosed porch. Anyone looking from my well-lit vantage point can only guess at the colors of the glass and the details of what they depict."

[Jeroen Vandenbossche · Rating 5 out of 5]

It has now been over a month since I finished reading “Border Districts” and the book has been very often on my mind.

Usually, when people write something like this about a novel they read earlier, they mean that they have been reflecting further about specific aspects of the story to try and understand their meaning or that they have continued to ponder the motives of some of the characters in the book. This is not what I mean in this case, however. There isn’t much of a story in “Border Districts” to reflect on ; nor are there any particularly striking characters or memorable scenes.

Although the book qualifies itself as “a fiction” on the cover, on the inside, it presents itself as a factual “report” written by an elderly gentleman who has just moved from the capital city to a small town near some unnamed border “so that [he] could spend most of [his] time alone and so that [he] could live according to several rules that [he has] long wanted to live by.” The “report” he writes is centred on a limited set of “mental scenes” or “thought images” which play a dominant role in the narrator’s memories and are examined from various angles. Most of these “mental images” are seemingly banal, prompted by equally banal objects in the narrator’s surroundings: church windows, coloured glass, a line from the Aeneid, the dust jacket of a book, a book programme on the radio, etc.

When I say that “Border Districts” has been on my mind for several weeks now, I do not mean that I have been thinking back about one or other of these scenes or images (although I will never look at stained glass or marbles in the same way as before). Rather, I mean that I vividly recall the actual experience of reading itself. Put differently, what I remember is me, sitting alone in the sofa in the living room overlooking our little garden, enjoying the first quiet hours of the day while everyone in the house is still fast asleep, drinking a cup of coffee and focussing all my attention on Murnane’s writing. This may sound strange or maybe even a little presumptuous, but Marcel Proust has a fascinating essay about reading in which he hints at something similar. It is entitled “Sur la lecture” and these are the first lines:

« Il n’y a peut-être pas de jours de notre enfance que nous ayons si pleinement vécus que ceux que nous avons cru laisser sans les vivre, ceux que nous avons passés avec un livre préféré. Tout ce qui, semblait-il, les remplissait pour les autres, et que nous écartions comme un obstacle vulgaire à un plaisir divin (…), tout cela, dont la lecture aurait dû nous empêcher de percevoir autre chose que l’importunité, elle en gravait au contraire en nous un souvenir tellement doux (tellement plus précieux à notre jugement actuel que ce que nous lisions alors avec tant d’amour,) que, s’il nous arrive encore aujourd’hui de feuilleter ces livres d’autrefois, ce n’est plus que comme les seuls calendriers que nous ayons gardés des jours enfuis, et avec l’espoir de voir reflétés sur leurs pages les demeures et les étangs qui n’existent plus. »

It is quite something isn’t it, for the author of “A la recherche du temps perdu” to admit that what he remembers best about the books he loved to read as a child is neither their content nor their style but the actual activity of reading itself? Paradoxically, the “divine pleasure” of reading is described here as a mental activity which separates us from our environment and isolates us from “lived” reality while at the same time intensifying our awareness of what happens around us and engraving it more deeply in our memories.

I do not think that all reading experiences fit this paradoxical description, but I always found that it applies very well to reading Proust’s own writings. For me, reading “A la recherche du temps perdu” always felt like an immersive, very focused experience which heightened my awareness of what was happening around me at the time of reading and which I remember quite vividly until this very day. When trying to explain to others what attracts me so much in this work, I often compared it to a kind of disciplined meditation which helps me slow down, concentrate and become more aware of myself and my surroundings. To this very day, I still remember well when and where I read the various volumes and what was happening around me at the time. Reading “Border Districts” felt oddly similar.

So, what is it about the writing of Proust and Murnane which makes for this meditative reading experience?

Part of it, I believe, is related to the subject matter. Both “Border Districts” and “La Recherche” are ostensibly books about experience and memory and the interaction between the two. They both explore the working of the human mind, trying to capture how memories are formed and what makes them stick. Most of it, however, has to do with the formal features of the two books. Two specific characteristics are particularly important in my view.

First, both Murnane and Proust’s writings can be said to be very sensual albeit in very different ways. Proust’s descriptions are extremely detailed and precise: sounds, smells, interiors, clothing and physical appearances are described at great length (just look up the 11 lines I left out in the quote above and you’ll get what I mean). Sensorial impressions play an equally important role in Murnane’s writing even if his descriptions are more “imagist”. Whereas Proust’s descriptive passages are full of elaborate metaphors, Murnane’s are more “literal”, somewhat like the “objective” descriptions Roland Barthes appreciated in Robbe-Grillet’s first novels. What Proust and Murnane have in common though is their willingness to pause and spend time describing the outward appearance of the world for its own sake. In neither of the two’s works, the description is subordinated to the story; rather it takes on a significance of its own.

Secondly and crucially, both writers also force the reader to slow down, focus and observe. Each uses their own techniques to do so. Proust’s preferred tool is syntax. As any reader will confirm, his intricate, often page-long sentences cannot be enjoyed when you are pressed for time or unfocused. Savour them unhurriedly, however, and their carefully modulated beauty will mesmerize you. Compared to Proust’s, Murnane’s sentences in “Border Districts” are mostly short, simple and to the point. In his case, it is the meandering composition of the “report” and the frequent metafictional interruptions which force the reader to take it slowly. As he tries to make sense of his own writing, Murnane’s narrator frequently interrupts the flow of the story to come back to an earlier point, to amend it, explain it in a different way or to establish a connection with another episode he referred to earlier. While doing so, he hones in on the present circumstances in which the activity of writing takes place. Here are but two examples among many more:

“I wrote the two previous paragraphs while the book mentioned was in its usual place on my shelves. After I had written the phrase ‘essences of personages’ just now, I was prompted to retrieve the book and to place it here beside me with the rear of the dust-jacket uppermost. My eye was then led on its usual route from the rectangular zone of light outside the boundaries of the illustration, then back towards the highlighted features of the woman staring ahead of her, and finally to the surface of her nearer eye.”

“After I had written the previous paragraph, I took the certificate mentioned from the folder where it has lain out of sight for perhaps twenty years in one of my filing cabinets. I was not surprised to find in the illustration a number of details differing from those in the image I had in mind while I wrote the previous paragraph.”

Hurried readers who dislike such interruptions to the narrative flow shouldn’t bother with “Border Districts” as they are an integral part of the text’s aesthetic. Like Proust’s unique syntax, they greatly add to the “mindfulness” of the reading experience; as the narrator draws closer to the moment in which he is writing, the reader is made more keenly aware of his own reading activity.

This brings me to a last point I want to make about Proust and Murnane. It pertains to their attitude towards writing. On this, both works clearly diverge. As is well known, “A la Recherche du temps perdu” is a kind of outsized coming-of-age novel focused on the narrator’s vocation as a writer. From a very young age, the latter is fascinated by art in general and literature in particular and he hopes to become a famous writer himself one day. Although he frequently despairs about his own talent and fears that he might not find a subject worthy to write about, the redemptive power of literature as such is never really called into question. The book is an anti-Bildungsroman as the protagonist has to accept that he has to “turn his shoulder to life” (as Mallarmé would put it) and seclude himself from society if he is to produce a lasting piece of literature. Nevertheless, there is no doubt on the narrator’s mind that this is a sacrifice worth making.

Murnane’s narrator’s attitude towards writing and literature is decidedly more ambivalent. As indicated above, he insists emphatically and repeatedly on the purely factual nature of his “report” throughout the book, seemingly resenting the possibility that it could be mistaken for a ‘mere’ work of fiction. He also refers in apparently condescending terms to the earlier periods in his life where “he read book after book of fiction in the belief that [he] would learn thereby matters of much importance not to be learned from any other kind of book.” (He equally forcefully dismisses the revelatory power of music by the way). This ambivalence about the value of literature and art in general remains until the very end when, just before the narrator brings his report to a close by quoting two lines of romantic poetry, he gives a stab at the author of the poem in question.

What to make of this difference in attitude? One answer could be that Murnane shares the profound scepticism about the truth-revealing power of language which is a staple of so much (post-)modernist literature, whereas, on this point, Proust remains indebted to the nineteenth century literature of his youth. Another could be that the difference in attitude may also have to do something with the fact that Proust’s narrator still has to start writing as the book reaches its end, whereas Murnane’s is already engaged in the process since the very beginning. Maybe the latter is just more lucid about the limits of what he is doing as he is already doing it? In a way, one could indeed argue that “Border Districts” picks up where “A la recherche du temps perdu” left off and brings us one step closer to that “essential solitude” which, according to Maurice Blanchot, withdraws the writer from the world he or she inhabits and thereby allows him or her to start writing.

[Nathanimal · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book of non-events functions like meditation, a big act of noticing. Reading it, I can feel the volume being turned up on my own ability to notice. It’s kind of a perfect pleasure for an introvert who is maybe feeling overworked by atmospheric rivers. Others disappear and the smallest sensations become his friends. Or so I’m guessing.

[Vivian · Rating 1 out of 5]

Unpopular opinion time.

Guard eyes while in town.

Underdeveloped. Confluence of unwoven themes in a stream of consciousness format that bores the reader with repeated instances of "I never took any interest" and "While I was writing the previous paragraph".

There are repeated themes of stain glass, horses, females, anti-Protestantism as the author struggles with his faith. He espouses a belief in the humble and now, but a longing for wealth and mythic past. Reminds me of a nostalgic collective unconscious memory; the weaving of it is very starkly presented.

I feel that this speaks to a narrow audience: white, Gaelic/British heritage, and Catholic, which considering the author's Australian roots is not surprising, but it feels rather alienating and exclusive. I just wished that explorations of color and light had been better executed because there's an intriguing circling of the subjects. Feels more like a flushed book outline than a finished book.

There is an idea of something substantive, but it's never realized and that's disappointing.

My favorite part was in the closing, a quote by Percy Bysshe Shelley:

Life, like a dome of many-colored glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity.

[Eric Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Intense curiosity has surrounded Australian author Gerald Murnane since a prominent New York Times Article from 2018 asked in its title ‘Is the Next Nobel Laureate in Literature Tending Bar in a Dusty Australian Town?’ The literary community adores having a genius spring from obscurity – especially one who has been working diligently and quietly producing books for years. The trouble is that not much of his writing has been available outside of Australia, but this year the wonderful publisher And Other Stories are bringing out a couple of his books in the UK.

So I picked up “Border Districts” to see why Teju Cole states that “Murnane, a genius, is a worthy heir to Beckett.” It turns out to be an apt characterization of this author because this novel is dominated by the voice of an old man living on the edge of civilization sifting through resonant images from his past and highlighting more of what he’s forgotten than what he remembers. Rather than plot we’re offered a way of seeing through the kaleidoscope of the narrator’s consciousness the ideas and sensations which persist in his mind - though their origin has frequently been lost.

Read my full review of Border Districts by Gerald Murnane on LonesomeReader

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 3 out of 5]

The effects of Murnane’s prose accrue gradually as one meanders through his mental warren of recollections and ruminations. The pace is often glacial; there is no speed-reading to be done in this book, despite its relative brevity. Suddenly one is left at the end with the vague sense that loose themes have somehow been lightly pulled together into an apparition resembling a knot. If you reach for it, your hands will undoubtedly pass through it. Whether you sit there attempting to undo this transparent knot in your mind—or at least meditate on its composition—will likely depend on your attention span. There is certainly much to consider: the increasing metafictional nature of the ‘narrative’ as it draws toward its soft close; Murnane’s occasional pointed statements that this is not a fictional account, which may in fact be just another element of the metafiction at play; and the significance, if any, of all that damned ‘coloured glass’ the narrator is always obsessing over. Perhaps the aforementioned knot is simply Gordian in nature? (3.5, rounded down)

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 3 out of 5]

The appeal of Murnane to modernist headbangers is apparent—the long skeins of ruminative prose on the impermanence of memory, the Beckettian interiority and recurring images and moments, the repetitions and self-corrections. This is Murnane’s final novel (at the time of writing), and is a graceful last hurrah for a writer with a long career of uncompromising artistic practice, although not essential for the unfamiliar.

[Kansas · Rating 4 out of 5]

https://kansasbooks.blogspot.com/2024...

“He olvidado casi todas las miles de palabras que le dije a aquella persona que me había parecido más dada a escuchar que a conversar, pero sí recuerdo algunas de las cosas que sentí mientras pronunciaba estas palabras. Tal vez debería haber escrito que creo recordar no tanto los sentimientos en sí, sino más bien el hecho de haberlos sentido. Mientras trataba de escribir la frase anterior…”


Segundo de los libros que leo de Murnane, aunque debo confesar que intenté otros dos que no acabé, no sé si porque no era el momento o porque este autor me exaspera de la misma forma que logra fascinarme. Este Distritos de Frontera me ha parecido mucho más accesible que Las Llanuras (un libro que me sigue persiguiendo en sueños, en el buen sentido) aunque tampoco sabría cómo catalogarlo pero igual por eso he elegido esa cita particularmente para empezar este comentario sobre esta novela. En este texto, o en Murnane en general, no se trata tanto del recuerdo de algo sino más bien del poso que ha dejado ese recuerdo “creo recordar no tanto los sentimientos en sí, sino más bien el hecho de haberlos sentido”, es una idea recurrente a lo largo de toda esta obra. Murnane además nos recuerda una y otra vez que mientras escribe este párrafo (siempre en presente) o esta idea anterior, se le acaba de ocurrir otra reflexión así que este texto da la impresión, de estar escrito sobre la marcha o de estar continuamene transformándose, o de que las ideas se le van ocurriendo y a medida que va conectándolas, estas la han ayudado a enlazarlas con otras. “Nunca me he alejado más de un día por carretera o en tren del lugar donde nací. Para mí, los países extranjeros son algo así como imágenes mentales, algunas de ellas vividas y detalladas y muchas surgidas mientras leía obras de ficción”. El paisaje de la mente o lo que perdura de la memoria es lo que de verdad le interesa a Murnane porque en definitiva lo que hace Murnane a lo largo de este texto es explorar como funcionan ciertos momentos del pasado y el poso que han dejado las imágenes, un sonido, un olor o un piano, pero sobre todo la luz.


“Si esto fuera una obra de ficción, podría contar qui que una de la canicas de valor que tengo desde hace más tiempo es de vidrio translúcido y que, cada vez que la sostengo entre mis ojos y una fuente de luz brillante, su tono rojizo me recuerda el color de las hojas de la parra ornamental antes mencionada y también parte, por lo menos, de lo que sentí mientras estaba en el punto donde terminaba el camino, justo antes de que aquella chica alta, casi una mujer, me llevara de la mano hasta el lugar donde había parecido ser el origen de mis sentimientos.“


Me interesa especialmente en este texto la sutilidad con la que va conectando un concepto con otro a través de la memoria, y es cierto que hay momentos en que en medio de una idea se detiene a contarnos en un párrafo siguiente por qué se le ocurrió escribirlo, puede parecer anticlimático, pero la gracia está precisamente en que no es así. "Aún no he olvidado el periodo de mi vida en el que leía un libro de ficción tras otro. Aún no he olvidado el aspecto de las habitaciones donde mis libros llenaban un estante tras otro. Aún no he olvidado los lugares donde me sentaba a leer. Y ciertamente recuerdo parte de lo que sucedía en mi mente mientras leía..” Cuando Murnane detiene una idea para explicar cómo ha llegado a ella, se siente como parte del mismo paisaje de la mente, porque continuamente nos está recordando que nos alejemos de nuestra obsesión por la ficción, que esto no es ficción ¿o sí podría serlo?, que está en continuo proceso de escritura casi en directo (es lo mismo que hacia George Elliot en Middlemarch): estamos leyendo algo escrito por alguien que está incidiendo en el hecho de que es un proceso de escritura “in progress” Está claro que Murnane nos está exigiendo, y no los recuerda muy sutilmente, que hay que implicarse y salir de nuestra zona confort, que nos dejemos llevar por estas conexiones de luz y memoria.


"Hace más de treinta años copié a mano un pasaje de la principal obra de Marcel Proust que pretendía explicar por qué el vínculo entre lector y personaje de ficción es más estrecho que cualquier vínculo que pueda existir entre personas de carne y hueso."

"Creo recordar que lo que escribió Proust fue que el autor era capaz de plasmar los sentimientos de un personaje de tal forma que el lector se sintiera más cerca de este que de cualquier persona viva."


“Recordé una cita del escritor Franz Kafka que había leído hacía poco según la cual una persona podía descubrir todo lo necesario para su salvación sin salir de su propia habitación. Quédate en tu habitación el tiempo suficiente, y el mundo encontrará el camino hacia ti y se retorcerá a tus pies." A partir de un momento concreto como el color de una canica, o la imagen de una casa, la mente de Murnane se vuelca en todo tipo de imágenes del pasado que interactúan con este primer momento de orígen, Murnane niño, la religión y cómo llegó a abjurar de la fe (aunque es cierto que sus textos tienen ese algo místico), o esa obsesión en detenerse en un detalle concreto que convierte sus párrafos o sus ideas, en movimientos circulares volviendo siempre a la idea de origen. No hay una trama real, porque es su mente la que va creando la trama conectando ideas, suyas, y yo diría que la esencia de la obra de Murnane está en pillar estos pequeños matices, que son tan sútiles que igual en una primera lectura son inabordables. Leer a Murnane exige prestar atención, volver atrás en un párrafo y encontrar ese punto de partida, siempre enlazado no tanto al recuerdo en sí, sino a lo que le hace sentir recordándolo.


"Cuando leía sobre nuestras mentes o sobre la mente, así como sobre supuestos instintos, aptitudes y facultades, por no hablar de espectros como el ego, el ello y el arquetipo, tenía la impresión de que los paisajes en apariencia interminables de mis propios pensamientos y sentimientos debían ser un paraíso en comparación con los monótonos lugares donde otros ubicaban sus yos, sus personalidades o comoquiera que llamaran a sus territorios mentales. Así fue como hace tiempo decidí dejar de interesarme por lo teórico y dedicarme a estudiar lo real, que para mí era el escenario aparente que había detrás de todo lo que hacía, pensaba o leía."


Murnane piensa, reflexiona, imagina, y nos recuerda continuamente, sin descanso, que estamos leyendo un texto que varía dependiendo de los paisajes de su mente. Nos recuerda también que no solo él está escibiendo un libro, sino que que este texto no sería posible sin que nos convirtamos en cómplices o por lo menos emular ese concepto proustiano que es el de ese vinculo vital entre el personaje de ficción y el lector, aquí se puede decir que el vínculo se establece desde el momento en que el lector entra de lleno en el paisaje de la mente de Murnane, un autor que estilisticamente parece penetrar de puntillas con sus frases en un princpio breves y directas, y que de la misma que se van alargando, van calando en el lector.


"Me trasladé a este distrito próximo a la frontera para poder pasar la mayor parte del tiempo solo y vivir según una serie de reglas a las que hacía ya tiempo que quería ceñirme. Ya he mencionado que he adoptado una mirada cautelosa. Lo hago para prestar más atención a lo que aparece en los limites de mi campo de visión, para percatarme de inmediato de cualquier elemento tan necesitado de mi atención."

♫♫♫ Moments - Olexandr Ignatov ♫♫♫

[John Darnielle · Rating 5 out of 5]

To read this book is to become unmoored from what might be called a traditional reading stance; the voice Murnane affects here bears closer resemblance to Sergio Pitól’s short fictions in “Mephisto’s Waltz” than to anything else I can think of, but Murnane is even more severe. Lacking narrative thrust or what might be called a plot, the book is nonetheless compulsively readable; over the course of two days i could think of little else but to get back to the strange extended meditation occasioned by light through strange glass. I think many readers might find this book boring, even maddeningly so, and I kind of did, too, but I also found it irresistible; I’ll seek out more Murnane soon.

[Tamara Agha-Jaffar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Border Districts: A Fiction by Gerald Murnane is in the form of an extended monologue with lengthy paragraphs uninterrupted by page breaks or chapter headings. There is no plot or story. Instead we are served a map of the narrator’s mind with its meanderings, reflections, detours, memories, digressions, and opinions. It is akin to stream of consciousness in that one seemingly random thought or image triggers a memory that sets the narrator down a winding path, the relevance of which may or may not be readily apparent to the reader. But we follow the narrator because his prose is hypnotic, his thoughts luminous, and because we are curious to see where he will take us next.

The narrator is an elderly gentleman, a grandfather, who has moved from a capital city to a quiet township near the border. He tells us he has done this to experience the freedom to record his “. . . image-history, which includes, of course, my speculations about such image-events.” And that is precisely what he does. He writes a report in which he records the images that have preoccupied his mind from childhood into old age and he considers if and how his reflections on those images have changed in the interim. If all this sounds somewhat bizarre, that is because it is.

The central image preoccupying his mind and one that recurs is of stained or colored glass windows. His focus is intense as he studies the colors, the shapes, and the fluctuating impact of light as it filters through the colored panes. He sees himself as “a student of colours and shades and hues and tints.” He is intent on looking at things sideways since “a glance or a sideways look often reveals more than a direct gaze . . .”

The narrator is painfully self-conscious, analytical, and deliberate in his writing, as in, for example, “I strayed a little in the previous two sentences” or, more typically, “While I was writing the previous two paragraphs . . .” He writes in the past tense and has a propensity to use the conditional construction in his sentences: “If only I had had . . . I would have had . . .” etc. He launches into elaborate scenarios where he imagines things that might have been. For example, while visiting a friend, he weaves an elaborate tale in which he envisions a marriage between his friend’s spinster aunt and her sweetheart returned from the war. He constructs their home in his imagination and even compares his childhood and schooling with that of the imaginary daughter adopted by the aunt and her sweetheart.

All this makes for curious reading. One wonders what he’s up to. And then a sentence toward the end of the book brings the entire work into focus. The narrator has taken a photograph of a colored glass window in his friend’s home. As he examines the photograph, he makes the following statement:

“ . . . a part of my seeing was investing the glass with qualities not inherent in it—qualities probably not apparent to any other observer and certainly not detectable by any sort of camera; that what I missed when I looked at the photographic prints was the meaning that I had previously read into the glass.”

In other words, Murnane does with images what many of us do with books. We can read the same book many times over and experience it differently with each reading depending on our life experiences at the time. If we are astute and deliberate readers, we can recall which passages in the book left an impact on us, when, how, and why. This exercise reveals as much about the reader as it does about the book. We might do it with the written word; Murnane does it with images. He imbues what he sees with meaning. His images of landscapes and colored glass are significant because they reveal the eye of the beholder, then and now.

Murnane has charted the landscape of his mind throughout the decades by using image-events as triggers. He explores the development of his mental state by gauging his reaction to visual stimuli. He has been doing this all along in the novel, but it is not until the end that the whole enterprise comes into clear focus.

An unusual novel in terms of structure, content, and theme. Highly recommended for those who enjoy reflective, digressive writing.

[Antonio Jiménez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Murnane es, de entre los escritores que suelo leer, uno de los menos impostados y honestos. Su propia naturalidad, libre de corsés, ilumina su texto, que es como un camino que va tomando bifurcaciones para volver a unificarse después. En apariencia sencillo pero verdaderamente cargado de sutileza.

Obsesionado con la luz y el color, arroja conceptos como: "imagen mental", "paisaje mental" o "informe" (su texto), para explicar cómo compone su (percepción del) mundo/entorno/experiencias/recuerdos. El caleidoscopio Murnane es maravilloso.

Parte de su esencia la explica él mismo en este fragmento de su informe (p. 125):

«Si alguna vez diera el audaz paso recién mencionado, primero tendría que añadir varios pasajes al texto tal y como está ahora mismo. Mientras escribía las páginas anteriores, a veces he dejado algún asunto colgado para empezar a escribir sobre otro distinto que justo acababa de aparecer en un lateral de mi mente y que, si no me ponía a escribir de inmediato sobre él, podría haber desaparecido, o al menos eso fue lo que creí en su momento».

[Cody · Rating 2 out of 5]

Murnane:

For people that find Coetzee too avant-garde.

That fuck with the lights off.

Who drink light beer.

Who alphabetize Art.

Often think, ‘It’s Stan Getz time!’

So far from the soil that they substitute dust as a proximate.

Argue England’s literary merits over the United States/Japan/France/Ireland/Argentina/Czech Rep/Greece/Norway/Russia/Trinidad-Tobago...

For those people that ‘take pictures of each other/just to prove that they really existed.’

[ReemK10 (Paper Pills) · Rating 5 out of 5]

We, as readers, are incredibly spoiled. To be able to spend time with so many great authors, and to be able to join them "for the ride" as we read novel after novel is such a joyous privilege. Each author is able to contribute in ways unique to him or her. I only know of Gerald Murnane by readers who have read him extensively or are of a cult following. For me, this is my first Murnane, and what Murnane has done is keep his reader engaged with his peculiar style of writing, his reminiscences, and his mental wanderings. Murnane has proven to be his own man as he has written his novels. He has no tried and true formula. The reader can envision him chasing after that perfect sentence. As an author, he has struggled to have his books published in his home country, a country he has never left. He soon found fame after The New York Times ran a piece raving about his work. Now, he's a contender for Nobel Prize Laureate!! Having heard so many great things, I can't wait to read The Plains, Inland, Tamarisk Row and A Million Windows.
Murnane has proven to be a sweet discovery!

[Sarah]

DNF @ 21%

One for the Murnane completists perhaps but not a great choice of starting point for his work. A heavy focus on stained glass and strong Proust vibes...

[Blair · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gerald Murnane is one of the greatest Australian writers ever. This is supposedly his last book and it's very much in line with his last few since his late renaissance. It's a meditative reflection on the nature of literature and a sort of stream-of-consciousness trip through the narrator's memory. I wouldn't recommend it as a place to start with Murnane's writing, but what a wonderful place to finish.

[Marcus Hobson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found it hard to enjoy Border Districts, but at the same time I couldn't help but admire the quality of the prose.

The book has been shortlisted for this year's Miles Franklin award - Australia's premiere literary prize. It is Murnane's first nomination in his 44 year career, and one critic unkindly called him "the greatest living English-language writer most people have never heard of".
Murnane is well known for his reluctance to travel. We find his novels have a very local setting. In this book he constantly reminds us of his narrow horizons with phrases such as "in the northern suburbs of the capital city" or "when I first arrived in this township just short of the border," he will never mention the name of the suburb, the city or the township, even if he obliquely talks of them often.
My only other experience of his work is the novel 'A Million Windows' from 2014. I had a similar reaction, unsure whether I was reading fiction, biography or just stream of consciousness. Border Districts feels like a continuation of where that book left off, like the author just stepped outside for a cigarette and is now back to pick up the threads of the story.
At one point Murnane says "I have never travelled more than a day's journey by road or rail from my birthplace." I think this is what makes his voice uniquely Australian, given how many others from that continent are keen to travel the world, undertake their OE as they call it (Overseas Experience). Murnane is content to live life vicariously through other people's books and experiences. He constantly overlays his own preoccupations onto other places - his time spent training within the church, his love of horse racing and of literature.

The theme of coloured glass recurs often in the book, beginning with English history when during the 1650s men travelled the country smashing stained glass windows in churches by standing on ladders with staves and axes and breaking them inwards. We consider what happened to the broken shards, were they gathered up to be reused or were they stolen by children to be held up to the light? Painted glass fragments reoccur in the windows of houses in which Murnane stays during his lifetime.
There are a whole series of recollections, each leading onto another, where the author recalls a biography of the writer George Gissing, but more particularly the black and white photo of the woman who wrote the book which fills the back cover and the unusual fall of the light on her face. This leads him to recall the marbles he has collected since his childhood, the first gift of marbles he was given, then a kaleidoscope with a marble in it, taking him on to the set of coloured pencils he bought many years before and which he keeps in jars near his desk. From there we stray into the stories of the coloured hats and shirts worn by jockeys in both Australia and England matching colours and patterns to owners and families, and so we continue to ramble. There are no breaks in the narrative, no page breaks or chapter headings, and often we will hear the phrase "as I said in a previous paragraph", all of which give the book the quality of a stream of consciousness. Nine pages from the end of the book we suddenly jump back to a story from the beginning which was left unfinished, and needed more elaboration. It has taken a hundred pages to get to the point of the story. Such features make me wonder if this is really great literature or simply the rambling of a slightly incoherent mind.

[Jim Coughenour · Rating 4 out of 5]

First, I feel a fool for not having read Gerald Murnane before now, for not even knowing who he was. True, somewhere over the last few years I remember reading of an eccentric Australian who’d won a literary prize that stipulated part of the prize money would be spent on international travel. The winner refused, instead reciting all the addresses where he’d once lived, all confined to a relatively small area. I didn’t realize until tonight, after finishing Border Districts and reading some reviews, that this author was Murnane.

But I feel a lucky fool. The last time I felt like this (or so I imagine) was when I first picked up The Rings of Saturn and wondered what exactly I was reading – then was slowly disarmed, enchanted and drawn into the author’s meditation, an author confident enough to break the rules of fiction writing and invent something that obviously pleased and probably amused him. Here’s the first sentence.

Two months ago, when I first arrived in this township just short of the border, I resolved to guard my eyes, and I could not think of going on with this piece of writing unless I were to explain how I came by that odd expression.

Of course I had to know. Within a few paragraphs we discover a man in late middle age who has retreated, who seems to have always been retreating, from the world around him, his imagination caught by colors, particulary the colored light cast by stained glass. Something quite banal is suddenly luminous, pulsing with intimations that call to mind (deliberately, I assume) Proust’s rapture over that “tiny patch of yellow wall” in Vermeer’s “View of Delft.” The pressing reason the writer must “guard his eyes” is to capture such intimations before they evanescence.

I moved to this district near the border so that I could spend most of my time alone and so that I could live according to several rules that I had for long wanted to live by. I mentioned earlier that I guard my eyes. I do this so that I might be more alert to what appears at the edges of my range of vision; so that I might notice at once any sight so much in need of my inspection that one or more of its details seems to quiver or to be agitated until I have the illusion that I am being signaled or winked at. Another rule requires me to record whatever sequences of images occur to me after I have turned my attention to the signaling or winking detail.

Notice the contradiction: this secular mysticism is anchored in what he acknowledges as illusion.

This is all from the first few pages. This tense, humorous, depressed, often deliberately awkward seriousness persists to the end, to a final small epiphany. One of the recurring jokes (or is it? Maybe it’s something more profound) is the way the writer repeatedly refers to what he was just written, and the random thought that occurred to him as he was writing. “Today, while I was writing the previous paragraphs…” It’s a short book, I never got tired of it, I always wanted to know what “mental image” had manifested itself as he was writing the sentence before.

I’ve mentioned Proust and Sebald. Teju Cole compares him to Beckett. This is one way readers honor writers. Reportedly this is Murnane’s final novel. I don’t know what his other work is like, but I’ve just ordered Stream System. I feel lucky.

[Kathleen · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Even in my youth, I seem to have been seeking evidence that the mind is a place best viewed from borderlands.”

This is a unique read that requires patience and attention.

I love books that tell us what goes through people’s minds. Of course I am more drawn to them when I find similarities to my own mind, and I didn’t find that here. I am convinced this contains deep meanings, but they eluded me. Even when he was talking about reading, something I am acutely interested in, I found my mind wandering because nothing in his words crystalized into significance for me.

I had the vague notion that the point was what continues after we are gone—the vines in the recurring stained glass, the awareness that comes as we reach the border between life and death.

But heck if I know.

[Tonymess · Rating 5 out of 5]

Profound exploration of mental images, revisiting a life, memories, experiences & the resulting images. A simple life explored through the machinations of time, place & recollections. Not many books written like this anymore. The Aussie, Western Districts Proust?

[Brian]

Like watching paint dry—but as the paint sets into the surface, you see every minute change in its viscosity, each microscopic shift in hue, the way errant drops slide down, creep to a stop, and solidify in their trails. If you stare at something for long enough, the phantom details emerge.

[Marc Nash · Rating 4 out of 5]

A man ( a writer) is looking back on his memories, arranging them you might say like photos in an album. So far so bog standard and the opening is about his education in a Catholic school being taught by Priests and Brothers. Lots of unfamiliar words for artefacts used in liturgy, such as ciborium, monstrance which is all i think I'm going to get from this novel, juxtaposed with words specific to Australia such as 'rosella' (an Australian breed of parakeet). But then the novel takes off in a whole new meditative direction as the narrator ditches his Catholic indoctrination, because he abhors abstractions and everything he has been taught about religion cannot be proved materially and so can only ever remain an abstraction.

And that is the course for the rest of the book, an inquiry into the material base of memory. He is obsessed with the visual quality of things, not to preserve an experience, but to try and get back to the state of mind or mood felt at that particular time. He is cropping his memories, for the visual cue that seared them in his mind. So lots of meditations on coloured glass (the only vestige he takes from Catholicism being stained glass), of the coloured vanes in marbles and the coloured patterns viewed in kaleidoscopes. In his search, part forensic, part filagree work or needlepoint, he reconstructs the exact moment when he used past images and impressions to further refract more recent memories. He is trying to unpick the distortions of time and anachronism and does so almost by tracing every single neuronal pathway that constructed the multi-layered thing that is any single memory. To follow this as the reader is both intimate and voyeuristic. Though it recalls Robbe-Grillet and early Nicholson Baker in its forensic eye, here it is about memory rather than tech as with Baker, or psychological realism as with Grillet.

There's a brilliant image where he turns on the radio to tune into a horse race, but the signal is from far away and it's largely overridden (his word not mine) by a discussion between two women, one of whom is an author. This seems to perfectly indicate what Murnane is doing here, trying but ultimately unable to sieve for pure memory at its source, always interfered with by more recent accretions, submerging his memory as a buried palimpsest. His own obsessions mean that when the female author talks of a writing retreat she runs, he imagines not only the residential house in which it takes place (based not on anything she says, but his own projections of buildings from his memory collection) and also begins to draw up rules for how the two sexes will interact, or rather be kept separate so that the writing will be the thing in focus at all times. It's not his writing retreat, it's hers!

The woman writer also talks about the quiet period at the start of any Quaker session as they try and enter the spirit of the sacred by letting all worldly issues fall away and the male protagonist skits from this idea to Buddhist meditation and imagines that it must be nice to have all mental imagery vacate to leave 'pure mind' which is what he has been struggling for all his life. To see what the mind is composed of. But he cannot empty his mind of its memories and visual prompts. Similarly he 'fails' in reading fiction, because the prompts and suggestions of the fiction authors set off a concatenation of images and associations from his own mind that he can never get past. This is a character verging on solipsism.

While absolutely intriguing and engrossing, I did feel it to be utterly subjective and personal and intimate to the author, which kept me at arm's length. These images played over and over again in his head and then without as he dissected them, were his images and not necessarily mine. I could relate to some, not to others, but each and every one felt like I was trespassing. that's the only reason I knocked a star off. However I do suspect that all his novels are like this so it's unlikely that I would read another one (unlike David Markson's literary schtick which sucks me in time and again to revel in it, Murnane's schtick here is just a little too distancing).

Still, for me a worthwhile reading experience, but I would be a little wary in recommending him to any of you, in case you never forgive me.

[LindaJ^ · Rating 2 out of 5]

While this book is well written, I never engaged with it. Frankly, I was bored. I read it because it is the June group read for the 21st Century Literature GR Group. Luckily, it was not long so I was able to keep my frustration in check long enough to read it. And, it is a book that one must pay attention to, as the author will switch to a different topic in the middle of a paragraph when what he is writing about causes him to remember something else. The author, however, never loses his train of thought as he frequently references back to something he mentioned a paragraph, or four paragraphs, or four pages ago. It was nicely structured. But, it was so boring. I did not relate to his memories and his examination of them. There are some excellent reviews of the book by people who loved it, see e.g., https://www.goodreads.com/review/show..., so there are many people who did find their time well spent reading it. I look forward to the discussion in June in 21st Century Literature.

[Omar Z · Rating 4 out of 5]

A dialogueless book about the mind, memory, and, most importantly, the images in our imperfect memory in comparison to the experiences we've collected them from, written by a man who believes he'll only remember the things worth remembering--this novel is written with an ascetic approach that I could only liken to the style of direction more akin to Bressonian cinema; having only spent 5 total reading sessions during my entire reading of this book, as noted in my journal, I've reason to believe this to be one of the most memorable (pun not intended) texts I've read this year.

I'd originally began reading this book at a time (I'd perceived as late) one night after a migraine I may have mentioned elsewhere giving me the incentive to read through the discomfort, and Border Districts was the cause of my having fallen asleep at 10PM with my bookmark coincidentally fitted in between pages ten and eleven; I'd waken up early the next morning and tried to figure out the cause of my passing out, and I picked up Border Districts to resume my previous read and it didn't take long enough to remember why--but, oddly enough, this book isn't a 'slog' as people may put it, I'd quickly acclimated myself to Murnane's style on my first proper read (this book even kept me awake longer than I'd realized at one point,) and I've a differing thought of this book that doesn't at all align with what my sleepy-time situation may be misleading you into believing (here's an excerpt from my journal written during my second reading session): 'As short a novel this is, it isn't to be devoured, it is to be savored and experienced in solitude, silence--Border Districts isn't a cafe book, it isn't the shit-rag hoisted atop the lap when passing chocolate sea-monkeys, it isn't to be read from the seats of a moving car, nor is it the social book read amongst the usual Saturday clique for a book club, it is to be read in secret, it is to be caught on the breath of oneself, read from a cupped palm as though shielding a small flame'; all in all, I believe this to be a feeling adjacent to the feeling one might derive from reading Proust (who's actually mentioned a bit throughout the text); and now, one may wonder, what's the writing style exactly like?

I've mentioned it being ascetic, but what's my idea of an ascetic writing style? well, it's in the idea that Murnane's prose isn't concerned with metaphors, similes, the obvious things that engage the reader and provide us with reasons to continue reading, so no, it isn't heavy on the adjectives, it doesn't lie and tell you you're reading the closest thing to poetry, it's straightforward, no frills, and it's cold and exact, and the most 'exhilirating' moments of this book actually come from minor revelations throughout the text--this book on memory relies on the memory of the reader to allow its magic to function efficiently, and for this reason alone, it's difficult even placing a finger on an excerpt and saying: here, this is a great example of the one of the nicer moments experienced when reading this; the prose compounds past events and reaches conclusions to certain details only several pages later--no excerpt is to be placed down as a bitesized excerpt of literary genius, for the book to work, it must be read wholly, the previous contexts is necessary (this book is one of the biggest 'if you know, you knows' one could read,) and Murnane doesn't exactly waste pages no matter how 'unimportant' or insignificant the things he's communicating are to the reader: yet what does he talk about?

Well, for the most part, Border Districts is concerned with the glass, windows, stained glass in particular, but in the manner which this is done, it feels more like a combination of motif and symbolism and the author's self-professed special interests, but to state that Murnane's essentially a possibly-autistic elderly man rambling about his special interests for one hundred pages into excess would be an intensely reductive statement; this book is an in-depth exploration of the unreliability of memory (by tracing each thread to what the narrator perceives as the primordial source of the image at-hand, or, at-thought), as is of several other details I rather shield the reviewer from knowing beforehand as it might be the closest thing in resemblance to a spoiler when it comes to this book--the objects, environments, and events themselves function more like characters than any actual people mentioned in the text.

There are no chapters, there are no paragraph breaks--Murnane's sentences utilize lighthanded repetition and blade-clean grammatical structures that border on the edge of breathlessness, all of which is a testament to the author's grammatical discipline, and that implies that several of his sentences can be long, about 2 I'd consider as 'really long' as they're nearly a page in length, and that's fun because me like write big sentence as much as me like read sentence large, but I appreciate that for its stream-like reading, anyhow, if one would like to know how to write a proper sentence without the frills of obvious stylization, read this book--the author's prose isn't thick, it isn't lean, it isn't over-the-top, it's bare, yet dense, and having all the qualifications of an actual sentence; and Murnane's use of repetition, which I've previously described as lighthanded, never becomes the mind-numbing, word-melting static that is the style of repetition utilized by Robbe-Grillet in 'In the Labyrinth' (for the record, Jealousy is the better half of both Jealousy and In the Labyrinth.)

When one brings their attention to the world outside of Border Districts after a thorough reading session, one is accompanied by a strange sense of peace and incisive attention to the smaller things existing around them, much akin to being given glasses for the first time when not aware of actually needing them; this is a lovely work, a good read that I've found myself really enjoying from time to time, traveling along Murnane's thoughts with an attention nearly as close as his when he'd thought them.

Excerpts:
"I seem to recall that I tried sometimes, many years ago, to move my glass marbles from place to place on the carpet near my desk with the vague hope that some or another chance arrangement of them would restore to me some previously irretrievable mood. The marbles, however, were too variously coloured, and each differed too markedly from the other. The colours seemed to vie, to compete. Or, a single marble might suggest more than I was in search of: a whole afternoon in my childhood or a row of trees in a backyard when I had wanted back only a certain few leaves."

"Bunches of mauve wisteria blossom hung along the veranda where I had been sitting. I broke off a small bunch and put it into the pocket of my jacket. I seemed to recall that female characters in fiction set in earlier times had sometimes pressed flowers between the pages of books. I intended to ask my wife later to help me preserve the coloured petals, but I was drunk when I reached home and I put away my suit without remembering the wisteria. Weeks later, while I was dressing for a race-meeting, I found in the pocket of my jacket the shrivelled brown remnants of what had been mauve petals."

(FYI: by 'race-meeting,' he means horse races [I don't want anyone getting any ideas.])

[89.99999999999999/100]

I ended up buying myself a cheap copy of Murnane's collected short fiction 'Stream System' right before finishing this book (I'd purchased it 2-ish days ago [thanks, WorldOfBooks]); I just had to absorb some more of this fine Australian gentleman into my system before I inevitably cough him out.