مليون نافذة

by Gerald Murnane, جيرالد مرنين, محمد عبدالنبي (Translator)

«يُجبر القارئُ على التشكيك في العلاقة بين الخيال والواقع، والعالمين المرئي وغير المرئي، والتساؤل عن العلاقة بين المؤلف كراوٍ والقارئ كشريك في الخطاب الأدبي» - «ورلد ليترتشر توداي»

«قراءة استثنائية وآسرة بشكلٍ مستمر، من البداية إلى النهاية» - «ميدويست بوك ريفيو»

«عبقري على مستوى «بيكيت»» - «تيجو كول»، مؤلف رواية «مدينة مفتوحة»

«كتاب ذو بناء مُعقَّد ونطاق فكري واسع، لقد وجدت نفسي منبهرًا بأصالة «مُرْنين»» - «جيمز ماكنمارا»، «نيويورك تايمز»

«مليون نافذة» تأمُّل مبهر في الكتابة الإبداعية وبحث رائع ومُربك في أمجاد كتابة الرواية ومزالقها، مع التركيز على أهمية الثقة وحتمية الخيانة، في الكتابة كما في الحياة. تستكشف الخيوطُ المتداخلة لهذا العمل العلاقات المشحونة بين المؤلف والقارئ، والطفل والوالد، والصديق وصديقته، والزوج وزوجته.
هذه ليست رواية للقارئ العادي، بل للقارئ الجاد الذي يحب تأمُّل مصائر الشخصيات الروائية، ومنطقية تسلسل الأحداث، ويهتم بكل ما هو أعمق من الحكاية البسيطة التي يقدمها العمل الروائي عادة. هي أيضًا رواية ممتعة لكل من يهتم بالكتابة، حيث تفتح له بابًا لفهم أسباب اختيار كبار الكُتَّاب لمسارٍ بعينه لإحدى شخصياتهم.
تُصنَّف «مليون نافذة» كرواية «ميتا-فيكشن»، وهو تصنيف للروايات التي يشرح مؤلفوها دوافع شخصياتهم، ويناقشون منطقية الأحداث التي اختلقوها، كل هذا في نَصِّ الرواية نفسه، مما يجعل هذا النوع مميزًا ومثيرًا لتفكير القارئ وتأملاته.

«جيرالد مُرْنين» والذي ولد عام 1939 واحد من أشهر المؤلفين الأستراليين المعاصرين. نشر أكثر من عشرة روايات وكتب مقالات أدبية. حاصل على جائزة «باتريك وايت» الأدبية المرموقة، وجائزة «ملبورن» للأدب، والجائزة الأدبية لمهرجان «أديليد»، والزمالة الفخرية من «مجلس الأدب» في «مجلس أستراليا».

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

224 pages, Paperback

First published May 10, 2014

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

[د.سيد (نصر برشومي) · Rating 4 out of 5]

سترسل لك صديقتك صورة على هامش ندوة السرديات التقطها تلميذ لم تعرفه
تتعجب من كونه حضر معك محاضراتك كلها تقريبا ولم يتكلم أبدا
هؤلاء الذين ألقوا الأسئلة لم تشغلهم المجلة نصف المفتوحة في يدك على صفحة لقصيدة عامية لشاعر تحبه وأهديت ديوانه "الموف" ذات أصيل لفتاة لم تكترث وتركته على طاولة الكافيه دون أن تفتحه لتحضره لك فتاة تحمل حقيبة شمسية اللون تخبرك أنها وجدته عند عم وجدي الذي يجلس آخر شريف من ناحية محطة نجيب، في الصورة التي التقطها تلميذك الصامت فتاة تراها في الحلم فقط تقرأ معك القصيدة بصوت موجي لا يسمعه غيرك.. لا تعرف كيف التقط تلميذك النابغة تلك الصورة من حلم يقظة انصرف إليه تركيزك قبل أن يعلن صديقك رئيس الجلسة عن بحثكما المشترك بصدد منظور التخيّل بين الرواية واللارواية
تطلب المساعدة من جيرالد مرنين فيبتسم محمد عبد النبي الحاضر بوصفه مترجما ويشير عليك بسؤال أبلة حكمت
التي كانت تدرس لك كتاب القراءة الرشيدة في أحمد عرابي
الابتدائية المشتركة هناك قرب النيل
الذي لا تراه إلا في عيني فتاة ترتدي فستانا بلون "المنت"
الذي يظن صديقك الدكتور عبده أنه فسدقي كما قالت لك هدى
صاحبة المكتبة الزرقاء التي تشتري منها علب ألوانك

مليون نافذة رواية فن إبداع الرواية
إننا نسمع - ونقرأ - عن مصطلحات علم السرد والراوي ووجهة النظر والشخصيات
وهناك تصوّرات متعددة لها يستخلصها علماء النقد من استقصاء تقنيّات النصوص الروائية المتعددة التيارات الفكرية والتعبيرية - وهما لا ينفصلان - لكن ما علاقة المبدع بتلك المفاهيم؟ هذا الطرح هو فرضية جيرالد مرنين الذي يكتب عن القص الشارح أو الميتافيكشن أو ما وراء القص من منظور قارئ عالم، ولكن باسترانتيبجية روائي قاص، وهذه الوضعية الجدلية تمنح المتلقي مساحة فكرية مهمة لتأمل المفاهيم الخاصة بصنعة السرد، وتأخذه إلى ما يشبه ورشة عمل
لدراسة علم الرواية، وتلهم القاص لاستلهام تفاصيل الحياة، ومخزون الذاكرة الحسية بخاصة البصرية والسمعية، فتضع أمام مخيّلته صيغا حكائية مشحونة بالمشاعر والأفكار، مثل هذه الروايات تتطلب قراءة دقيقة أكثر من مرة، ويفيد منها المهتمون بعلم السرد
لكنها تثري الخبرة الجمالية لكل مثقف يسعى إلى معرفة عميقة

[Fionnuala]

I'm sitting here at my desk on this last day of 2022 attempting to write my final review of the year.
But the thing is, I finished A Million Windows more than three weeks ago, and as I glance through the many many paragraphs I underlined or ticked or highlit in some way, hoping they would catch my eye when it came to posting a review and would order themselves neatly for me, I feel totally distracted, my mind unwilling to settle down and make a connection with some or other of those isolated paragraphs, even while my eye roves the wintry scene beyond the window which my desk faces. I feel I can't write this review, and that the paragraphs don't want to cooperate, and that they'd prefer to merge back into the text and continue their peaceful existence there. I feel that I'd rather...

No, I won't do what I was thinking of doing in the last line of the previous paragraph because I really do want to have a complete set of reviews to match my set of 2022 books. So I will pick one or other of the quotes I've marked up and force it to take me somewhere:

The detail about to be reported has not only stayed in my mind since my first and only reading, nearly forty years ago, of the work of fiction by […] but is the only detail that I can recall from my having read the work.

You're wondering what the book is and what the detail might be, aren't you? I'll let you guess at the book but here's the detail: a tiny butterfly alights on the narrator of the book's desk as he is writing his memoir story, and had seemed to look at him as though he might have been the god of the butterflies, according to Gerald Murnane.
Murnane then goes on to link that butterfly-memory with a butterfly-memory from an entirely different book, in fact a book from the other side of the world, flitting directly and easily from one to the other. Can you guess which book Murnane might be talking about from this description:

the narrator of the novel, so to call it, claims that the town merges so comfortably into the countryside surrounding it that many a butterfly urged to travel from some or another grassy landscape north of the town to some or another more congenial landscape south of the town chooses not to follow some or another long, circuitous course around the margins of the town but rather to flit through the town itself: to pass over roads and between shops and houses as though these are only recent and temporary alterations to the long-standing arrangement of things; as though the countryside is permanent and the town merely temporary.

Nice, isn't it? But where have those butterflies taken my review? Not anywhere I can follow easily, I'm afraid, unless it is to recall a brief scene from my own book-memory in which a butterfly tried vainly to pass through the glass of a window. It's a description I quoted in the review of the book concerned so I have it handy:

The fire greyed, then glowed, and the tortoiseshell butterfly beat on the lower pane of the window; beat, beat, beat; repeating that if no human being ever came, never, never, never, the books would be mouldy, the fire out and the tortoiseshell butterfly dead on the pane.

That beautiful but melancholy vignette is by an author I was disappointed not to find Murnane mentioning in this book or in any of the others of his I've read—he talks about real novels often within his fictions. I don't think he ever talks about fictional novels by the way. No, he's no Alberto Manguel, for which I'm grateful because I have a tendency to flit off after any book titles that are mentioned in the books I read, which is all very well if the books exist but which, when it's a question of unreliable narrators, can lead me on a merry flutter to nowhere.

And now this unreliable review has ended up in a nowhere place again, beating its wings uselessly against the window pane. But maybe I can pluck out another highlit paragraph and make it do my bidding:

This present work being neither autobiography nor fiction of the same order as the work that I began to write, in the present tense, in the mid-1960s, I need report here only the detail first mentioned in the seventh paragraph of this present work. I need report here only that the window first mentioned in the first paragraph of this present work of fiction might have seemed, at the moment when it was first mentioned, as a distant window might have seemed on an extensive plain to a narrator of an autobiography or to a chief character of a work of fiction – might have seemed like a spot of golden oil, even though I myself have never seen any window with such an appearance.

Hmm. I think the reason Murmane has never seen a window with such an appearance is that he's more likely to be behind the window, sitting at his desk composing sentences just as I am doing now rather than outside looking towards the window from a vantage point in the distance. But for a man who has spent so many hours of his life enclosed in a small space composing sentences at his desk or else reading other writers's sentences, he has a fierce dislike of limits and boundaries in life or in books, or at least his main characters have:

He found it impossible to accept that the last page of a book of fiction was any sort of boundary or limit. For him, the personages who had first appeared while he was reading some or another fictional text were no less alive after the text itself had come to an end than while he had pored over it.

I think that may be the most useful quote for my review purposes I've hit on yet. I'm going to modify it to explain the urge I had in the last line of the first paragraph of this review when I considered what I'd rather be doing instead of writing this review. What I realised while scanning the highlit passages in Murnane's book was that I didn't want A Million Windows to be marked as 'Read'. That I didn't want the sentences of which it is composed to ever end, that I wanted them to continue in my mind like a long stream of ticker tape, and that the only solution was to put the book back on my currently-reading shelf, or better still, on my ongoing shelf, because I intend to be 'going on' with this book about books for a very long time!

……………………………………………………………

Edit: 2nd January.
I just came across this line in Murnane's Barley Patch: I could not reasonably have asked of any author that he or she should write a book so long that I could never read to the end of it...

Further edit:
The books from which Murnane remembered butterfly scenes are:
Epitaph of a Small Winner, by Machado de Assis
The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy
The book I remembered a butterfly scene from:
Between the Acts by Virginia Woolf

………………………………………………………………

For those of you who might be wondering about the title of Murnane's book, it's a reference to the preface to The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James, and I just happen to have the relevant bit handy because I included it in my review of HJ's book back in 2016. So here is HJ's vision of the million windows:
The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million—a number of possible windows not to be reckoned, rather; every one of which has been pierced, or is still pierceable, in its vast front, by the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will. These apertures, of dissimilar shape and size, hang so, all together, over the human scene that we might have expected of them a greater sameness of report than we find. They are but windows at the best, mere holes in a dead wall, disconnected, perched aloft; they are not hinged doors opening straight upon life. But they have this mark of their own that at each of them stands a figure with a pair of eyes, or at least with a field-glass, which forms, again and again, for observation, a unique instrument, insuring to the person making use of it an impression distinct from every other. He and his neighbors are watching the same show, but one seeing more where the other sees less, one seeing black where the other sees white, one seeing big where the other sees small, one seeing coarse where the other sees fine. And so on, and so on; there is fortunately no saying on what, for the particular pair of eyes, the window may NOT open; “fortunately” by reason, precisely, of this incalculability of range. The spreading field, the human scene, is the “choice of subject”; the pierced aperture, either broad or balconied or slit-like and low-browed, is the “literary form”; but they are, singly or together, as nothing without the posted presence of the watcher without, in other words, the consciousness of the artist. Tell me what the artist is, and I will tell you of what he has BEEN conscious. Thereby I shall express to you at once his boundless freedom and his “moral” reference.

[Katia N · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is my second Murnane and I am rapidly becoming a fan. His writing style is unique - very precise and dense text, long sentences. Reading him requires a substantial concentration, but at the same time I find it mediative and unexpectedly addictive. I gathered his most famous novel is The Plains. But I came to his oeuvre sideways - so happened I’ve started with the A History of Books. Then I’ve read a story “In far fields” from Stream System: The Collected Short Fiction of Gerald Murnane. And now - I finished this book. I’ve started with his late, more abstract work. But I do not regret it.

Murnane’s genius is that he reveals the way how he approaches writing explicitly within his fictions. It is all there for you to see how he composes. The reader is given access to his subject matter and, at the same time how he works with that. By doing it, he manages to create an illusion that the reader and the writer are doing their work simultaneously - he writes and you read. Or so it seems to me at least.

I also think that Murnane fiction stems from the system he has created to understand reality. Many philosophers comprised their own systems to describe the universe including metaphysical part. This systematic view has unfortunately ended circa after Kant as it has become too confusing and contradictory. But Murnane’s system works for Murnane at minimum. And it certainly leads to very original writing.

The following is how I understood Murnane’s system (he doesn’t use the word “system”, but it is easier for me to describe it this way):

There are two worlds: visible world of people of “flesh and blood”, objects plus nature and invisible world existing in his mind. It is worth underlying that invisible world is as real to him as visible and it is populated by “images” he can see in his mind and feelings or other connections between some of those images. Images are certain clusters of objects and “personages” - those could be either totally out of his imagination or memories from his encounters or characters from the books he has read in his life. He does not like the word “characters” or “memories” as for him all those persons are simply “personages” of the same nature.

In his story “In far fields”, he visualises this invisible world as a big green-grass space with the clusters of settlements (images) sometimes connected with the roads (feelings, associations). In his mind, he sees an image (in his sense of the word); he starts describing it by writing or he might see a totally different image straightaway. At some stage, he might realise how those images are connected or it might not happen. So when he writes he just moves around this mental map. But obviously he does not always manage to write the stuff down before it changes. That is why for him, the writing is not totally the same as the subject matter and the characters (or personages) are impossible to control almost in the same sense it would be impossible to control any “flash and blood” human. It is not the stream of consciousness as he does not associate his ego with what he sees. Ego’s role is just to write the stuff down. Consequently, he calls this type of writing “reporting” and the resulting work is “true fiction’.

In this book, “A Million windows” he writes:

I have never seemed able to do whatever it is that other persons seem to do whenever they think or claim to be thinking. I am capable only of seeing and feeling, although I can see and feel, of course, in both the visible and the invisible worlds … Only I can do is to select. This is no easy task, but I am mostly able, while struggling to keep in mind what I can only call an instinctive desire on my part to arrange the densest possible concentration of meaning on the fewest possible pages – I am mostly able to confine myself to reporting what I, whether as implied author or narrator, see fit to report.

I find it all very fascinating both from purely fictional literary perspective and also from the insight how someone’s mind works. If you want an entry point into his later texts, I would recommend this short story “In far fields” from Stream System: The Collected Short Fiction of Gerald Murnane. It might be a gentle introduction into the intersection of his two worlds.

"A Million Windows" has been inspired by Henry James quote “The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million”.

On the very superficial level, the action (or the lack of it) takes place in an imaginary house populated by imaginary writers each with the window of his/her own (not a room in this case). But it would not be Murnane I’ve described above if it would be just as simple as that. This is the one of the first paragraphs of this work:

I have to admit that authors were withholding information from readers long before the first film-scripts were written. Long before cameras could record such scenes, solitary characters were reported as sitting in quiet rooms or trudging across lonely landscapes at the beginnings of works of fiction while the readers of those works looked forward to learning, all in good time, the names of those characters, their histories, and even their motives and deepest feelings. The narrator of this work of fiction wants no reader of the previous paragraph to look forward to learning any such details in connection with the personage mentioned there.

And from there on, “the narrator of this work” starts to subvert any conventions or challenge our expectations what we think we know of fiction. I put “the narrator” in the quotation marks because again in Murnane’s world the narrator could never fully stand up for the author. But equally he does not like unreliable narrators either. He is also not a big fan of the fiction without any narrator’s voice. He finds it unconvincing. He deserves a special attention for the books with multiple narrators or the characters taking the storytelling in their hands. On this, he is especially difficult to impress I have to say. In this work, the narrator reminisces about reading a certain book:

“I surely understood at the time that a close study of events and places and persons referred to in each monologue could have told me who was the presumed speaker of each and when, in the time-sequence of the whole work, each speaker could have been presumed to have delivered his or her outpouring. But I was just as surely hindered from doing so by the fact that each of the monologues, as I call them, was made up of the same unrelenting prose. Authors of fiction purporting to come from a medley of voices are seldom skilful enough to compose a distinctive prose for each supposed speaker.”

You wouldn't probably guess that he is talking about One Hundred Years of Solitude. He does not mention the title. But from the description of the book it is more or less evident. His opinion might upset the numerous fans of that book and they might disagree. I personally do not remember it well enough. But his view has definitely reminded me of the highly praised novel published this year I’ve recently read. In that novel, four characters were giving an interior voice by the author. But three of them sounded exactly the same as each other in terms of their language. One might differentiate them by the context of course. But then what was the purpose of giving them that interiority if it did not create a voice unique for each individually?

In ‘A Million Windows” Murnane often switches between single first person and the plural one narrators. Respectively he himself has managed to create a bit of a “medley”. Though, in his case, they are “reporters” of course, not the voices.

“The word plot is seldom heard in the sporadic discussions that take place in this upper corridor of this remote wing of this building that remains largely unfamiliar to most of us. Many of us claim to find the word not only irrelevant but scarcely comprehensible.”

Consequently, Dickens is admired but not as an example to follow. The writers in this “upper corridor” cannot comprehend how he managed to control his characters and neatly plan their lives. While these writers do not even try. Instead they ask the question: “why most fictional personages seem to behave unpredictably and not even as foreseen by those called, for convenience, their authors?”

But Henry James receives a big firm “yes” from the crowd from the upper corridor in this house with million windows. especially for The Golden Bowl.

However, this book is not an essay or literary criticism. All these literary musings are intertwined with “the images” and the stories describing them. The result might be read as many times as the amount of windows in the house of fiction. And each time you might find something new.

I want to end this review with the little episode from "In Far Fields". First of all, it underlines once more this distinction Murnane makes between the subject matter existing in his “invisible world” and what comes out of it as his writing. Secondly, I am convinced all of us would be able to relate to this little story (maybe not to the last sentence though).

More than thirty years ago, before I become a writer of books, I used to seek out persons who might talk with me about books. Whenever I was reading a book those days, I would hear in my mind the sound of myself talking in the future to someone about the book…. After I had become a writer of books, I was more wary of talking about books. I understood by then that each book I had written was not the book I had read in my mind before I had begun to write. …After I had begun to suspect these things, I seldom talked about books. .. I would point out a book to a person or would place a book in the hands of a person or would leave it where a person might come across it, but I would seldom talk about any of these books. Nowadays, I am more likely to hide books rather than put them in the way of people…

[Nada Elshabrawy · Rating 4 out of 5]

متعب جدًا وإن فعلًا مهم ومختلف.

[سارة سمير · Rating 1 out of 5]

عرفت من دعاية الناشر المكتوبة على الغلاف الورقي الحافظ للغلاف المقوى أن الرواية، إو ما تسمى بهذا، تتخذ نسقا لولبيا من حيث الزمن

تعالالي بالراحة كدا يا عم انت عشان بس انا مش فطن زي ما حضرتك بتقول
يعني ايه مش فاهمة انت كاتب رواية ولا كتاب نقد ولا ساخر بتسخر من اخواتك الكتاب ولا بتحفل على نفسك نفسي افهم



كانت بداية مهببة لما قررت تدخلنا مدخل الكاتب العارف بكل شيئ وعديناها
بدأت تهبل مع الراوي ولا الكاتب ولا مش عارفة مين االي قاعد في مبنى من طابقين او تلاتة قولت وماله يمكن بيحب يسرح من الشباك

قلبت دماغنا بالصبية ام شعر داكن اللي ما بقتش صبية بس لسه شعرها دلكن وبعدين تاني رجعت صبية وشعرها داكن
ما علينا

الكاتب ممل وبينقد نفسه بنفسه من ناحية مبدأ احفل على نفسي اه تحفلوا عليا والله اعملكم كتاب نقد تاني يروشكم

ما قدرتش اكمله ومش هكمله ومش عايزة اكمله ولا اشوف وشه تاني

شكرا يا 2024
خيبة الامل من اول السنة في وشي

[Ahmed · Rating 4 out of 5]

مليون نافذة.....جيرالد مُرنين
ترجمة: محمد عبدالنبي

النوع دا من النصوص الواحد بيقف قدامه مبلم، نص حكائي ممتاز، بسرد معجز، كل جملة فيه كأنه طوبة بتبني بيت جميل، كل كلمة لها فائدة، نحن أمام كاتب عظيم مجرب، يقتحم الكتابة كمغامر جسور ويخرج لنا بمغامرة مدهشة تستحق الحكي، وعندما ننتهي نشعر بحزن لنهايتها.
نص يحتاج كل تركيز القاريء فلا يفوته منها شيء، وبعدها بتنشأ علاقة بين القاريء وبينه كأنه هو كاتبها.
الترجمة كانت ممتازة الحقيقة، ترجمة واعية مفيدة.

[Jim Elkins]

Why Reviews of Murnane are Not Adequate, and How Complex Failures Produce Great Literature

I find Gerald Murnane much more perplexing than most readers seem to. In a review of A Million Windows in the "New York Times," June 17, 2016, James McNamara sums up Murnane's theory of fiction this way:

"The Australian novelist Gerald Murnane has become known for works of difficult genius, and his latest will only burnish that reputation. An exploration of the mind and of literary creation, it is a book of intricate construction and vast intellectual scope.
Moving between fiction, philosophy and literary theory, A Million Windows investigates and demonstrates the aesthetic of what Murnane calls 'true fiction,' which faithfully records the narrator’s 'invisible world' of the mind. This is distinct from artifice, where the writer consciously creates, and realism, where the reader is prompted to think of characters and places as actually existing. Rather, 'true fiction' conceives of an invisible metaphysical plane that extends infinitely forward, backward, even sideways, into every possible temporal, topical and spatial dimension. In it are autonomous 'fictional personages' (characters), whose existence the writer 'learns of' rather than creates."

This is as succinct and accurate a theory as I have read, and I think it's substantially correct. It's helpful, reading Murnane, to keep three terms in mind:

1. "True fiction" is about the narrator's (and the author's) mind. (Exactly how it's about the mind is another question.)
2. "Self-referential" fiction (what McNamara calls "artifice") occurs when narrators posture in front of their readers and "wonder aloud, as it were, what fates to assign to various characters," as in Tristram Shandy. (p. 34)
3. "Film" (Murnane's preferred term) or "realism" (McNamara's term) occurs when the narrator and author wish to present a fictional world as real.

Murnane's idea of fiction isn't any more intricate than McNamara's summary provided that a reader doesn't try to follow Murnane's arguments. McNamara goes on to say A Million Windows "performs the theory it advances," but the book isn't just an example of its concerns: even more than a fiction, it is an investigation. Murnane has described his books, which are marketed as fiction, as "detailed reports" of the contents of his mind at the time of writing. ("The Still-Breathing Author," in Sydney Review of Books, February 6, 2018.) The narrator's voice is consistently affectless and grammatically precise. The book asks to be understood, not just "marveled at" as a sign of "genius" or "intellectual power and originality" (paraphrasing McNamara).

McNamara's three-point summary would be an adequate conceptual schema for reading Murnane, except that the three positions are exposited in an exceptionally unclear, inconsistent, irrational manner. These difficulties do not occur at the level of the fictional stories in the book, which are more or less continuous and ultimately traditional in affect, enabling readers to find their way through the book, and to experience its stories as expressive and moving. The problem is that the book itself--its language, its address, its grammatical precision--gives no sign that the passages on narrative theory are to be skimmed or taken as signs of a poetic evocation of the complexity of memory. On the contrary, those passages give every sign that they are to be understood and evaluated.

The questions I have about Murnane's fiction require an unusual amount of explication. I recognize the fact that spending 800 words on two sentences, as I am about to do in section 1--without even getting near the book's main topics--puts me way off to one side of the bell curve of reader's responses. Either reviewers and readers are reading too loosely, or my response is as nearly pathological as Murnane's own bedroom full of filing cabinets, which are so well described in Mark Binelli's wonderful piece in the New York Times (tinyurl.com/yd9bf98m).

It's possible to agree with Will Heyward's feeling that "beneath the immaculate surface of his formal, outmoded sentences runs a dark current of hopelessly compressed—hopeless, in that is otherwise inexpressible, and seemingly irrevocable—emotion" and at the same time feel Heyward's reading is entirely too loose and poetic. Reading Murnane, Heyward writes,

"The world can seem... as a maze of as yet unmade phenomenal connections. Navigating this maze, and realizing the connections within it, are part of his preoccupation with the act of writing. In writing, these connections are both invented and discovered. A single, remote phrase might rise to a series of responses, which then, like fractals, multiply again." [Heyward, in Music and Literature, tinyurl.com/ydcg2ywn]

Fractals aren't the right analogy for Murnane's distinctions, because nothing in Murnane disappears from sight into infinite complexity: everything is carefully named. It's also not enough to note that the book's title comes from "The Portrait of a Lady," and conjures fiction's house of a million rooms, or even to cite, as Heyward does, Murnane saying "I would like to be able to write a text, or create a text, so complicated that I would get lost in it." It's not enough because the book itself asks to be read slowly and carefully.

And I disagree absolutely with Heyward's conclusion: "Given the elliptical and awkward nature of Murnane’s writing," he says, "an easy mistake is to strain to understand him, but his writing is a visual proposition." That is like a review of a physics textbook that proposes readers needn't worry about the equations, because physics is to be "marveled at" and praised for its "intellectual power and originality." If those qualities are true, it's because physics has arguments worth attending to--even if some aren't true and others are mistaken.


1
Here is an example. The pages where Murnane's narrator distinguishes his book from "self-referential fiction" open with a description of the phenomenon, and close a page later with the narrator's first negative judgment about "self-referential fiction." The narrator notes that Tristram Shandy, "some of the fiction of Anthony Trollope," "much of the fiction of Thomas Hardy," and Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller oppose "writer and reader... as the players on either side of a chessboard." He then says:

"Even the undiscerning reader of this fiction of mine should have understood by now that I, the narrator, would dread to feel that we were separated even by these sentences." (p. 33)

This is both unexpected and apparently poorly aimed as a rejoinder against self-reference in fiction. I might have expected Murnane's first-person narrator to say that the manner in which he makes reference to his fiction differs from the theatrical model in Tristram Shandy. Or that he did not find the staging of a contest between reader and author to be persuasive. Instead we're given an unusual and emotional declaration: he would "dread" to be separated from his reader "even by these sentences." Of course he is separated by exactly those sentences, so the sentence itself cannot be the end of the matter: and more important, we have been given no particular reason to think the narrator wants to be close to us (I am echoing the "we" in the passage). It's as if the implied author has suddenly realized why he doesn't like what he calls "self-referential fiction."

(It's an entirely separate question whether we can believe that Murnane himself was unaware of the entire movement of postmodern metafiction beyond Calvino, and whether he knew that it doesn't rely on opposing "writer and reader"--whether he realized other people had been experimenting with different kinds of self-awareness not at all unlike his own. Elsewhere in this book, the narrator becomes abruptly coy about authors' names, pretending--how else can we interpret it?--to have forgotten the name of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Of course the narrator's and the author's minds are full of the names of books beyond James and Hardy.)

This passage I quoted is only one paragraph from a three-page section on the difference between A Million Windows and "self-referential fiction." The following pages just make things more obscure. At the conclusion he says he's already explained himself, but "for the sake of the undiscerning reader, I shall repeat that I am the narrator of this work and not the author." (p. 35)

This is a common and reasonable position for anyone interested in narration, and when I read it I expected he might continue by saying that as the narrator, he cannot play the games of "self-reference" that Sterne or Calvino play. But instead he says this:

"In the matter of my fate, so to call it, I am no more able to exercise choice than is any narrator of any [text]..." (p. 35)

Surely this doesn't address the question. It's evident narrators don't have control and so can't play games of the sort Murnane's narrator is imagining. But that has nothing to do with self-referentiality.


2
What matters most in terms of understanding is what Murnane's narrator means by "true fiction." I won't even begin to give arguments as I've done above. Instead I'll just note two salient markers.

(Before I do that, it's ineresting to try to coordinate Murnane's theories about his "true fiction," or "reports," with narrative theory. There's a passage in Gerard Genette's Fiction and Diction that is apposite. It's a footnote, in which Genette is talking about relations between Narrator (N), Author (A), and Character (C). If A = N = C, that's autobiography. The footnote describes a kind of narrative that fits Murnane's very well. "A narrative that betrayed its own fictionality in every sentence," Genette writes, "by an expression of the sort 'Let us imagine that...'... would be perfectly 'serious' in enunciation and would be covered by the formula A = N." (p. 70 n. 1) That's interesting because in Murnane, the author is assumed not to be the narrator, except in his interviews, when he speaks easily about his "fictions" being "reports." Genette would have to say: for the Narrator, A doesn't equal N; for the Author, A = N.)

First, regarding the narrator's (and implied author's) control of the distance between the events he recounts and the narrator who recounts those events.

Murnane's narrator's distance from his "fictional characters" is variable and unstable. I said this in my notes on Barley Patch. In A Million Windows the narrator tends to slip downard, in the direction of what he calls "film," from a starting point that is as abstract and metafictional as he can make it. These slips, I think, are not premeditated, and not wholly in Murnane's control.

A typical section or paragraph might begin like this:

"If ever he had asked himself, during all the years since, how a person might feel on seeming to recognize as a version of himself or herself some or another personage in a work of fiction..." (p. 83)

A half-page later these many qualifications are no longer present:

"Sometimes, in later years, he supposed that... the answer quoted should have shamed and humiliated him..."

The hypothetical, atemporal, ungendered character becomes becomes a generalized, temporalized narrator, who becomes a fictionalized character, who becomes a memory of the narrator's, who becomes a memory of the implied author's.

A Million Windows, like Barley Patch, contains a central story: in this case, it's about a woman; in Barley Patch it's about the narrator's parents. Enframing and infiltrating those stories are metafictional hypotheticals. In both books Murnane (the implied author) can't seem to control the degree of separation. It's an expressive quality, this slippage: it's part of the book's interest and pathos, but there is no sign that it is intended.

3
Regarding the narrator's (and implied author's) theories about the ontology--the mode of being--of his "fictional characters."

As McNamara says, Murnane is concerned with "autonomous 'fictional personages' (characters), whose existence the writer 'learns of' rather than creates." Yet Murnane's narrator (and by implication Murnane, since this phenomenon repeats across several books) has a self-contradictory, or at least a very counter-intuitive, theory about the nature of fictional characters. At one point about halfway through the book he rehearses his complaint that reviewers and critics always discuss characters "as though they are persons living in the world." (p. 94) He says he approves of something Evelyn Waugh said: he had never "entertained the least interest in why characters behaved as they did." This, it seems, is an anti-realist position, which wants to let fictional characters behave in any number of ways that people don't. Waugh, Murnane's narrator says, "felt no obligation to try to read the minds of his creatures."

So far so good. But Murnane has a theory, both in A Million Windows and in Barley Patch, that characters in fiction can be understood as leading their own lives. In Barley Patch he also imagines characters living "in" the worlds of specific fictions even though the authors don't name them. (And he fails to consistently distinguish those two possibilities.)

The sense in which such "fictional characters" (or characters that are "potentially" available for fictions) are alive without intentionality is entirely obscure. I think the best way to understand this is as a theory ruined by its author's intensely held and mutually incompatible desires: to write about fiction in such a way that it becomes "true" to its author's experience of writing about fiction, and at the same time true to its author's experience of reading fiction.

*
At the moment I can't do better than that. Mark Binelli's New York Times essay reveals the spectacular compulsive complexity of Murnane's personal archive, and it should be a warning against readings that reduce his books to expressive narratives of memory embedded in vaguely understood theories of fiction.

For me, Murnane's books fail to construct reliable theory, and the theory fails to prevent the narrators from telling the very human, "realist" stories of love and memory that are at their core. Together those two failures produce texts that are expressive in ways no other author has achieved. Beckett, Calvino, Perec, Stein, and other experimental modernists are consistent and controlled by comparison. Murnane's are complex failures of authorial intention and control, and they produce genuinely interesting writing that appears to be literature.

c. 2020, revised 2024

[Stephen P(who no longer can participate due to illness) · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve waited after reading to come up to this novel to be able to review it. So easy to say that I, “Cannot do it justice”. The temptation is there but it isn’t that simple. The work is beyond, not what I can think but what I can grasp. Indeed, this is a large part of what the book is about.

I have traveled through and resided in the land of Murnania having read a few of his works which certainly does not leave me an expert. However, it does give me a sense that, The Millions, is the culmination of his many years of writing, of thinking, of living. It is the most relevant text I have read. This does not mean, that in his enigmatic style, it is a great work of art according to the cartography of literary spells. What it has meant to me is a guide to the thinking of truth and understanding my choices and decisions. Some of which may have already been rendered by an internal cavalcade of attorneys, jurors, and judges without my knowing. Societies robed consorts lined up against the world of my mind with its hazy aperture and gauzed apparitions.

Moving through the many hallways, corridors, wings of Murnane’s two or three story house, we pass by windowed rooms. He recalls a castle where a film-maker has placed each of his characters from his career in a window. Murnane’s two or three story house is of a million windows, taken from a Henry James quote,

“The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million …”.

A room is lit and at a desk by the light a writer, writes. He is an author of personages which exist within their own realm and proceed through the writing of their own accord.

“The single holland blind in his room was still drawn down in late afternoon although he would have got out of his bed and would have washed and dressed at first light. At this moment when he became a personage in this work of fiction, I supposed him to be seated at his small desk with his back to the glowing blind and to be reading, by the light of a desk-lamp, a sentence that he had written, perhaps only a few minutes earlier, at the head of a blank page.”


The author no longer believes he is telling the story but it is the narrator. The narrator being also a personage, a personage within the story of personages.

P.78 “The narrator rails against a narrator(s) of close
3rd person seeing only out of the main characters eyes.
Yet, he being only a fictional personage in this text allows
us therefore to see only through his eyes. Who is he? The author?
Like others he/she is a “Fictional Personage.”

The narrator does not sound nor seem lonely. Rather, she/he seems content, possibly preferring their world to be filled with such personages who exhibit a very perceptible life of their own existence. The visible world with its complications and disappointments, its aim for the necessities of survival do not measure up. Although agreed upon as the back slapping confines of, Reality, it is thin and uni-dimensional.


His two or is it three story house, because how can one be sure, is stocked by the windows of the writer’s own personages. When we look at this story it is readily apparent that we live within a world composed and narrated by an indecisive narrator. Well she/he should be. The visible world is flossing and tooth brushing filled with people we create, an image in our mind, at times an image of an image. The characters in what Murnane calls the visible world (VW) are flat lacking consciousness as are actors in a film,(who are performing a role or persona imagined by a writer-similar to Mann’s problem with film in the Magic Mountain-leaving the watcher two layers away from…? In film there is but room for the screenwriter’s imagination, the actors interpretation, but no room for the watcher to slip in and participate.) This is compared to the personages in the invisible world (IW). These personages exist, so shows the narrator of Murnane’s text we are reading which Murnane reminds us is a piece of fiction in and of itself. These personages are known at a depth only sought but rarely if ever perceived in the VW. Murnane is quite clear he prefers the IW. This is where meaning resides. Not in the flesh and blood. The IW is seen through the eyes of an unreliable narrator, a world constituted of, as-ifs and may-bes. They are possibilities that writers of true fiction allow for the reader (another personage) to slip into. There characters and stories not only continue on past the end of the text but thrive in relationship to the true reader.

These writers existing behind the windows of the two story or possibly three story house, are of different types; some trying to calculate their fiction to be as close to a replica of the VW as possible, others dealing in allusions, symbols, metaphors, in mysteries, etc. By following the corridors and peeking into the rooms the narrator’s journey as a writer over the years can be mapped out. Though these writers generally keep separate at times they do meet, discussing writing, fiction, authors of old (Henry James) moving toward and attempting to arrive at true writing which will engage a true reader..

However, it is important to remember the narrator in this work of fiction is a personage relaying the tale of personages under the pen of the author himself. Yet Murnane is a personage to each of us. We don’t know him but for only what we have heard or read. At the end the narrator stands before the large house looking up at the author’s window. He learns nothing as though something could be learned from the flesh and blood writer.

What it come down to is that many consider the flesh and blood visible world to be sacrosanct when the reality of this reality is that it can only be constituted of fictions we tell ourselves. This visible world is necessary for survival but does not have to be considered beyond that. We know or have the opportunity to know landscapes, people, in literature that reside in the invisible world. We participate in their coming about and their existence. We sense a soul by what is not said as much if not more than what is. This is a world dense with meaning and offers a life of meaning, therefore a life of maybes, possibilities. We all have a choice. A vital choice.


* Make of it what you will, but though not ordered as such the book came in a large print edition. The words huge. The pages tall.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Precise and carefully constructed. An entirely pleasurable and stimulating reading experience. One of the best books I have read in quite some time.

[Ben Winch · Rating 5 out of 5]

To ask of fiction that it tell us about the world, I can’t help but think, is to sell fiction short. Fiction, surely, tells us more. About the universe, say? Or better, about life. And not just human life, though lacking another shape to adopt fiction’s characters may appear as human; they needn’t though, not at all.

Apparently I started something when I read Barley Patch last year; in the past month or two I’ve read Invisible But Enduring Lilacs and A Million Windows and I’ve just picked up A History of Books. All of these are works from Murnane’s “late period”, written after he gave up fiction-writing for eight years following an aborted draft for a long book which was to have followed Inland, and all mine the same theme with variations, the core of which could be said to be the interplay of memory, reading and writing fiction. A Million Windows, the latest, is, to my mind, the culmination. A manifesto, but at times a baffling one, both tantalising and frustrating, apt to break off at the threshold of its seeming complete, as if it were no more than common sense for the “discerning reader” (a favourite phrase of Murnane’s) to piece together the remainder. But that’s not to criticise the prose itself, which, I’m tempted to say, is just about as clear as prose can be. After all, it’s a hard task he’s set himself, this explication of what makes a narrator “strong” in the Murnanian sense by a (we hope) Murnanian strong narrator. And in at least one important respect, Murnane and I concur almost completely:

I have sometimes tried to explain what I consider a widespread confusion about the nature of fictional personages.

Forget, for now, that (as Murnane ensures us) the “I” of this passage is himself a “fictional personage”; in any case (Murnane also ensures us) he’s most likely reliable (Murnane being unable, in most if not all cases, to abide unreliable narrators, or narrators whom he describes as having “acted in bad faith” (or was it their authors who acted thus? I forget. In any case neither Murnane nor his narrators, we suspect, are likely to repeat this so-called mistake)). The point is he means it, I’m certain. Get this:

Rather than struggling to write about her, he is mostly content to accept her existence as incontrovertible proof that the reading and the writing of fiction are much more than a mere transaction during which one person causes another person to see in mind a sort of shadowy film; that the whole enterprise of fiction exists mostly to enable her and numerous others of her kind to flit from place to place in mind after mind as though many a fictional text is a mere bridge or stairway raised for their convenience of travel.

Now if that isn’t the most beautiful image and concept I’ve read or heard of in the past months I don’t know what is. And Murnane’s is, surely, the most singleminded attempt to allow this travel by fictional personages to occur with minimal interruption, so much so that for its sake he’s happy to disrupt any and every apparent through-line which might have otherwise aided the reader in her or his effort to appreciate the text. Images or potential plot-points which in another work might have borne scrutiny are here often ignored, while scenes and images which seem to do nothing more than note a character’s (or fictional personage’s) passing are returned to repeatedly. At times the structure Murnane hangs it all upon seems close to arbitrary, and Murnane (or his narrator) himself comments as if ironically on the structural notes he has beside him as he writes, having forgotten the import or intention of certain sections and instead leaving it to chance to dictate where he turns next, but always with that goal of facilitating his mysterious creatures/entities in their travel via his work to wherever it is they’re going.

As I read A Million Windows (carefully, in blocks of ten or so pages, with time to reflect on each) I became certain that Gerald Murnane is a unique genius, with all of the positive and negative implications that the word “genius” implies. He (if he’s anything like his narrators) is opinionated, and narrow in his tastes, and defensive of a stance which can hardly have helped his popularity or his critical cache, deriding as it does all “social” or political novels, seemingly all contemporary realist novels, and in fact even (what he calls) “self-aware fiction”, a term which he claims, bizarrely, does not apply to his fiction. But for me, the self-awareness in Murnane’s work is like nectar – gold! I flip through the book to find passages on this or that aspect of writing, then turn back and read the (slightly) more traditionally “fictional” passages associated with them.

On the rare occasions when we discuss authors such as Charles Dickens, we seem to agree that we lack for something that writers of fiction seemed formerly to possess. And yet, if we have lost something, so to speak, we have also gained something. We may be unable to exercise over our fictional personages the sort of control that Dickens and others exercised over their characters, but we are able to turn that same lack of control to our advantage and to learn from our own subject-matter, so to call it, in somewhat the same way that our readers are presumed to learn from our writing. [...] The matters at issue were as follows: could the writer predict with certainty how the personage was about to behave? and, if not, could the personage be said to stand, in relation to the writer, in any way differently from some or another man or woman in the building where the writer sat writing [...]

For me, this is a hard book to review, partly because for all that I love about it, I find something in Murnane’s aesthetic dour. (This video may help clarify a little. Will you look at the place he writes in! And that voice! He could just about be much-reviled ex-Australian Prime Minister John Howard!) But then, that’s the beauty of his style, especially as it matures, that it becomes so shorn of adornment that such considerations hardly matter. And when he gets on a roll – as he does here about page 116, where he relates the (secondhand) story of a hobo and the dog which befriended him – the results are genuinely moving, uncanny, and shot through with that glow of the otherworldly that accounts for so much of my pleasure in reading.

The train slowed; the man saw an open door; the man ran beside the train; the man clambered aboard. As soon as he was securely aboard, the man looked for the dog. He saw it keeping pace with the train and looking up at him. The dog was able to keep pace with the train for as long as it climbed the low hill, but when the train passed the hill, the dog began to fall behind. The man lay in the doorway of the freight van and watched the dog falling further behind. The man later wrote in his autobiography that he had recalled often during the remainder of his life his sight of the dog while it tried to keep pace with the train. He had recalled in particular his sight of the nearer eye of the dog while it tried to keep pace. The eye had seemed to be turned sideways and upwards, or so he had thought, as though the dog had struggled, before it lost sight for ever of the only person who had fed it or treated it less than harshly, to fix in mind an image of that person.

Of course, for a writer who purports to write about the travel of fictional beings, the recurrent descriptions of trains in this work are not coincidental. Nor the butterfly alighting on Machado de Assis’s desk or flying from one side of Casterbridge to another. The best and most thrilling part of Murnane’s project is that he’s alive to the mystery – the shape-shifting ghostlikeness – of his creatures. When last year I reviewed Barley Patch I compared him to Beckett, and again that comparison springs to mind. Compared to Beckett’s late period, Murnane’s is scarcely less focussed, and will, I’m sure, admit of less and less intrusions as it proceeds. If you’re thinking of reading the guy, A Million Windows, I think, is the place to start.

[Omar Abu samra · Rating 5 out of 5]

مليون نافذة تقودنا نحو نافذة واحدة، وهي نافذة الأدب، وهي بدورها تلك النافذة تقودنا إلى مليون نافذة أُخرى، وهكذا تجد نفسك حول عالماً يفشل في إنهاء ذاته، يبقى يدور في عقلك، متجولاً، لا يخضع الا لنفسه، عالماً متفرداً بقوانينه الخاصة. إن هذه الرواية تؤكد بأن دراسة الأدب والخيال هي دراسة جادة وهامة وليست عبثية كما يدعيّ البعض، لاننا وببساطة، دون الأدب نموت.

[Proustitute (on hiatus) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review published in The Quarterly Conversation: http://quarterlyconversation.com/a-mi...

[Taghreed Jamal El Deen · Rating 2 out of 5]

كتاب لمحبي التذاكي والحركات البهلوانية؛ سفسطة روائي حول كيفية كتابة الأدب الخيالي، ممل وفارغ وتم تصنيفه كرواية لسهولة تسويقه.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found reading the latest book by Gerald Murnane even more challenging than usual, and yet it was impossible to abandon it. In A Million Windows he once again dissects the meaning and process of writing fiction, dredging from memory the books he has read or written; the girls he has imagined (or maybe met); the dreamy landscapes of what might be outer-suburban Melbourne; and the thoughts and dictates of the personage in this work of fiction, who seems like a first-person narrator and may perhaps be a bit like the author (but is most certainly not a character). But it is not easy reading.

For a start, there is an implied expectation that the reader will be familiar with all of the author’s previous books. Well, when Murnane draws on his own previous published works of fiction, the allusions may seem like old friends if you have read those books. But if one title or another (in my case, Barley Patch) still rests unread on the TBR, you too may be occasionally flummoxed (in my case, by an allusion to Torfrida) – unless you cheat like I did and consult Google.

But I do not believe that Gerald Murnane writes to be deliberately obscure. And while (certainly in this book) he expects a lot of his readers, nor do I think that he wishes his readership to be an exclusive scholarly clique. To the contrary, he goes out of his way to explain himself and the conceptual framework that underlies his fiction and I think that he would be well pleased to find readers such as myself muddling through, as best they can. I suspect that some of what seem like provocations to the reader in A Million Windows are intended as a spur to arouse stubborn persistence…

My previous experiences reading Murnane meant that I was not expecting to understand everything on the page. With his demanding fiction, it’s a case of read on, and pieces will (mostly) fall into place. But still, it is disconcerting to learn that reading what Murnane calls ‘considered narration’ entitles me to nothing more than to suppose that the narrator of the paragraphs was alive at the time when they were written and felt urged to report certain matters. (p.15) Later on, the narrator/the voice of this work reminds us that he is under no obligation to do anything other than report what’s in the mind of the person of the narrator of the fiction (p.159) and that to be deserving to be called the implied reader we must be worthy of the trust placed in us by the writer of ‘true fiction’. (p. 185)

To read the rest of my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.com/2014/09/16/a-...

[LAUREN NADER · Rating 2 out of 5]

ليس لمنزل القصص الخيالي - على الإجمال - نافذة واحدة فقط، بل له مليون نافذة.

[ٰسلمى · Rating 5 out of 5]

يا دين النبي!! ايه دا؟
كتاب غريب جدًا من أول صفحة فيه لآخر صفحة.
لحد مثلًا أول ٨٠ صفحة معرفتش أحدد أنا بقرأ رواية ولا كتاب؟ هو بيعمل ايه؟ بيقولي ازاي أكتب رواية في رواية؟
كاتب قاعد بيكتب رواية عن واحد بيحاول يكتب رواية، ويقوبك هو ليه حط الكلمة دي بدل الكلمة دي، وازاي تبص للنص الابداعي، والقارئ الفطن هيقول كذا والقارئ الغير فطن هيقول كذا.
ويخليك في حيرة من أمرك أن هل الكاتب دا مجنون؟ النرجسية والغرور اللي بيفكروني بنيتشه شوية دول موجودين فعلًا؟
ولعبة أن أنا بكتب رواية وبقولك اهو اني بكتبها وأنك قاعد بتقرأها، اللي بيبرع فيها كونديرا بشدة، لعبة خطرة جدًا.
نص مرهق نفسيًا وعقليًا جدًا
يمكن يكون من أغرب الكتب اللي قرأتها السنة دي، إن لم يكن الأغرب على الأطلاق.
بس هو عظيم.

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Top three Murnane in my mind right now, no particular order:

The Plains
Inland
A Million Windows

Runners up: Border Districts; A History of Books

[David Winger · Rating 3 out of 5]

How I wanted to like this. I'm half way through and forced to bow out. Any given page of it is intriguing, unique. But the effect of a whole lot of these pages read in a row is something else. I reckon The Plains is one of the best two or three Australian novels ever, but is it possible Murnane has succumb to his own legend? Does he believe his esotericism and obtuseness are virtues? Are his editors too frightened to edit him?

He may well be a genius, but I can't quite come at this one. Mind you, three stars for being a literary recalcitrant, and not in the acceptable way [see every 'experimental' New York writer, including Peter Carey]

[Mohamed Gamal · Rating 4 out of 5]

اول شيء يجب قوله ان هذا النص صعب ، صعب في قراءته و في تقبله.
هل اذا يستحق كل هذا العناء ؟ اعتقد انه نعم يستحق ، هذة ليست رواية يجب ان تعلم هذا مسبقا ، خليط و مزيج غريب بين السرد و الحديث عن الأدب كما يجب من وجهة نظر الكاتب ، كأنك بداخل رأس كاتب يشرع في كتابة رواية.
رؤئ عن الادب و الخيال و الشخصيات مع سرد من حيوات مختلفة
كل فقرة تشكل حجر في البناء
بالطبع النص مربك الانتقال بين الفقرات ليس سهلا ، اضطررت لاعادة قراءة نصوص مرتين ، يحتاج تركيز شديد ، لكن في النهاية لقد شعرت حقيقة بمتعة عقلية كبيرة معه
قد يكون الكتاب مهم فعلا للكتاب اكثر من القراء لكن القارئ المتمرس سيحبه ان صبر عليه

[Blair · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nobody out there is writing books like Gerald Murnane. He is a treasure. The book takes its title from a comment by Henry James, which is included as an epigraph: "The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million..." Murnane imagines a house of two, or perhaps three, stories with numerous windows surrounded by mostly level grassy countryside. The house, which has many wings, is inhabited by writers who often discuss the intricacies of writing fiction, and many of these writers seem to have published books that bear resemblance to Murnane's previous works. We become privy to various stories as well as the musings about the craft of writing. Murnane makes you work, he makes you aspire to be the "discerning reader" that he mentions often, and avoid falling into the traps of mistaking fiction for reality.

One of the images that Murnane comes up with is of the garden of "concentric box hedges and gravel paths" that occupies the grounds of the house of many windows. In some ways, I think this sums up his fictional project. The "chief character" says, as he "stood confused" in this garden: "I was not lost or in any sort of danger. Even if I had not been able to plot a path outwards through the hedges, I could have scrambled over them or through them and could have got back to my room whenever I chose. For as long as I limited my thinking, however; for as long as I observed what I supposed were the conventions of gardens and their designers; for as long as I felt bound to walk only on designated pathways and forbidden from breaking through even a miniature hedge, then I seemed truly a captive of the artifice and of whoever had designed it, even though I could look away at any time from the petty labyrinth and outwards towards the far-reaching countryside or upwards towards this massive building and its numerous windows." Murnane says he wants to secure for himself "a vantage-point from which each of the events reported in a work of fiction such as this present work, and each of the personages mentioned in the work, might seem, at one and the same time, a unique and inimitable entity impossible to define or classify but also a mere detail in an intricate scheme or design."

Murnane has succeeded, I think, in creating a unique and inimitable work that breaks free from the designated pathways of fiction. He's not for everyone, but for me he's one of the most remarkable practitioners of fiction alive today. Just stunning.

[Christopher Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A (seemingly) self-reflective work of fiction about the writing of fiction doesn’t sound like much fun on paper, but Murnane pulled it off magnificently here. This is (somehow) fast-paced, gripping, profound, funny, heartbreaking, powerful stuff, and the writing is stunning to boot. This gets an easy 5 from me. Highly recommended.

[أحمد ناجي · Rating 5 out of 5]

كتاب معلمين، الجميل فيه انه مش نصائح ساذجة حوالين العقد والبناء والشكل والتكنيك والعك دا، لكن رحلة ابحار في عقل كاتب عنده اسئلة وشك. مزيج بين تدريبات السرد والحكى والنصائح والتحليل لأعمال كتاب آخرين..
عرفت ايضا ان فيه نسخة مترجمة للعربية ستصدر قريبا عن دار الكرمة

[Soukaina Ait Ouasaa · Rating 3 out of 5]

متعب و مختلف جدا
لكنني اظنه ليس بالكتاب الذي يثير اهتمام الجميع

[M. Sarki · Rating 3 out of 5]

A Million Windows could be a culmination of a life’s work, a retreading through past compositions, tried and true ideas, and a useful handbook for all writers of fiction. Problem for me is, the work was boring. After being blissfully exposed to Murnane masterpieces such as The Plains and Landscape with Landscape it is difficult to see the point in reading something inferior to his previous efforts. Often in this book Murnane’s tone was one of knowing better, the narrator being an accomplished elder literary man teaching the young novice a thing or two about writing fiction. Better to read a second time both Barley Patch and Inland and have the experience again of being in the presence of something novel.

[أميرة ناصف · Rating 1 out of 5]

مرسي ابن المعلم الزناتي اتهزم يا رجالة 😔وصلت لنصها واستسلمت خلاص 🥹

[Godine Publisher & Black Sparrow Press · Rating 5 out of 5]

**This review was written by our intern, Allie Merola, and posted on our blog on 22 June 2016. http://www.godine.com/2016/06/22/hous...**

“The house of fiction has . . . not one window, but a million.” - Henry James, preface to The Portrait of a Lady

Gerald Murnane, one of Australia’s most acclaimed contemporary authors, delves into the subject of fiction writing in his latest work, A Million Windows. His thoughts are organized into 34 unnamed and unnumbered chapters populated by memory fragments and “image-persons,” including dark-haired women and girls, sunlight reflecting on a windowpane like “spots of golden oil,” and a house with “two, or perhaps three, storeys” in the midst of some grassland. This house, which is intermittently described in great detail but never viewed as a whole, provides the primary touchstone for the other images and narrative fragments in the novel, which form concentric circles around the house and one another by promise of connection with the larger structure. The resulting patterns that they form are dazzling and overwhelming in their complexity, expanding through both time and space.

If we envision the temporal dimension of the novel as a horizontal timeline, as we often casually do when we refer to the past as being behind us and the future as being ahead of us, Murnane reminds us that there is an additional vertical component to consider in the form of levels of narration. He simultaneously locates certain narratives in the minds of the “image-persons,” the minds of the authors writing about such persons, and his own mind as he traverses the ever-present and the distant past. These shifts in focus produce a deliberately destabilizing effect for the reader, but do not muddle Murnane’s conception of the true nature and purpose of fiction, precisely because his meaning swells in the space of “faint lines” between his images. He finds meaning and connectedness to be synonymous:
What others might have called meaning he called connectedness, and he trusted that he would one day see (revelation being for him always a visual matter) among the multitudes of details that he thought of as his life or as his experience faint lines seeming to link what he had never previously thought of as being linked and the emergence of a rudimentary pattern, which word had always been one of his favorites.

The element of elusiveness or obscurity is essential. Murnane accords a deep respect to fictional personages because they capture the moods and patterns that shadow us throughout our lives, and thus cannot be predictably contained. He compels authors to realize that this lack of control can be advantageous, empowering them to “learn from [their] own subject matter...in somewhat the same way that [their] readers are presumed to learn from [their] writing.” It is no coincidence that so many works of fiction are semi-autobiographical. Murnane imagines that fictional personages exist even when writers are not reporting the details of their lives, and we can never expect what sense, memory, or experience will alert us to their existence. Considering the relationship between meaning and connectedness, it is unsurprising that “the details of what we call our lives go sometimes to form patterns of meaning not unlike those to be found in our preferred sort of fiction.”

Murnane despises evasiveness when it comes to writers “using expressions such as beautifully written or moving or powerful in order to hide their ignorance of the craft of fiction,” though A Million Windows is all of these things. It testifies that the “real world,” or the “visible world” as Murnane calls it, is overrated. Many authors and narrators exhaust themselves attempting to describe the visible world with complete accuracy, while A Million Windows is comfortable with the uncertainty of visualizing abstractions in great detail. The feelings that this process evokes and the persistent hints of underlying connectedness are various, vibrant, and sincere. In his review of the novel in Music & Literature, Will Heyward writes that Murnane “dissects his writing and his memory in the way a Christian doctor might have a human corpse centuries ago: earnestly, hopelessly, in search of the soul.” The absence of a specific map or diagram may be unsettling to consider at first, but it ultimately opens both the visible and the invisible worlds to the possibility of something infinite and grand.

[Eman · Rating 4 out of 5]

مليون نافذة نقد أدبي في ثوب روائي

عالم الأدب هو عالم مفتوح على احتمالات غير نهائية ..على فضاءات من التأويل لا حد لها..لا شيء يقيني وجازم في عالم ينهض و يتأسس على دعائم من خيال ؛لذا فكل محاولة لإخضاعه لمنطق وقوانين الواقع هي تحجيم له وتضييق لمداه الرحب ، يبدأ جيرالد مرنين من العنوان بالتأكيد على هذه الفكرة الأساسية في الكتاب؛ فمليون نافذة هي إشارة إلى الرؤى والإحتمالات اللانهائية للمعنى في النص. كما اختار التمهيد للرواية باقتباس للروائي هنري جيمس يؤيد نفس الفكرة: ( ليس لمنزل القصص الخيالي- على الإجمال- نافذة واحدة فقط،بل له مليون نافذة).فالمنزل هو منزل السرد والنوافذ ماهي إلا تأويلاته العديدة المحتملة .

بذلك يتضح أننا أمام رواية تجريبية فريدة من نوعها اتخذت من نقد الرواية مضموناً لها فتتطرقت من خلال بناء نموذج يحاكي عملية الكتابة إلى أهم عناصر العمل الروائي : المكان والزمان والراوي والحبكة والشخصيات و الرواي والحوار ولأنها من روايات مابعد السرد فإن القارئ يختبر بنفسه كل هذه العناصر من خلال نماذج سردية مفترضة بداخل النص ، يتم سردها وتأملها ونقدها لاستنباط الخلاصة التي هي الأنموذج المثالي للسرد من وجهة نظر الكاتب وما ينبغي للرواية أن تكون عليه. أي أن "مرنين " عمل على إشراك القارئ في خضمّ عملية إنتاج النص تماماً كما تحدث في حينها، يمضي القارئ في النص وهو يتحسس دربه إلى المعنى وحين ينتهي سيكون قد مر بكافة عناصر العمل الروائي وخاض بنفسه مراحل كتابته.

لذا فإن قارئ هذه الرواية يلج إليها دون إرشادات تقريباً ، لا شيء يقوده لتصور تام عن النص إنه فقط يفترض ويخمن في لعبة السرد الخيالي محاولاً رصد المعنى الذي يتشكل من توليفة من المفردات والصور المركبة والمشاعر المتداخلة التي تقوده ببطء نحو الخلاصة ، تماماً كما الرواي في متن هذه الرواية الذي كان هو أيضاً يخمن ويفترض حيث يرى مرنين أن كتابة الرواية لابد لها من اعتبارات منها مثلاً : ألاّ يكون الراوي عالماً علماً كلياً بنوايا شخوصه فالإحاطة بكل شيء تفصيل إلهي كما يؤمن بأن الشخصية الروائية يجب أن تتمد في فضاء السرد حرة لتنمو وتواجه مصيرها بحسب السياق الذي وجدت فيه وتفاعلها معه.

إن صبغ الرواية بصبغة عدم اليقين هذه هي إشارة من الكاتب بأن النص الأدبي هو محض تخيّل لا يحمل في ثناياه أي يقين مطلق إنه مزيج من أخيلة وأحلام و لاوعي يُعبّر عنه بمفردات الواقع لكنه لا يعكسه ولا يشير إليه في المطلق لذلك يكرر كثيراً كلمة (افترِضُ)في مواضع عدة ليؤكد على أنه لا ينطلق من يقين بل من افتراض .

ورغم أن البناء الروائي للكتاب كان معقداً وغير مألوف إلا أن ذلك يستفز القارئ ويدفعه دفعاً ليتخذ موقفاً ما ويعمل على جمع وتركيب هذه الأحجية السردية ويضم بعضها إلى بعض ما يشحذ معرفته الأدبية ويرسخ في ذهنه الأفكار التي تنهض عليها عملية الكتابة الروائية .فتبدأ الرواية بمشهد لشخص يجلس على مكتب ليقرأ الجملة التي كتبها محاولاً تذكر من أين استوحى هذه الجملة ويصف لنا الراوي هذا المشهد ثم يبدأ في الحديث عن أدوات كتابة العمل الأدبي ، يتكرر مشهد النافذة ذاك وكل مرة هناك كاتب يقدم نسخته من المشهد مستنداً إلى ذكرى قديمة جداً وتتعدد النسخ والقصص المسرودة لنخلص إلى أن المنزل ما هو إلا مكان يضم كُتاباً يخضعون لما يشبه الورشة في كتابة الرواية وتلك هي رواياتهم المتعددة مجتمعة لتشكل الرواية. هذا هو القالب الذي اختاره جيرالد مرنين ليقدم نصائحه في الكتابة الأدبية وشرح من خلاله رؤاه النقدية مثل حضور الراوي في السرد وموقعه في النص العلاقة بين الحقيقي والمتخيل في الرواية ، و الزمن الفعلي والزمن الروائي في النص ، استعمال ضمير الغائب و المتكلم واختلاف الدلالة وتأثير ذلك على النص. مدى حضور الكاتب كشخصية في شخصيات نصه وتأثير ذلك على جودة النص.

يستمر جيرالد في تفصيل رؤاه النقدية و الأساليب التي ينبغي أن يتبناها كاتب الرواية وتلك التي عليه التخلي عنها ضارباً أمثلة من أعمال لروائيين كهنري جيمس إيتالو كالفينو ماشادو دي أسس وغيرهم يشعر القارئ للنص أنه أمام عمل نقدي في المقام الأول لكنه صِيْغَ في قالب روائي وهذا الدمج بين النقد و الرواية جاء مبتكراً وربما لا يعني أي قارئ إلا القارئ ذو الميول النقدية أو كما أسماه القارئ الفطِن.

[Jack · Rating 5 out of 5]

Murnane is utterly singular. I'm giving this 5 stars because I will definitely be reading this again and because it had me thinking about literature and the experience of reading more deeply and differently than anything else in a long time. I can't claim to have understood it all that well - I'm not sure I am Murnane's "discerning" reader, but maybe that will come in time.

I am always shocked, living in Sydney, how difficult Murnane's books are to find, despite the decently sized Australian fiction section in every shop. Can't help but feel his absence diminishes the whole. Hopefully a Nobel win can change all this. I don't want to live in a world where Bob Dylan can get the Nobel and Murnane can't.

Despite my praise, I don't think I would recommend this as a first read...but then, I'm not sure what I would recommend either. I found The Plains something of a slog to get through, and have found it invading my consciousness steadily ever since. This book will no doubt be the same.

-
2nd read:
I was surprised what I remembered and what I didn't, considering I'd only read this a year prior. The book wasn't quite as difficult this time. Having read more Murnane his books blur together. Still desperate to read everything he's got published while I can.

[Nick (11th Volume) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like an aged wine, he gets better and better. What fascinates me so much with Murnane is his writing on the relationship between reader, author, narrator, personage and the fictional landscape in which they all occupy - and each of which are separate and distinct entities in the make up of a fictional work. When I thought Murnane had exhausted this subject, in A Million Windows he makes important developments in the theme that impact me deeply in my thinking of what fiction can do, and what fiction should strive to do. I genuinely read (or view) fiction differently because of Murnane.

I place A Million Windows almost on equal footing to Inland. It’s an essential cog in the Murnane wheel but there’s a slight annoyance for those starting out: I wouldn’t recommend reading this unless you’ve read earlier works such as Tamarisk Row, Collected Short Fictions, Landscape with Landscape and of course, Inland. That being said, you most certainly could still pick this up and get a great deal from it, however your reading would be more enriched having read the earlier works.

[Jafar · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was too "meta" for me. Attempting to write fiction while explaining the process of writing fiction in a strange and self-conscious way?