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    Border Districts: A Fiction
    Border Districts: A Fiction
    Border Districts: A Fiction
    Ebook136 pages2 hours

    Border Districts: A Fiction

    By Gerald Murnane

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateApr 3, 2018
    ISBN9780374717278
    Border Districts: A Fiction
    Author

    Gerald Murnane

    Gerald Murnane is the award-winning author of acclaimed works of fiction as Border Districts, The Plains and Inland, and equally acclaimed non-fiction such as Last Letter to a Reader and the essay collection Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs. Murnane lives in Goroke, a remote village in western Victoria, Australia.

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    Reviews for Border Districts

    4/5

    24 ratings7 reviews

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    • 5/5
      As always, Gerald Murnane is incomparable
    • 5/5
      Beautiful and deeply moving
    • 4/5
      An older man leaves the city and moves to a small town. Memories triggered when passing a small church with coloured glass windows start a meandering of other memories.The writing was lovely but my mind kept wanderin off...
    • 5/5
      Gerald Murnane’s Border Districts: A Fiction, opens with a lengthy description of the central mystery of Catholicism, namely, the doctrine of the Real Presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament / Eucharist. Without this belief the entire priesthood and history of the church crumbles. This mysterious divine presence is at the heart of the narrator’s being (not to be confused with the living author Murnane), and it follows him regardless of his purported shifts in metaphysics; it has become the nature of his soul. The reader may be surprised to see the narrator conclude with an excerpt from Percy Shelley’s “Adonais,” and yet it fits perfectly with the narrator’s all-pervasive search for the mysterious hidden presence somewhere in the soul. Murnane’s text is essentially an affirmation of Shelley’s statement in his “Essay on Christianity”: “We live and move and think; but we are not the creators of our own origin and existence. We are not the arbiters of every motion of our own complicated nature; we are not the masters of our own imaginations and moods of mental being. There is a Power by which we are surrounded, like the atmosphere in which some motionless lyre is suspended, which visits with its breath our silent chords at will.” Murnane’s narrator writes a prose that has the liturgical quality of a swinging incense censer, a rhythmic movement associated with the adoration of the Blessed Sacrament in his opening section. Also, the repetitive visible commentary on his own phenomenological recording of experience, statements like, As I was writing the previous paragraph / sentence, etc., may at first seem like the interior of certain modern homes where all wiring and plumbing is intentionally left visible as part of an overall aesthetic statement, but within his Catholic context these statements suggest the visible raised texture of a woven altar cloth, or the embroidering of vestments.It is ironic to a degree that the Catholic education system that is described as disintegrating images by the narrator is the same system that taught the narrator Percy Shelley’s works, in spite of Shelley’s anti-Catholic and radical view of Jesus. Again, in his “Essay on Christianity,” Shelley presents this startling, far from orthodox statement: “We die, says Jesus Christ; and, when we awaken from the languor of disease, the glories and the happiness of Paradise are around us. All evil and pain have ceased for ever. Our happiness also corresponds with, and is adapted to, the nature of what is most excellent in our being. We see God, and we see that he is good. How delightful a picture, even if it be not true! How magnificent is the conception which this bold theory suggests to the contemplation, even if it be no more than the imagination of some sublimest and most holy poet . . . ”The Catholic education system that Murnane’s narrator not so much rejects as sees dissolving around him seems to have been a generous open framework for the pursuit of what is beautiful, good and true. Within this context, Murnane’s title Border District: A Fiction, is probably exactly that, A Fiction. I suspect the actual living author is still very much in search of the mystery of the Real Presence.
    • 5/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      R58

      There should be an Age Limit sticker on the front of this book like they have on movies, you know R18 and so on.

      On this book it should be R58.

      This is a meditation on life by an old man, a view inside an old mind and the many, many artefacts left in there once the dross of civilisation has faded. For that is what happens as you age, all that nicety and correctness, that compliance and conformity, that interest and urgency, they all fade to what they really are, just hot air and human waste. So much wasted effort on so many stupid things as your life passes you by.

      One of the things that constantly surprises me in my old age is the memories that are wedged in there real tight, memories of no apparent significance but persistent none the less. I like his strolling through his memories and the minutiae of the connections. I can feel the expanse of where he lives, I can feel that light on the back of my problematic eyes.

      I like his musings on the apparent shallowness of peoples (and his own) beliefs or maybe shallowness is not the right word, more the transience of peoples beliefs. I like how he takes his time to think about these things, something so seldom seen now.

      I can understand how this book may not gel with some people either for its content or its style. It is unashamedly different but it stands in its own shoes. Imagine living in a city and never having seen these wide open spaces where a mind can grow old and report back to the rest of us on what awaits there.

    • 3/5
      A strange 'novel' with neither plot nor characters.The narrator reflects on things and the meaning of things, all the while embellishing ideas and possibilities.The narrative is very self-referential ("After I had written the previous paragraph ..."), and the text meanders, often tied in some way to religious symbolism and ideas, or the use of stained glass.And then it just stops, with a quote from the poet Shelley which ties in with the reason why the narrator began this 'report' in the first place.

    Book preview

    Border Districts - Gerald Murnane

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