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A History of Books
The major work of fiction in this collection, ‘A History of Books’, explores the relationship between reading and writing in twenty nine sections, each of which begins with the memory of a book that has left an image in the writer’s mind. The memory of the books themselves might have faded, but the images remain in their clarity and import – scenes of discord and madness, a stern-faced man, a young woman on a swing, a glass of beer and rays of sunlight, mountain and woodland and horizon – images which together embody the anxieties and aspirations of a writing life, and its indebtedness to what has been written and read. ‘A History of Books’ is accompanied by three shorter works, ‘As It Were a Letter’, ‘The Boy’s Name was David’ and ‘Last Letter to a Niece’, in which a writer searches for an ideal world, an ideal sentence, and an ideal reader.
205 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2012
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504 people want to read
About the author
Gerald Murnane
32 books402 followersMurnane'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).
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).
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November 6, 2025The word 'paracosm' occurred to me while reading this and several other books by Gerald Murnane recently. A paracosm is an imaginary world created in great detail. One famous example is the Gondal world imagined by Emily Brontë during her childhood, and which Gerald Murnane mentions in A History of Books.
But if I was continually reminded of a paracosm while reading Murnane, it is because all of his books take me to the same place, whether he calls it Melbourne, Shropshire, Hungary, New England, Tristan da Cunha, or Paraguay. I want to call it Murnania.
As I envision it, Murnania is full of grassy landscapes where there is often a line of trees on the horizon. Or perhaps there will be a stretch of blue hills reaching as far as the eye can see. But always, beyond the trees and the hills, out of sight in fact, I envision high cliffs leaning out towards a vast ocean (and what may lie out of sight is a key thing in Murnane's reading and writing).
The landscape of Murnania contains houses here and there, houses of weatherboard, brick, or stone, and with two or more storeys. The glass in the windows of the houses, when seen from a distance, shines in the sunlight like shimmering drops of golden oil. However, inside the houses the holland blinds are often drawn against the sun. The doors of the houses often have panels of frosted glass the colour of beer.
Murnania is peopled with characters who seem to be variations of each other. The boys and men, who are always the main characters and sometimes the narrators, mostly like to be alone, often reading or writing, though they may also spend time drinking beer, playing cards or betting on horses. They tend to avoid encounters with girls and women though they long for such encounters. Some eventually find a partner, others remain alone, but all live for the written word, and the landscapes and women characters it contains. One of the narrators goes so far as to line his walls with his own writing, and cover his bed and even his skin with pages of fiction by his favourite authors.
The girls and women in Murnania tend to be dark-haired, several have freckles, and they are more at ease in the non-book world than the men. A few of them are readers. One is a writer. None are main characters or narrators in Murnane's fictions.
I know that the word 'paracosm' implies an imaginary world but I believe that the place I see in Murnane's books has not been 'created' or 'imagined' in the strict sense of those words. One of Murnane's narrators admits to not being able to imagine things that he has not seen, experienced, or read about. Magical realism is definitely not for him. I feel that Murnane is telling us that the places and people he presents in his fictions are simply called forth from the store of images provided by his own life and especially by his reading. As one of the narrators in Stream System: The Collected Short Fiction of Gerald Murnane says: "he thought of reading as travel. He said the best sort of books made him feel as though he was exploring the borderlines of the landscape of knowledge."
A History of Books has many narrators, and not surprisingly, they talk about books even more than Murnane's other narrators generally do. One of them finds himself thinking about autobiography and concluding that the only possible subject for any seeming-autobiography that he might succeed in writing, was the books that he had read.
Whether Murnane envisages A History of Books as a 'seeming-autobiography' or not, it is nonetheless full of seemingly-fictional episodes about books which its narrators have read throughout their lives—and which Murnane himself has surely read (he discusses the term 'fiction' at one point and concludes that fiction inevitably contains its share of fact though in a different way to non-fiction). The many books referenced in A History of Books are not identified by their titles, and plots are rarely mentioned (which makes for a guessing game I enjoyed). Instead, the narrators of each of the many episodes talk about an 'image' or a 'feeling' evoked by the referenced books. The 'image' is always of a character or a landscape, and the 'feeling' is often intense empathy or extreme awe. Murnane implies that these images and feelings feed his own fictions, though the rest of the contents of those books may be forgotten, "that a book of fiction could not, by definition, come to an end; that what had been created could not be later annihilated; that the image-persons and the image-scenery brought into being whenever a certain sort of reader read what a certain sort of writer had written—that such image-realities must continue their image-existence even though another sort of writer might report long afterwards that they were no longer remembered."
The narrators/main characters in the various episodes cherish the books they have read, even if most of their contents are forgotten, and get pleasure from gazing at the spines as they sit on their bookshelves, knowing the wealth of memory-images they have provided. One such character "got much pleasure from owning some or another book of fiction that had supplied him with a rich pattern of connected images but was unknown to his friends." I smiled when I read that, thinking of the network of connections I envisage when I glance at the spines of my favourite books (which most of my family and friends haven't read), a network that makes reading each new book such a pleasure as I discover how it connects with one or another book in my collection—which it invariably does. When I place A History of Books on my shelves, I know it will be completely at home there.
…………………….
As well as A History of Books, this volume contains three other shorter pieces which I'd read already read in Stream System: The Collected Short Fiction of Gerald Murnane.
But if I was continually reminded of a paracosm while reading Murnane, it is because all of his books take me to the same place, whether he calls it Melbourne, Shropshire, Hungary, New England, Tristan da Cunha, or Paraguay. I want to call it Murnania.
As I envision it, Murnania is full of grassy landscapes where there is often a line of trees on the horizon. Or perhaps there will be a stretch of blue hills reaching as far as the eye can see. But always, beyond the trees and the hills, out of sight in fact, I envision high cliffs leaning out towards a vast ocean (and what may lie out of sight is a key thing in Murnane's reading and writing).
The landscape of Murnania contains houses here and there, houses of weatherboard, brick, or stone, and with two or more storeys. The glass in the windows of the houses, when seen from a distance, shines in the sunlight like shimmering drops of golden oil. However, inside the houses the holland blinds are often drawn against the sun. The doors of the houses often have panels of frosted glass the colour of beer.
Murnania is peopled with characters who seem to be variations of each other. The boys and men, who are always the main characters and sometimes the narrators, mostly like to be alone, often reading or writing, though they may also spend time drinking beer, playing cards or betting on horses. They tend to avoid encounters with girls and women though they long for such encounters. Some eventually find a partner, others remain alone, but all live for the written word, and the landscapes and women characters it contains. One of the narrators goes so far as to line his walls with his own writing, and cover his bed and even his skin with pages of fiction by his favourite authors.
The girls and women in Murnania tend to be dark-haired, several have freckles, and they are more at ease in the non-book world than the men. A few of them are readers. One is a writer. None are main characters or narrators in Murnane's fictions.
I know that the word 'paracosm' implies an imaginary world but I believe that the place I see in Murnane's books has not been 'created' or 'imagined' in the strict sense of those words. One of Murnane's narrators admits to not being able to imagine things that he has not seen, experienced, or read about. Magical realism is definitely not for him. I feel that Murnane is telling us that the places and people he presents in his fictions are simply called forth from the store of images provided by his own life and especially by his reading. As one of the narrators in Stream System: The Collected Short Fiction of Gerald Murnane says: "he thought of reading as travel. He said the best sort of books made him feel as though he was exploring the borderlines of the landscape of knowledge."
A History of Books has many narrators, and not surprisingly, they talk about books even more than Murnane's other narrators generally do. One of them finds himself thinking about autobiography and concluding that the only possible subject for any seeming-autobiography that he might succeed in writing, was the books that he had read.
Whether Murnane envisages A History of Books as a 'seeming-autobiography' or not, it is nonetheless full of seemingly-fictional episodes about books which its narrators have read throughout their lives—and which Murnane himself has surely read (he discusses the term 'fiction' at one point and concludes that fiction inevitably contains its share of fact though in a different way to non-fiction). The many books referenced in A History of Books are not identified by their titles, and plots are rarely mentioned (which makes for a guessing game I enjoyed). Instead, the narrators of each of the many episodes talk about an 'image' or a 'feeling' evoked by the referenced books. The 'image' is always of a character or a landscape, and the 'feeling' is often intense empathy or extreme awe. Murnane implies that these images and feelings feed his own fictions, though the rest of the contents of those books may be forgotten, "that a book of fiction could not, by definition, come to an end; that what had been created could not be later annihilated; that the image-persons and the image-scenery brought into being whenever a certain sort of reader read what a certain sort of writer had written—that such image-realities must continue their image-existence even though another sort of writer might report long afterwards that they were no longer remembered."
The narrators/main characters in the various episodes cherish the books they have read, even if most of their contents are forgotten, and get pleasure from gazing at the spines as they sit on their bookshelves, knowing the wealth of memory-images they have provided. One such character "got much pleasure from owning some or another book of fiction that had supplied him with a rich pattern of connected images but was unknown to his friends." I smiled when I read that, thinking of the network of connections I envisage when I glance at the spines of my favourite books (which most of my family and friends haven't read), a network that makes reading each new book such a pleasure as I discover how it connects with one or another book in my collection—which it invariably does. When I place A History of Books on my shelves, I know it will be completely at home there.
…………………….
As well as A History of Books, this volume contains three other shorter pieces which I'd read already read in Stream System: The Collected Short Fiction of Gerald Murnane.
August 13, 2022
In a mind of a man or several - a maze of books being read, being experienced and being remembered; from the conciseness and memory to the page and back…reading, writing, seeing:
Thirty years afterwards, the same man prepared to write a short passage about his experience as a reader of the last pages of the book mentioned or, rather, about his memories of that experience. The man intended to report that the words ice and sky, together with the words white and blue, had appeared often on the last pages; that the chief character had been reported as approaching the zone where the white and the blue seemed to meet or even to merge. Much else, of course, had been reported in the last pages, but the man remembered nothing of it.
For thirty years, the man preparing to write the short passage mentioned had wanted to write a work of fiction the ending of which would alert at least one reader to the feel of things in the way that he, the man, had been alerted by the ending of the book mentioned often above. If the man could not have written the work that he had wanted to write, then he would have been satisfied to write a work of fiction for which the only apt ending would have been a report of the effect on the man of his having read, thirty years before, that the chief character in a certain work of fiction had seemed to pass from sight in a place where the white seemed to meet, or even to merge, with the blue; where the land seemed to meet, or even to merge, with the sky, the visible with the invisible, the writer even with the reader, and whatever had been written with whatever had been read.
Silent vivid endless echo - sublime…
It is my first Murnane. But now I want to read all of his major works. This book contained four loosely connected novellas. The biggest of them is “The history of books”. There 29 small fragments when a man tries to understand what remains in mind after certain reading experiences that took time decades ago. In the process, he reveals how his mind works, what he forgets and what stays. It is revealing indeed, but at the same time very relatable. For me it was also a bit of detective work to figure out which particular book he means in each case. I have not succeeded in all occasions, but the passage above is related, very likely, to World Light by Laxness.
I believe the man who taught himself Hungarian language in his late 50s without leaving Australia, should write special books. And he does.
Here is his essay why Hungarian:
https://hungarianreview.com/article/t...
Thirty years afterwards, the same man prepared to write a short passage about his experience as a reader of the last pages of the book mentioned or, rather, about his memories of that experience. The man intended to report that the words ice and sky, together with the words white and blue, had appeared often on the last pages; that the chief character had been reported as approaching the zone where the white and the blue seemed to meet or even to merge. Much else, of course, had been reported in the last pages, but the man remembered nothing of it.
For thirty years, the man preparing to write the short passage mentioned had wanted to write a work of fiction the ending of which would alert at least one reader to the feel of things in the way that he, the man, had been alerted by the ending of the book mentioned often above. If the man could not have written the work that he had wanted to write, then he would have been satisfied to write a work of fiction for which the only apt ending would have been a report of the effect on the man of his having read, thirty years before, that the chief character in a certain work of fiction had seemed to pass from sight in a place where the white seemed to meet, or even to merge, with the blue; where the land seemed to meet, or even to merge, with the sky, the visible with the invisible, the writer even with the reader, and whatever had been written with whatever had been read.
Silent vivid endless echo - sublime…
It is my first Murnane. But now I want to read all of his major works. This book contained four loosely connected novellas. The biggest of them is “The history of books”. There 29 small fragments when a man tries to understand what remains in mind after certain reading experiences that took time decades ago. In the process, he reveals how his mind works, what he forgets and what stays. It is revealing indeed, but at the same time very relatable. For me it was also a bit of detective work to figure out which particular book he means in each case. I have not succeeded in all occasions, but the passage above is related, very likely, to World Light by Laxness.
I believe the man who taught himself Hungarian language in his late 50s without leaving Australia, should write special books. And he does.
Here is his essay why Hungarian:
https://hungarianreview.com/article/t...
September 6, 2024
In one of the books written by this author that I read some years ago, I can’t with any certainty remember when now without looking it up, and the ‘when’ is hardly the chief concern of this sentence, nor can I remember the name of the book, something else that isn’t as important to what I’m trying to say as you might otherwise think, he says that he regretted ever telling readers which of his works were fiction and which were whatever the opposite of fiction writing is. This is an idea that he plays with extensively here.
While I was reading this book, I sent a paragraph to my new partner to show her that there would always remain things that she would likely find absurd about me. The paragraph I quoted read: “More than fifty years after the boy mentioned had found the strip of paper mentioned, the man who had been the boy could remember no phrase or sentence from any page that he had read in any of the books that were kept in the shelves mentioned earlier. He sometimes remembered, however, a few words from one of the last pages in one of the books and what might be called the import of one of the sentences on that page.” Perhaps one cannot understand the universe from a grain of sand, but if you were to think about the implications of someone writing a sentence like that in a novel, I think you could sketch out the concerns of the novelist and guess at many of the themes this book is composed of.
You quickly become aware of the fact that the person writing this book has been deeply affected by their reading of various novels throughout their lives. However, these novels and their writers are rarely named and are presented in the text with just enough detail to make you want to guess, but to still remain uncertain about how accurate your guess might be. I imagine there are readers who would find this very frustrating – but the novelist, or the narrator, or the person who stands between the novelist and the narrator, are causing this frustration for a very good reason. You see, they had once taught people writing in a college of advanced education in a very affluent suburb of Melbourne – a writing degree I also undertook in the late 1980s until 1990, the year my first daughter was born. In that course the writer, narrator, chief character in this work of fiction, explains that the one attribute he sought to leave in the minds of those he taught was a deep regard for the sentence. We write in sentences. They are the fundamental units of our texts. Their rhythm and their meaning ought to both ring true for us, but also move us by the very nature of the truth they convey.
And yet…
And yet, this is a book about the mostly forgotten history of reading books. Books that remain in memory, if at all, as a series of ill remembered fragments of images. For example, in White Noise by Don DeLillo, a book I know the author of this novel does not like, close to the only thing I remember is the image of two academics walking across the courtyard of a university with their heads bent forward in deep conversation. I remember this because one of the men thinks to themselves that this sums up what they had hoped academic life might be. Having now worked as an academic for 10 years or so, I can attest to how rare such an image matches what I’ve come to know of this life.
The narrator here wants to believe in the power of sentences, but he has exaggerated this power. The power of a sentence isn’t, for me at least, in my desire to memorise each word in the way I might seek to memorise a poem or song – but rather to convey to the mind’s eye images of such complexity and beauty that they have troubled the author throughout their lives. To me, it is these images that are most important, and the sentences are important to the extent that they bring those images to life in the mind’s eye of someone other than the writer of those sentences.
The one book of his own that the author of this book quotes directly is one of the only books by this author I have never read – and isn’t that the way the world works?
While I was reading this book, I sent a paragraph to my new partner to show her that there would always remain things that she would likely find absurd about me. The paragraph I quoted read: “More than fifty years after the boy mentioned had found the strip of paper mentioned, the man who had been the boy could remember no phrase or sentence from any page that he had read in any of the books that were kept in the shelves mentioned earlier. He sometimes remembered, however, a few words from one of the last pages in one of the books and what might be called the import of one of the sentences on that page.” Perhaps one cannot understand the universe from a grain of sand, but if you were to think about the implications of someone writing a sentence like that in a novel, I think you could sketch out the concerns of the novelist and guess at many of the themes this book is composed of.
You quickly become aware of the fact that the person writing this book has been deeply affected by their reading of various novels throughout their lives. However, these novels and their writers are rarely named and are presented in the text with just enough detail to make you want to guess, but to still remain uncertain about how accurate your guess might be. I imagine there are readers who would find this very frustrating – but the novelist, or the narrator, or the person who stands between the novelist and the narrator, are causing this frustration for a very good reason. You see, they had once taught people writing in a college of advanced education in a very affluent suburb of Melbourne – a writing degree I also undertook in the late 1980s until 1990, the year my first daughter was born. In that course the writer, narrator, chief character in this work of fiction, explains that the one attribute he sought to leave in the minds of those he taught was a deep regard for the sentence. We write in sentences. They are the fundamental units of our texts. Their rhythm and their meaning ought to both ring true for us, but also move us by the very nature of the truth they convey.
And yet…
And yet, this is a book about the mostly forgotten history of reading books. Books that remain in memory, if at all, as a series of ill remembered fragments of images. For example, in White Noise by Don DeLillo, a book I know the author of this novel does not like, close to the only thing I remember is the image of two academics walking across the courtyard of a university with their heads bent forward in deep conversation. I remember this because one of the men thinks to themselves that this sums up what they had hoped academic life might be. Having now worked as an academic for 10 years or so, I can attest to how rare such an image matches what I’ve come to know of this life.
The narrator here wants to believe in the power of sentences, but he has exaggerated this power. The power of a sentence isn’t, for me at least, in my desire to memorise each word in the way I might seek to memorise a poem or song – but rather to convey to the mind’s eye images of such complexity and beauty that they have troubled the author throughout their lives. To me, it is these images that are most important, and the sentences are important to the extent that they bring those images to life in the mind’s eye of someone other than the writer of those sentences.
The one book of his own that the author of this book quotes directly is one of the only books by this author I have never read – and isn’t that the way the world works?
August 11, 2013
http://msarki.tumblr.com/post/5798363...
Written in the third person, the author, supposedly being the subject of this fiction, composed this title-story text in a style quite similar to Gerald Murnane's last book published titled Barley Patch, and it appears to me as surprisingly irritating I should go ahead and figure for most people to read except for those of us much as I am, and that being, a very huge fan. Though rarely do I recognize an author or a book being mentioned as image-memories I do enjoy the exercise the reading takes on my mind. I cannot say for certain that my reading of this book helps me to feel young again, but it is full game in the sense of play but still serious as a fatal heart attack.
I am most interested when Gerald Murnane uses himself as the subject. The trouble is in discerning who and what he is talking about at almost any given time. This new style of writing seems to have been initiated by Murnane after taking fifteen years off from writing, and there is every indication that he spent a few years of that extended break tending to his ill wife who eventually died in 2009. There is little to be known about that relationship except for what he alludes to in his fiction regarding the women he has known throughout his life. There is nothing but difficulty in reading a book written by Gerald Murnane. But the reading gives me an enormous amount of pleasure, and I secretly feel I am in select company along with his other somewhat elite and perhaps special other particular fans of his writing.
My personal challenge to myself within this reading is to recognize immediately in the text, and for selfish reasons, the eventual presence of the one author named Jack Kerouac and to realize at some point why Murnane holds the old drunken misogynist in such high esteem. Obviously, I do not, but I am interested in learning what is possibly wrong with my thinking. It does seem that the further I venture into the title story the more engaging it gets. At first my head was spinning but it has settled down now into a simple nervous twitch. Murnane is nothing short of amazing even when being somewhat irritating as hell with all his image-this and image-that dotting his ever-changing but constantly revolving landscape. But the history of Murnane reading twenty-nine authors of twenty-nine books of fiction interspersed supposedly into this work of fiction, and nowhere are the titles or authors named precisely, may cause some consternation no matter how maturely balanced and well-adjusted the reader might be. And to think I have challenged myself to only identifying one author of the twenty-nine is a bit ridiculous on measure, but the book is hard enough to follow on its own than to be constantly racking ones brain to figure things out. I read for pleasure and feeling anyway, and not for any meaning in my life. It is only after finishing a work that I can honestly say what it meant to me, and certainly not while I am in neck-deep and fighting for my life.
There is a wife in this fiction who screams at a husband in this fiction. This woman, it turns, is very sick emotionally, or maybe she is mentally unbalanced. It isn't clear, though she has been sent from the emergency room to a padded cell in a sanitarium for observation. It is also related later in this book of fiction that the same wife, or perhaps a different wife, had been sick for over a year and that the husband in this fiction was required to take care of her and the children during her illness. It is not clear if this is one and the same husband either. It is also a so-called fact I read somewhere online that Gerald Murnane's wife died in 2009 after an illness. It was also reported somewhere else that Murnane's wife was sick for a time and he took care of the family in her absence. I am not sure if any of these fictions and facts are related but I am hoping the last few pages of the title story in this book of fiction provides more light on the subject or at least adds something to my wild, and possibly false, ideas.
Spoiler alert-
The last few pages of this title story in this work of fiction gained a traction I had not felt earlier in my reading. It was if Murnane was just getting up to speed and I was a bit distraught that too soon the work would be over, but I steadied myself knowing I still had three more separate short pieces ahead of me to read in order to complete this book. The ending of the title story came at me like a freight train. And wonderful! Now on to the last three shorter pieces in the collection.
… the chief benefit to be got from the writing of a piece of fiction was that the writer of the fiction discovered at least once during the writing of the fiction a connection between two or more images that had been for long in his mind but had never seemed in any way connected.
In a recently published story collection of my own titled Shorter Prose I had included three connected pieces of short fiction, the longest being Ponzil, the Pistolero, and his Comedy of Combustion. While writing this particular piece of fiction it occurred to me that I was actually connecting certain images and memories I had not done so before. Even the surprised narrator, Ponzil, states within the text of that story that he was indeed connecting and doing so obviously without a plan. Thus, it was rewarding to me to discover and read the Murnane quote presented above this paragraph where it gave acknowledgement to my ways of thinking; a confirmation that is quite hard to find within the confines of the world I mostly live in.
As It Were a Letter is the second story in this collection and the quote above is included near the beginning of it. Again, another charming piece but written in the style of the Gerald Murnane I am most accustomed to. None of the present-day image-this or image-that discovered in the previously read title story or his last long fiction book he titled Barley Patch. But this story rings of autobiography to the extent that I do believe it is. And it is totally engaging and repetitive of other anecdotes and characters previously written of and consequently read about. Of course, in its entirety connections were made, and by the end of my reading of this piece I felt as if I had possibly learned something of which I could not say.
Knowing there were only two more short fictions left before I completed this book I began reading the second to last in this collection with the title being The Boy's Name was David. Again, and this is why I love Murnane so much, immediately he prepares my mind for its own images while I am reading about his. He mentions almost nonchalantly how he hated studying math but loved to practice arithmetic. I, too, had the same experience and after quitting the smoking of cigarettes I calculated how many of them I had consumed throughout my smoking career. The total amount of cigarettes consumed numbered no less than 210,000 nor more than 250,000, but still within the range of certain physical abuse no matter how you want to cut it. I never did count, as Murnane did, the total number of beers I drank. I did measure the length of road trips back home from working as a carpenter as being a one-beer to four-beer excursion depending on the miles I needed to drive. I avoided counting beers for the most part as I really didn't want to know how much I drank. But my wife did collect a garbage bag full of them after a night of hard drinking in order to finally, and with great emphasis, prove to me I drank too much. It wasn't long after her submitted proof that I did indeed quit and have stayed sober for over twenty-seven years. But it is fun for me to witness on the page other people like Murnane whom I respect and who actually think like I do. For others this would seem too scary, but for me it gives me hope and some condolence that I m not so alone as I might feel I am some days. The Boy's Name was David is a treatise on memory as a whole and how at the end of ones life there are only certain specific images that are left to possibly consider. Of course, the narrative of this story is patterned around an unnamed man who taught fiction-writing for fifteen years. He is remembering his students and any sentences they may have written that he had assessed and seen and perhaps made comment on. It is another wonderful story and I am certain Murnane was a gifted teacher who was also much-loved.
The last story appears to be a letter written to his niece and titled, Last Letter to a Niece. Instead, or rather I think, the piece is purely fiction and meant as an epigraph for something previously unsaid and unwritten. Based on this latest book and his previously published long fiction titled Barley Patch, there is really no telling in my mind where Gerald Murnane will surface when he again comes up for air. But I will be waiting for him, diligently.
Written in the third person, the author, supposedly being the subject of this fiction, composed this title-story text in a style quite similar to Gerald Murnane's last book published titled Barley Patch, and it appears to me as surprisingly irritating I should go ahead and figure for most people to read except for those of us much as I am, and that being, a very huge fan. Though rarely do I recognize an author or a book being mentioned as image-memories I do enjoy the exercise the reading takes on my mind. I cannot say for certain that my reading of this book helps me to feel young again, but it is full game in the sense of play but still serious as a fatal heart attack.
I am most interested when Gerald Murnane uses himself as the subject. The trouble is in discerning who and what he is talking about at almost any given time. This new style of writing seems to have been initiated by Murnane after taking fifteen years off from writing, and there is every indication that he spent a few years of that extended break tending to his ill wife who eventually died in 2009. There is little to be known about that relationship except for what he alludes to in his fiction regarding the women he has known throughout his life. There is nothing but difficulty in reading a book written by Gerald Murnane. But the reading gives me an enormous amount of pleasure, and I secretly feel I am in select company along with his other somewhat elite and perhaps special other particular fans of his writing.
My personal challenge to myself within this reading is to recognize immediately in the text, and for selfish reasons, the eventual presence of the one author named Jack Kerouac and to realize at some point why Murnane holds the old drunken misogynist in such high esteem. Obviously, I do not, but I am interested in learning what is possibly wrong with my thinking. It does seem that the further I venture into the title story the more engaging it gets. At first my head was spinning but it has settled down now into a simple nervous twitch. Murnane is nothing short of amazing even when being somewhat irritating as hell with all his image-this and image-that dotting his ever-changing but constantly revolving landscape. But the history of Murnane reading twenty-nine authors of twenty-nine books of fiction interspersed supposedly into this work of fiction, and nowhere are the titles or authors named precisely, may cause some consternation no matter how maturely balanced and well-adjusted the reader might be. And to think I have challenged myself to only identifying one author of the twenty-nine is a bit ridiculous on measure, but the book is hard enough to follow on its own than to be constantly racking ones brain to figure things out. I read for pleasure and feeling anyway, and not for any meaning in my life. It is only after finishing a work that I can honestly say what it meant to me, and certainly not while I am in neck-deep and fighting for my life.
There is a wife in this fiction who screams at a husband in this fiction. This woman, it turns, is very sick emotionally, or maybe she is mentally unbalanced. It isn't clear, though she has been sent from the emergency room to a padded cell in a sanitarium for observation. It is also related later in this book of fiction that the same wife, or perhaps a different wife, had been sick for over a year and that the husband in this fiction was required to take care of her and the children during her illness. It is not clear if this is one and the same husband either. It is also a so-called fact I read somewhere online that Gerald Murnane's wife died in 2009 after an illness. It was also reported somewhere else that Murnane's wife was sick for a time and he took care of the family in her absence. I am not sure if any of these fictions and facts are related but I am hoping the last few pages of the title story in this book of fiction provides more light on the subject or at least adds something to my wild, and possibly false, ideas.
Spoiler alert-
The last few pages of this title story in this work of fiction gained a traction I had not felt earlier in my reading. It was if Murnane was just getting up to speed and I was a bit distraught that too soon the work would be over, but I steadied myself knowing I still had three more separate short pieces ahead of me to read in order to complete this book. The ending of the title story came at me like a freight train. And wonderful! Now on to the last three shorter pieces in the collection.
… the chief benefit to be got from the writing of a piece of fiction was that the writer of the fiction discovered at least once during the writing of the fiction a connection between two or more images that had been for long in his mind but had never seemed in any way connected.
In a recently published story collection of my own titled Shorter Prose I had included three connected pieces of short fiction, the longest being Ponzil, the Pistolero, and his Comedy of Combustion. While writing this particular piece of fiction it occurred to me that I was actually connecting certain images and memories I had not done so before. Even the surprised narrator, Ponzil, states within the text of that story that he was indeed connecting and doing so obviously without a plan. Thus, it was rewarding to me to discover and read the Murnane quote presented above this paragraph where it gave acknowledgement to my ways of thinking; a confirmation that is quite hard to find within the confines of the world I mostly live in.
As It Were a Letter is the second story in this collection and the quote above is included near the beginning of it. Again, another charming piece but written in the style of the Gerald Murnane I am most accustomed to. None of the present-day image-this or image-that discovered in the previously read title story or his last long fiction book he titled Barley Patch. But this story rings of autobiography to the extent that I do believe it is. And it is totally engaging and repetitive of other anecdotes and characters previously written of and consequently read about. Of course, in its entirety connections were made, and by the end of my reading of this piece I felt as if I had possibly learned something of which I could not say.
Knowing there were only two more short fictions left before I completed this book I began reading the second to last in this collection with the title being The Boy's Name was David. Again, and this is why I love Murnane so much, immediately he prepares my mind for its own images while I am reading about his. He mentions almost nonchalantly how he hated studying math but loved to practice arithmetic. I, too, had the same experience and after quitting the smoking of cigarettes I calculated how many of them I had consumed throughout my smoking career. The total amount of cigarettes consumed numbered no less than 210,000 nor more than 250,000, but still within the range of certain physical abuse no matter how you want to cut it. I never did count, as Murnane did, the total number of beers I drank. I did measure the length of road trips back home from working as a carpenter as being a one-beer to four-beer excursion depending on the miles I needed to drive. I avoided counting beers for the most part as I really didn't want to know how much I drank. But my wife did collect a garbage bag full of them after a night of hard drinking in order to finally, and with great emphasis, prove to me I drank too much. It wasn't long after her submitted proof that I did indeed quit and have stayed sober for over twenty-seven years. But it is fun for me to witness on the page other people like Murnane whom I respect and who actually think like I do. For others this would seem too scary, but for me it gives me hope and some condolence that I m not so alone as I might feel I am some days. The Boy's Name was David is a treatise on memory as a whole and how at the end of ones life there are only certain specific images that are left to possibly consider. Of course, the narrative of this story is patterned around an unnamed man who taught fiction-writing for fifteen years. He is remembering his students and any sentences they may have written that he had assessed and seen and perhaps made comment on. It is another wonderful story and I am certain Murnane was a gifted teacher who was also much-loved.
The last story appears to be a letter written to his niece and titled, Last Letter to a Niece. Instead, or rather I think, the piece is purely fiction and meant as an epigraph for something previously unsaid and unwritten. Based on this latest book and his previously published long fiction titled Barley Patch, there is really no telling in my mind where Gerald Murnane will surface when he again comes up for air. But I will be waiting for him, diligently.
November 16, 2012
Is there anyone like Murnane? A History of Books is a series of short reminiscences of books read, yet there is perhaps more Murnane here than his subjects. It deals the way in which we make the books we read, by remembering, long after we have finished them, certain aspects over others. In time we build fractious, sparse and highly subjective appreciations of the books we come to appreciate.
Much as I'm loathe to support anything Imre Salusinsky propounds AHOB does further support his claim that Murnane's writing is essentially concerned with consciousness and memory.
It is interesting also that one of these short pieces concerns itself with a memory of Hesse's The Glass Bead Game for the lazy critic in me keeps likening Murnane's work to a pastoral Glass Bead Game with a little Borges thrown in. He is though truly original and as we will come to realise en masse sometime in the future, terribly underrated and unread.
Much as I'm loathe to support anything Imre Salusinsky propounds AHOB does further support his claim that Murnane's writing is essentially concerned with consciousness and memory.
It is interesting also that one of these short pieces concerns itself with a memory of Hesse's The Glass Bead Game for the lazy critic in me keeps likening Murnane's work to a pastoral Glass Bead Game with a little Borges thrown in. He is though truly original and as we will come to realise en masse sometime in the future, terribly underrated and unread.
March 4, 2016
I've put off reviewing this for too long, and now my thoughts are all disorganized. But suffice to say, my gut instinct was: not as good as Barley Patch, not as good as A Million Windows, still better than most things.
The title piece ends with more or less a restatement of the claim in Barley Patch. Our narrator describes a book by Halldor Laxness, and the feeling he had reading the end of it. The narrator continues:
"the man preparing to write the short passage mentioned had wanted to write a work of fiction the ending of which would alert at least one reader to the feel of things in the way that he, the man, had been alerted by the ending of the book mentioned often above."
This urge to share with others "the feel of things" is, I take it, part of the explanation for 'Gerald Murnane' having started to write again in Barley Patch.
The shorter pieces here struck me a bit more, but also seemed to repeat much of what we've heard from Murnane in the past, albeit sometimes in pithier ways (fiction, he suggests, is a world inside the secular world that most people take as the entirety of reality; there's a nice statement of the contract between reader and writer on page 182). And then there's this:
"I have come to hope, dear niece, that the act of writing may be a sort of miracle as a result of which invisible entities are made aware of each other through the medium of the visible. But how can I believe that the awareness is mutual? Although I have sometimes felt one or another of my beloved personages as a presence nearby, I have no grounds for supposing that she might evven have imagined my possible existence." (203).
If you enjoy that, you'll love Murnane. This might even be a good place to start; it's less dense and so easier to follow, and the human warmth is more obvious than in some of his more impressive work.
The title piece ends with more or less a restatement of the claim in Barley Patch. Our narrator describes a book by Halldor Laxness, and the feeling he had reading the end of it. The narrator continues:
"the man preparing to write the short passage mentioned had wanted to write a work of fiction the ending of which would alert at least one reader to the feel of things in the way that he, the man, had been alerted by the ending of the book mentioned often above."
This urge to share with others "the feel of things" is, I take it, part of the explanation for 'Gerald Murnane' having started to write again in Barley Patch.
The shorter pieces here struck me a bit more, but also seemed to repeat much of what we've heard from Murnane in the past, albeit sometimes in pithier ways (fiction, he suggests, is a world inside the secular world that most people take as the entirety of reality; there's a nice statement of the contract between reader and writer on page 182). And then there's this:
"I have come to hope, dear niece, that the act of writing may be a sort of miracle as a result of which invisible entities are made aware of each other through the medium of the visible. But how can I believe that the awareness is mutual? Although I have sometimes felt one or another of my beloved personages as a presence nearby, I have no grounds for supposing that she might evven have imagined my possible existence." (203).
If you enjoy that, you'll love Murnane. This might even be a good place to start; it's less dense and so easier to follow, and the human warmth is more obvious than in some of his more impressive work.
November 6, 2025
If I were to be a man of forty or more years who had set out to write one or another report of the works of fiction that most occupied his mind, then that man aged about forty years would have reported the images created by a much-praised author who had been born almost forty years before the birth of the man first mentioned above. Upon seeing the image of the much-praised author, then the remebering man might have reported some or another image contained within the works of fiction of mentioned author. The most noticeable of those images would probably be images of an implied image-narrator, the image-landscapes of mostly level green countryside in the southern edge of image-Australia, one or another image-suburb of image-Melbourne and all other image-subjects cointained within the much-praised author's ouevre.
January 19, 2016
‘If you have not read him, you should do so. He is a staggering original…’
So says Peter Craven in his review at The Age/SMH. The judges for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award concurred, and have shortlisted A History of Books for the 2012 prize. This makes the task of choosing a winner doubly difficult because the shortlist is a strong one this year, and while in my opinion Murnane’s book is the stand-out contender, it raises the contemporary question of ‘accessibility’. A book which defies conventional ideas about what fiction can be is pitched against five other novels which – while equally worthwhile reading – are written in more conventional form and are certainly less demanding. It was obvious at last year’s award ceremony that there was a clear agenda of jazzing up the awards and giving them a higher profile, which implies ‘accessibility’. Even if that were not so, it’s been a very long time since a challenging, non-conventional book has won a major prize in Australia…
I wonder if that would change if Murnane won the Nobel Prize for Literature. I’m not the only one who thinks he is a strong contender. (The link to my thoughts about that is on my blog).
The first thing I should say in discussing A History of Books is that I should have read Barley Patch (2009) first. I bought that as soon as it came out, but I’ve been saving it because there aren’t many books by this author and I wanted to stretch them out. So, although I’m told that A History of Books is a continuation of the ‘exploration of the relationship between writing and reading which [Murnane] undertook in Barley Patch’ I’m reading this book as many readers will, without having read its predecessor. A History of Books was the only one of the Premier’s Prize shortlist that I hadn’t read, and I wanted to read it before the prize is announced on October 16th.
My first impression when I started reading this book (NB I’m not calling it a novel, though novel it certainly is) was that Murnane lost no time in deflating any ideas I might have had about being well-read. I knew before I began that this meditation on books and reading involved some authors that I’d read: James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Joseph Conrad, Herman Hesse, Elias Canetti and John Steinbeck, so I was expecting to identify allusions to their work. But the very first book he alludes to is one of the Latin magic-realists, and although I’ve read a couple of them, I, like Murnane, hadn’t liked them much (though for entirely different reasons). Even so, it’s a kind of torture not knowing which one he means, but I know I’ll never finish reading the book if I Google around trying to identify the subject of this passage:
None of the disputes between the man and the woman had been resolved when he and she became a male and a female jaguar, or it may have been a male and a female hummingbird or a male and a female lizard. (p3)
Is this image from one of the books I’d read? Or has Murnane referenced some obscure author that I’ve never heard of?
To read the rest of my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.com/2012/09/24/a-...
So says Peter Craven in his review at The Age/SMH. The judges for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award concurred, and have shortlisted A History of Books for the 2012 prize. This makes the task of choosing a winner doubly difficult because the shortlist is a strong one this year, and while in my opinion Murnane’s book is the stand-out contender, it raises the contemporary question of ‘accessibility’. A book which defies conventional ideas about what fiction can be is pitched against five other novels which – while equally worthwhile reading – are written in more conventional form and are certainly less demanding. It was obvious at last year’s award ceremony that there was a clear agenda of jazzing up the awards and giving them a higher profile, which implies ‘accessibility’. Even if that were not so, it’s been a very long time since a challenging, non-conventional book has won a major prize in Australia…
I wonder if that would change if Murnane won the Nobel Prize for Literature. I’m not the only one who thinks he is a strong contender. (The link to my thoughts about that is on my blog).
The first thing I should say in discussing A History of Books is that I should have read Barley Patch (2009) first. I bought that as soon as it came out, but I’ve been saving it because there aren’t many books by this author and I wanted to stretch them out. So, although I’m told that A History of Books is a continuation of the ‘exploration of the relationship between writing and reading which [Murnane] undertook in Barley Patch’ I’m reading this book as many readers will, without having read its predecessor. A History of Books was the only one of the Premier’s Prize shortlist that I hadn’t read, and I wanted to read it before the prize is announced on October 16th.
My first impression when I started reading this book (NB I’m not calling it a novel, though novel it certainly is) was that Murnane lost no time in deflating any ideas I might have had about being well-read. I knew before I began that this meditation on books and reading involved some authors that I’d read: James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Joseph Conrad, Herman Hesse, Elias Canetti and John Steinbeck, so I was expecting to identify allusions to their work. But the very first book he alludes to is one of the Latin magic-realists, and although I’ve read a couple of them, I, like Murnane, hadn’t liked them much (though for entirely different reasons). Even so, it’s a kind of torture not knowing which one he means, but I know I’ll never finish reading the book if I Google around trying to identify the subject of this passage:
None of the disputes between the man and the woman had been resolved when he and she became a male and a female jaguar, or it may have been a male and a female hummingbird or a male and a female lizard. (p3)
Is this image from one of the books I’d read? Or has Murnane referenced some obscure author that I’ve never heard of?
To read the rest of my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.com/2012/09/24/a-...
October 11, 2024
"In the left-hand margin of the sheet mentioned were several sentences in handwriting different from that of the essay writer: one such sentence had been underlined with a red felt-tipped pen. The sentence read 'you seem not to understand how morality works in literature.' Beneath the sentence, another sentence had been written with a black, felt-tipped pen in the handwriting of the essay writer: 'Worse, I do not understand what is morality or even what is literature.'"
June 22, 2020
Een aantal jaren geleden las ik met veel vreugde "The plains" en "Landscape with landscape" , van de mij toen nog volkomen onbekende maar grootse Australiër Gerald Murnane. Dat waren twee ongelofelijk vreemde boeken, over de oneindige en niet in kaart te brengen vlakten in ons hoofd, en over de al even oneindige en ongrijpbare landschappen van onze verbeelding. En nu las ik met even veel plezier "A history of books", dat net zo vreemd is en ook net zo intrigerend.
Het boek bestaat uit vier novellen of verhalen: drie relatief kort, een - getiteld "A history of books" relatief lang. Als titelverhaal, door zijn lengte en omdat het als eerste komt zet dit lange verhaal de toon van de rest van het boek. En wat een vreemde toon...…. Het titelverhaal "A history of books" bestaat zelf weer uit verschillende ongetitelde hoofdstukken, steeds met een andere naamloze hoofdpersoon die zich allerlei passages uit niet bij naam genoemde boeken alleen maar herinnert als vage beelden, of zelfs alleen als tantaliserende flarden en glimpen van die beelden. Door bepaalde kleine details merkte ik dat die hoofdpersoon soms schrijvers leest die ik ook wel ken - zoals Proust, Joyce, Laxness, Hesse, Hardy, Conrad- , maar zonder hun thema's of concrete passages te onthouden: de hoofdpersoon memoreert alleen nog beelden, stemmingen en schaduwtinten. Ook is die hoofdpersoon vaak een schrijver die er niet in slaagt te schrijven, omdat hij de beelden in zijn hoofd niet kan omzetten in zinnen. Dat wordt dan verteld in bijna adembenemd abstracte zinnen, waarin soms beeld in beeld in beeld in beeld word vervlochten, en verhaal in verhaal in verhaal in verhaal, zodat de ongrijpbaarheid van de beelden nog verder wordt vergroot. Te meer omdat de ik- figuur soms over zichzelf lijkt te spreken in de hij- vorm, waarbij die hij dan weer een personage kan zijn in een verhaal dat verzonnen is door iemand die verzonnen is door de ik- figuur.
Als lezer worden we dus in wel heel ongrijpbare werelden ondergedompeld, in fictie die zich wel heel nadrukkelijk heeft onthecht van de herkenbare realiteit. Maar die ongrijpbaarheid staat in het teken van intens verlangen naar nieuwe werelden en horizonten voorbij de kenbare en waarneembare wereld.Zie bijvoorbeeld de volgende passage: "The explanation for the strangeness of the image- sky and of the whole image- landscape, according to the owner of the book mentioned, was that sky and landscape were images not of any sight seen by persons in the place called the real world but of visions, so to speak, to the inhabitants, whoever they might be, of the place called the next world". Alles in deze zin haalt zichzelf onderuit: "sky" is "image- sky", ook het landschap is alleen het ongrijpbare beeld van een landschap, de "visoenen" die dat oplevert zijn alleen zichtbaar voor bewoners wier bestaan ook meteen wordt betwijfeld ("whoever they might be"). Een volkomen onwerkelijke zin dus, die precies door zijn onwerkelijkheid in het teken staat van de ongrijpbare "next world" waar de zin over gaat. Een wereld niet in woorden gevat kan of mag worden, en precies dat wordt gemanifesteerd in deze zin. Met deze en andere zinnen vraagt Murnane een bijna meditatieve aandacht voor het ongrijpbare en ondefinieerbare, en juist die aandacht kenmerkt voor hem de schrijver en de lezer.
Iets vergelijkbaars gebeurt volgens mij ook in de volgende passage: "If the man could not have written the work that he had wanted to write, then he would have been satisfied to write a work of fiction for which the only apt ending would have been a report of the effect on the man of his having read, thirty years before, that the chief character in a certain work of fiction had seemed to pass from sight in a place where the white seemed to meet, or even to merge, with the sky, the visible with the invisible, the writer even with the reader, and whatever had been written with whatever had been read". Dit is om te beginnen een wel heel fraaie interpretatie van Halldor Laxness, vooral van motieven in "World Light". En het is een naar mijn smaak prachtig beschreven totaalversmelting van alles, waarin elk individueel fenomeen versmelt met iets anders en dus zijn herkenbaarheid verliest. Dat alles is opgeschreven door een man die niet in woorden kan vatten wat hij wil vatten, ook dit schitterende slottafereel niet. Wat door de vreemdheid van deze zin nog wordt benadrukt ook. Maar precies daarom appelleert dit tafereel aan een intens en onblusbaar verlangen. De personages in "A history of books" hebben nauwelijks interesse in de definieerbare en kenbare wereld: hen interesseert alleen het ongrijpbare beeld, of liever zelfs nog alleen de glimp van dat beeld. Want alleen dat draagt de sporen van "iets" voorbij het kenbare en waarneembare. En wat dat "iets" is moet altijd verhuld blijven, want onthulling zou het weer reduceren tot een waarneembaar en kenbaar fenomeen.
Wonderlijk, hoe Murnane een heel boek lang in raadselen spreekt. Merkwaardig, hoe hij ons helemaal laat verdwalen in ongrijpbare werelden van fictie waarin ook zijn personages elke greep verliezen. En intrigerend hoe juist dat in het teken staat van onblusbaar verlangen naar ongrijpbaarheid. Veel mensen zullen niet houden van dit proza. Maar ik wel. Dit smaakt naar meer!
Het boek bestaat uit vier novellen of verhalen: drie relatief kort, een - getiteld "A history of books" relatief lang. Als titelverhaal, door zijn lengte en omdat het als eerste komt zet dit lange verhaal de toon van de rest van het boek. En wat een vreemde toon...…. Het titelverhaal "A history of books" bestaat zelf weer uit verschillende ongetitelde hoofdstukken, steeds met een andere naamloze hoofdpersoon die zich allerlei passages uit niet bij naam genoemde boeken alleen maar herinnert als vage beelden, of zelfs alleen als tantaliserende flarden en glimpen van die beelden. Door bepaalde kleine details merkte ik dat die hoofdpersoon soms schrijvers leest die ik ook wel ken - zoals Proust, Joyce, Laxness, Hesse, Hardy, Conrad- , maar zonder hun thema's of concrete passages te onthouden: de hoofdpersoon memoreert alleen nog beelden, stemmingen en schaduwtinten. Ook is die hoofdpersoon vaak een schrijver die er niet in slaagt te schrijven, omdat hij de beelden in zijn hoofd niet kan omzetten in zinnen. Dat wordt dan verteld in bijna adembenemd abstracte zinnen, waarin soms beeld in beeld in beeld in beeld word vervlochten, en verhaal in verhaal in verhaal in verhaal, zodat de ongrijpbaarheid van de beelden nog verder wordt vergroot. Te meer omdat de ik- figuur soms over zichzelf lijkt te spreken in de hij- vorm, waarbij die hij dan weer een personage kan zijn in een verhaal dat verzonnen is door iemand die verzonnen is door de ik- figuur.
Als lezer worden we dus in wel heel ongrijpbare werelden ondergedompeld, in fictie die zich wel heel nadrukkelijk heeft onthecht van de herkenbare realiteit. Maar die ongrijpbaarheid staat in het teken van intens verlangen naar nieuwe werelden en horizonten voorbij de kenbare en waarneembare wereld.Zie bijvoorbeeld de volgende passage: "The explanation for the strangeness of the image- sky and of the whole image- landscape, according to the owner of the book mentioned, was that sky and landscape were images not of any sight seen by persons in the place called the real world but of visions, so to speak, to the inhabitants, whoever they might be, of the place called the next world". Alles in deze zin haalt zichzelf onderuit: "sky" is "image- sky", ook het landschap is alleen het ongrijpbare beeld van een landschap, de "visoenen" die dat oplevert zijn alleen zichtbaar voor bewoners wier bestaan ook meteen wordt betwijfeld ("whoever they might be"). Een volkomen onwerkelijke zin dus, die precies door zijn onwerkelijkheid in het teken staat van de ongrijpbare "next world" waar de zin over gaat. Een wereld niet in woorden gevat kan of mag worden, en precies dat wordt gemanifesteerd in deze zin. Met deze en andere zinnen vraagt Murnane een bijna meditatieve aandacht voor het ongrijpbare en ondefinieerbare, en juist die aandacht kenmerkt voor hem de schrijver en de lezer.
Iets vergelijkbaars gebeurt volgens mij ook in de volgende passage: "If the man could not have written the work that he had wanted to write, then he would have been satisfied to write a work of fiction for which the only apt ending would have been a report of the effect on the man of his having read, thirty years before, that the chief character in a certain work of fiction had seemed to pass from sight in a place where the white seemed to meet, or even to merge, with the sky, the visible with the invisible, the writer even with the reader, and whatever had been written with whatever had been read". Dit is om te beginnen een wel heel fraaie interpretatie van Halldor Laxness, vooral van motieven in "World Light". En het is een naar mijn smaak prachtig beschreven totaalversmelting van alles, waarin elk individueel fenomeen versmelt met iets anders en dus zijn herkenbaarheid verliest. Dat alles is opgeschreven door een man die niet in woorden kan vatten wat hij wil vatten, ook dit schitterende slottafereel niet. Wat door de vreemdheid van deze zin nog wordt benadrukt ook. Maar precies daarom appelleert dit tafereel aan een intens en onblusbaar verlangen. De personages in "A history of books" hebben nauwelijks interesse in de definieerbare en kenbare wereld: hen interesseert alleen het ongrijpbare beeld, of liever zelfs nog alleen de glimp van dat beeld. Want alleen dat draagt de sporen van "iets" voorbij het kenbare en waarneembare. En wat dat "iets" is moet altijd verhuld blijven, want onthulling zou het weer reduceren tot een waarneembaar en kenbaar fenomeen.
Wonderlijk, hoe Murnane een heel boek lang in raadselen spreekt. Merkwaardig, hoe hij ons helemaal laat verdwalen in ongrijpbare werelden van fictie waarin ook zijn personages elke greep verliezen. En intrigerend hoe juist dat in het teken staat van onblusbaar verlangen naar ongrijpbaarheid. Veel mensen zullen niet houden van dit proza. Maar ik wel. Dit smaakt naar meer!
October 20, 2014
Memory is an issue with me and so any texts that deal with memory issues are always of more interest to me than others and so from the very beginning of this book I found myself empathising with the narrator—not to be confused with the author although they could well be twins—and his inability to remember very much about any of the books he’s read throughout his life. When I first joined Goodreads I decided to go through the books in my cupboard, the old ones I’ve been carting around for decades, and enter them in the system to start me off and I was appalled to note how little I could dredge up from the depths of my mind. I had, for example, read four books by Nabokov when in my early twenties and could remember nothing bar the titles.
If you’ve read Murnane before this book will not disappoint. If you haven’t this isn’t actually a bad place to start. There’s stuff you won’t see as important—the marbles, the horse racing and his interest in Hungarian which he taught himself to speak late in life—but it’s not a great loss; the book stands alone just fine.
Read my full review on my blog here.
If you’ve read Murnane before this book will not disappoint. If you haven’t this isn’t actually a bad place to start. There’s stuff you won’t see as important—the marbles, the horse racing and his interest in Hungarian which he taught himself to speak late in life—but it’s not a great loss; the book stands alone just fine.
Read my full review on my blog here.
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April 18, 2013Impossible to rate. Like comparing a kumquat to a pile of apples.. Highly unconventional style which takes a lot of concentration to decipher at sentence level, yet leaves crystal clear images and sensations behind. This is the first if Murnane's works I've read. I might have been more motivated to do the work necessary if I was interested in his biography or in working out how he writes. I'm not yet. I might come back o this after I've read The plains.
Read
April 2, 2013Gerard Murnane - or at least the version of Gerard Murnane in this book - can barely remember a word of most of the books he's read, and neither can I. That's enough to make me love this, but it's also brilliant, which helps. I don't even understand how you get to be like this.
PS. I've only read the first story, saving the other three shorter stories for later.
PS. I've only read the first story, saving the other three shorter stories for later.
October 4, 2023
It felt like setting out on a journey into the most hidden kernels of a man's memory, along with its most intimate life-images, throwbacks and out of the blue epiphanies that spring out of his lifetime readings' remebrances.
Standout, poignant and mesmerizing. A bloody masterpiece. ♥️
Standout, poignant and mesmerizing. A bloody masterpiece. ♥️
June 2, 2012
This would have been a better book if they'd done a fi d and replace, and replaced 'image' with nothing.
December 11, 2019
Three statements 1. This book gave me a headache 2. Breathtakingly pretentious 3. Worst book I've ever read
September 12, 2022
gosto muito de uma review de The Plains, do Murnane, na amazon que tem como título "obtuse australiana" e começa com "A lot of vague and descriptive prose like language." e segue com "I must have missed the subtlety as I was pleased to turn the last page.", pois sinto que a sujeita que deu duas estrelas pro livro- que provavelmente tem os mesmos procedimentos, a mesma cadência e provavelmente as mesmas palavras em alguns momentos- não está errada. é vago, obtuso, descritivo, maçante e talvez com uma paixão imperceptível ali no meio das palavras; ao menos esse é o caso de A History of Books, para o qual estou dando cinco estrelas.
Falando sério agora: esse livro é uma grande máquina de estraçalhar a memória.
Falando sério agora: esse livro é uma grande máquina de estraçalhar a memória.
January 28, 2019
Murnane is, as usual, concerned with the relationships between fiction and reality. I am afraid that here he is overdoing it a little: In about two dozen episodes, we are given clues about books, authors, "personages", and the effect these have or had or didn't have on the (fluctuating) main character (s). Not only are fiction and reality blurred, but thoroughly mixed. A challenge for the reader could be to decipher all the clues, and while this is indeed entertaining, it didn't really captivate me. I found the passages strongest where Murnane transcends the fog he is spreading, but, compared to his other books I have read, there are relatively few of those.
September 6, 2025
I should have quit the book early on in the first few pages, but I stuck with it because around three years ago I read The Plains and I have fond memories of it, of its sentences, of Murnane's talent. Here his talent is still somewhat there, but everything fell apart for me at the beginning: I didn't for one second buy what Murnane was trying to do, which was an (to me obnoxious) attempt at crafting a history of a reader. If he'd been more straightforward instead of getting in the way of himself and the stories and the writing in practically every sentence, this book could have been fine, it could have also been good. But no. I breathed more easily when I finished it.
November 26, 2024
Sometimes a book grabs you by the throat and immerses you into its narrative and other times it doesn't. This is why I love reading as I never know what I am going to get when I am reading an author for the first time.
Sadly, I was not gripped reading about the memory of books, how their images may have faded but their impact remains. I felt disconnected, but maybe that was the author's intention - get a reader out of their comfort zone, make them think, speculate.
Many people have loved this book, I found its perspective interesting but not riveting.
Sadly, I was not gripped reading about the memory of books, how their images may have faded but their impact remains. I felt disconnected, but maybe that was the author's intention - get a reader out of their comfort zone, make them think, speculate.
Many people have loved this book, I found its perspective interesting but not riveting.
March 13, 2021
Reading Murnane makes me more interested in reading and writing. His stories follow familiar patterns to his other books and he also tells now familiar anecdotes in slightly different ways here. I suppose that reflects his writing: constantly shifting and repeating in little ways. Like Janet Frame and Borges, I'd really like to know him. Against tired prose and familiar conventions, his novels are a relief and are exciting to read, like something unfamiliar is happening.
October 18, 2022
Layers upon layers of fiction, to which reality cannot hold a candle if this image of a person from one place or another is to be believed.
Murnane articulates thoughts that nobody ever writes about, almost beneath the articulation threshold. Yet he does - articulate them, that is.
Magnificent, unclassifiable, labyrinthine book.
Murnane articulates thoughts that nobody ever writes about, almost beneath the articulation threshold. Yet he does - articulate them, that is.
Magnificent, unclassifiable, labyrinthine book.
August 13, 2023
I keep reading books by Gerald Murnane thinking I will finally understand why the literary minds of the world think he is such a genius, I have yet to experience this revelation. He is a clever writer however he doesn't seem very interested in the real world problems, seems much more concerned with the problems of his mind. I read his books, think it was an interesting read but nothing more. He is not in the tradition of Patrick White writing about the grand spiritual and emotional journeys of troubled characters, Murnane is more Borges than Tolstoy.
January 3, 2024
yeah I DO suppose that I am more affected by image-persons and image-events than I am by actual persons and events! I am always saying this!
December 2, 2025
Perhaps a haiku review
Writer reads: recalls
Only images over decades; feels
Love for sentences
October 15, 2012
This was originally posted at my blog http://ifnotread.wordpress.com/
"I knew I was asking for trouble by reading it because I had read The Plains and understood it very little. The Plains needs a rereading before I can put my thoughts down about it.
For me, Murnane is a fascinating and enigmatic writer but I also get frustrated. Murnane would be crudely put into the ‘literary fiction’ category but I’m not fussed by categories. I only use them to steer me away from horror and romance…
The collection consists of only four stories but the title story is the longest, taking up more than half a book. Only until the end did I realise that ‘A History of Books’ is new and the other three stories have been previously published in magazines and collections.
If you picked up on the fact that I was disappointed with this book, you’re spot on. The idea behind the title story is of the feeling or memory that a book leaves after reading a book. That feeling or memory may suddenly come upon when you are doing something completely disconnected to the book itself. A bit like having a flashback when you smell something that reminds you of your childhood. Something like this:
The two words of the title were the only words from the book that the boy would remember, event a few years afterwards, but he would still remember, sixty and more years afterwards, some of what he had seen in his mind while he read and some of what he had felt.
There are many short pieces of different characters (a lot of them writers) grappling with the images in the mind and the memory of a book:
The man trying to learn the poem thought of his own mind as an image-landscape and had sometimes tried to write one or another poem while he seemed to have one or another detail of that landscape in view. The man, however, had failed as a poet and had even failed somewhat as a man, or so he supposed. He had thus failed because he had never seen clearly enough the details of his image-mind.
Murnane likes to write not so much about life but the stuff of life. I wonder if one would call his writing meta-fiction? I struggled to get through this and thought about it putting it down several times. But I persevered and kept waiting for the ‘Glad I finished it’ moment. It never came. (It has happened before when I finally finished the epic ‘Wolf Hall’ by Hilary Mantel.)
The other shorter stories left no lasting impression on me. This is hard for me to say because I love Murnane’s writing. Maybe I just don’t ‘get it’ (I hate saying that). So the question is ‘What it worth finishing?’ No. And I’m sad about that."
"I knew I was asking for trouble by reading it because I had read The Plains and understood it very little. The Plains needs a rereading before I can put my thoughts down about it.
For me, Murnane is a fascinating and enigmatic writer but I also get frustrated. Murnane would be crudely put into the ‘literary fiction’ category but I’m not fussed by categories. I only use them to steer me away from horror and romance…
The collection consists of only four stories but the title story is the longest, taking up more than half a book. Only until the end did I realise that ‘A History of Books’ is new and the other three stories have been previously published in magazines and collections.
If you picked up on the fact that I was disappointed with this book, you’re spot on. The idea behind the title story is of the feeling or memory that a book leaves after reading a book. That feeling or memory may suddenly come upon when you are doing something completely disconnected to the book itself. A bit like having a flashback when you smell something that reminds you of your childhood. Something like this:
The two words of the title were the only words from the book that the boy would remember, event a few years afterwards, but he would still remember, sixty and more years afterwards, some of what he had seen in his mind while he read and some of what he had felt.
There are many short pieces of different characters (a lot of them writers) grappling with the images in the mind and the memory of a book:
The man trying to learn the poem thought of his own mind as an image-landscape and had sometimes tried to write one or another poem while he seemed to have one or another detail of that landscape in view. The man, however, had failed as a poet and had even failed somewhat as a man, or so he supposed. He had thus failed because he had never seen clearly enough the details of his image-mind.
Murnane likes to write not so much about life but the stuff of life. I wonder if one would call his writing meta-fiction? I struggled to get through this and thought about it putting it down several times. But I persevered and kept waiting for the ‘Glad I finished it’ moment. It never came. (It has happened before when I finally finished the epic ‘Wolf Hall’ by Hilary Mantel.)
The other shorter stories left no lasting impression on me. This is hard for me to say because I love Murnane’s writing. Maybe I just don’t ‘get it’ (I hate saying that). So the question is ‘What it worth finishing?’ No. And I’m sad about that."
June 6, 2012
A challenging read, as always with Gerald. I liked the concept of the images and what they represented, or didn't as the case may be. Not as mighty a novel as The Plains, the daddy of them all.
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