Border Districts
A Fiction
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Devotees of Murnane (The Plains), the exacting Australian writer of crafty, austere fictions, will find familiar themes in this prismatic work: the fascination with color, the grassy landscapes, and the obsessive compiling of a mind's "image-history." The aged narrator, a "student of colors and shades and hues and tints," has retired to a "district near the border" of his unnamed native land. There he explores the regions of his psyche with a monklike devotion, "study in all seriousness matters that another person might dismiss as unworthy, trivial, childish." These include his lifelong enchantment with marbles and stained glass, his mental album of "image-heroines" (the Madonna, Thomas Hardy's Tess), and a remembered line from Virgil's Aeneid about the reddening dawn. He looks at his surroundings askance to make himself "more alert to what appears at the edges of range of vision," attuning himself to the borderlands of his senses, as it were. He is punctilious in scrutinizing his own narration, insisting on classifying his text as a "report of actual events" and including compositional updates ("While I was writing the previous sentences...") and revisions as he goes. Murnane's mysterious, exquisitely constructed novel lingers with the reader just like the images that have indelibly imprinted themselves on the narrator's mind.
Customer Reviews
Border Districts
Even with the near-absurd affect of eschewing prepositions almost universally in favor of renaming things again and again by their proper names (“the church with the stain glass window...., “the church with the stain glass window...”, etc), this book is able to spin some fascination out of otherwise drab rural Aussie events- Nobel worthy? Not sure about that...