Border Districts

New
Paperback
2019
$10.71

`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 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 colours 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 cataloguing this treasure, little knowing where his `report' will lead and what secrets will be brought to light. Border Districts, a jewel of a farewell from one of the greatest living writers of English prose. This is his first work to be published in the UK.

Synopsis

`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 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 colours 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 cataloguing this treasure, little knowing where his `report' will lead and what secrets will be brought to light. Border Districts, a jewel of a farewell from one of the greatest living writers of English prose. This is his first work to be published in the UK.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 144
Publisher: And Other Stories
Published: 31 Jan 2019
ISBN 10: 1911508385
ISBN 13: 9781911508380
Book Overview: Intense buzz around Murnane's work in US and Australia Lots of interest building in Murnane's work in the UK - Murnane is a genuine cult figure Fans include Teju Cole, Ben Lerner, Chris Power, Lidija Haas and many more First of five Murnane novels from And Other Stories

Media Reviews

`Murnane, in his unfailingly serious way, is very funny.' Lidija Haas, Harper's Magazine`Fascinating . . . Relentlessly introspective but dependably playful.' Washington Post ---- `As Murnane remarks, My writing was not an attempt to produce something called literature but an attempt to discover meaning , and his insistence on the artifice of written enterprise bears witness to a thoroughness and integrity that far outweigh the minor virtue - or minor vice - of readability.' Adrian Nathan West, TLS ---- `As Murnane remarks, My writing was not an attempt to produce something called literature but an attempt to discover meaning , and his insistence on the artifice of written enterprise bears witness to a thoroughness and integrity that far outweigh the minor virtue - or minor vice - of readability.' Adrian Nathan West on Border Districts and Stream System, TLS ---- `Border Districts is bound together by intersected themes of light and faith. . . Murnane's is a vision that blesses and beatifies every detail.' 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[ing] in all seriousness matters that another person might dismiss as unworthy, trivial, childish.' Publishers Weekly ---- 'An old man ruminates on landscapes and houses, authors and religion, colored glass and memory in this drifting quasi-fiction. The unnamed narrator, age 72, has recently moved from a city to live alone in a 'quiet township' near an unspecified border in an unnamed country. In the opening pages, he recalls his school days and the religious brothers who taught him.' Kirkus, starred review ---- 'His new book, Border Districts, is weird in the way everything he has published is weird. It possesses the peculiar quality of being intimately familiar and unidentifiable. (...) Border Districts is a bit like a Wordsworthian epic in quasi-lyrical mode that has been translated from the Hungarian and reconfigured as an old codger's attempt to find his fragments in his ruins and to adjust to his obsessions a language of maniacal precision and blindness. (...) This is a book that refuses to name names, and its elaborate winding stair will preserve the wonder of a sensibility at the edge of solipsism. (...) You will not find a more intimate or more lame or more deeply wrought piece of fiction anywhere in the world.' Peter Craven, The Australian ---- 'Border Districts is a quieter, gentler book than its forebears, weighted, but not haunted, by Murnane's Catholic upbringing and its echoes. It's also a synesthetic book, heady with colour' Beejay Silcox, Australian Book Review ---- 'Border Districts is a devotional manuscript in which the intention is not the divine but a recuperation, even a restoration, of self. It is thrilling. Nothing happens, everything happens. Helen Elliott, The Monthly ---- 'Murnane's fascination is now in what appears at the edge of his vision: the border separating what is glimpsed at the very brink of sight and what is just on the far side of seeing.' Benjamin H. Ogden, New York Times ---- 'External reality does not impede here on the mental -- instead, the two are parallel or complementary realms defined by different conditions of access: the one reachable by foot or car, the other by pondering the properties of light and what might be called speculative recollection.' Adrian Nathan West, Times Literary Supplement ---- 'Border Districts, with more room to expand, feels less formally oppressive while still holding the author's signature moments of crystalline detail and uncanny observation. (...) The sequences are inscrutable and resistant to interpretation.' Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal ---- 'This is writing peppered with phrases of a purposeful stiltedness. The result is tedious -- but fascinating. (...) In the absence of plot, Border Districts is bound together by intersected themes of light and faith.' Jamie Fisher, The Washington Post ---- `Border Districts is a strange and demanding experience, but to give over to its demands, to its way of making the familiar strange, is to open oneself to the delicate power of its rhythms, the haunting depth of its images, and the irrefutable craftsmanship in every sentence.' Louis Klee, Sidney Morning Herald

Author Bio

Gerald Murnane was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1939. He is the author of eleven works of fiction, five of which will be published by And Other Stories in the coming years. He has won multiple high-profile awards across Australia, despite eschewing publicity and travel. He now works as a barman at the local golf course.