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. ( )

This collection includes the novella-length "A history of books" as well as three shorter pieces, all dealing in different ways with the author's memory of the books he has read (or not-read, in some cases), and exploring the conceit that it is these books that have formed the most significant moments in his life. All four stories are billed as "fiction", something the narrator reinforces (or undermines) by reminding us repeatedly that it is fiction we are reading. In the first three, the narrator seems to share much of his background and career with what we know of the author, but "Last letter to a niece" takes us a few steps further into the realm of fiction by imagining a narrator for whom the people he encounters in books are so much more real to him than those of the "real world" that he has been unable ever to engage properly with that real world: his only significant relationship is with the niece with whom he only communicates in writing.

Murnane is intrigued by the way literature works through words in sentences, whilst what he remembers of books is in the form of images and feelings. He finds he can remember few of the millions of words he has read, and when he acknowledges that he can remember a phrase or sentence it is usually one of astonishing simplicity, like "The boy's name was David," a sentence that opened a story by one of his creative writing students, and which — as Murnane unpacks it — turns out to be making the most astonishing claims for the power of fiction.

Especially in the title-story, Murnane enjoys teasing us by referring to the books he is talking about in the most indirect and allusive way possible, hardly ever mentioning the title or the author's name (the only book actually mentioned by name — after several pages of riffing about marbles and the colours in the cover image — is Das Glasperlenspiel, of which the narrator claims to have read the first hundred pages (further than most people get...!). Authors' identities are hinted at through odd facts and relative chronology, e.g. "The author was an Englishman and a contemporary of the man who had read at least part of the book but had later seemed to forget it". This one was Brian Aldiss, as is obvious from the images Murnane remembers from the book, but others are harder to spot, particularly since Murnane often omits basic parameters like gender and nationality. (There's a Publisher's Note at the end of the book teasing us further by sowing doubts: "The authors of the books referred to in ‘A History of Books’ are believed to include...")

He also constantly distances himself-as-narrator from himself-as-subject by talking about the subject as "a boy of ten years", "the man lying on the couch", "a man aged almost forty years", etc. And there's an almost forensic carefulness about language, about distinguishing the things he projects from his memory of books from those he actually saw:

The man remembering the book that he had read forty-five years before saw in his mind several adjoining image-rooms in which the image-walls were covered with image-books on image-shelves. The image-rooms were part of an image-flat in an image-city in image-Europe.

— This is talking about a book that seems to be Canetti's Auto-da-fé. It can be maddening, but it's also fascinating and weirdly beautiful. Murnane seems to be doing that thing literature is supposed to do and so rarely achieves, unpicking the world and making us look at it in a completely new way. Except that here it's not the real world he's unpicking, but an imagined world taken from books that partly overlaps (or not) with our own imagined worlds. ( )