Friday, May 25, 2018

Border Districts: A Fiction by Gerald Murnane

1 Star


Unpopular opinion time.

Guard eyes while in town. 

Underdeveloped. Confluence of unwoven themes in a stream of consciousness format that bores the reader with repeated instances of "I never took any interest" and "While I was writing the previous paragraph".

There are repeated themes of stain glass, horses, females, anti-Protestantism as the author struggles with his faith. He espouses a belief in the humble and now, but a longing for wealth and mythic past. Reminds me of a nostalgic collective unconscious memory; the weaving of it is very starkly presented.

I feel that this speaks to a narrow audience: white, Gaelic/British heritage, and Catholic, which considering the author's Australian roots is not surprising, but it feels rather alienating and exclusive. I just wished that explorations of color and light had been better executed because there's an intriguing circling of the subjects. Feels more like a flushed book outline than a finished book.

There is an idea of something substantive, but it's never realized and that's disappointing.

My favorite part was in the closing, a quote by Percy Bysshe Shelley:

Life, like a dome of many-colored glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity.

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