‘Border Districts` by Gerald Murnane – Fiction???

 

‘Border Districts` by Gerald Murnane (2017) – 132 pages

I believe I gave ‘Border Districts’ a fair chance, but it didn’t work for me.

Usually I can read and appreciate most of the lauded fiction writers. I did not care much for Dario Fo who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1997, but giving the prize to him was probably a mistake anyway. Otherwise my major stumbling block has been Samuel Beckett. I’ve read both some of his plays and a few of his novels, but none of his work has reached me in any meaningful way. Not even ‘Waiting for Godot’ affected me that much.

One of the reviews of ‘Border Districts’ by Gerald Murnane that I read mentioned Samuel Beckett.

First of all ‘Border Districts’ reads more like a memoir rather than a fiction. There is even a line in the novel stating that “I am not writing a work of fiction but a report of seemingly fictional matters”. There is no plot. There are no characters. It is mainly the narrator’s memories of what he has read or seen. The language has the verisimilitude of non-fiction. At times ‘Border Districts’ reads like a not very interesting essay on the author’s marble collection among other things.

Despite my lack of appreciation for this book, I did catch its theme. It is about the images which most affect us and which we retain as part of our visual image memory throughout our lives. Hence his fascination with his translucent marble collection. Perhaps some pictures may have helped?

Another image memory the narrator has is of the refracted light through the stained glass church windows of his Catholic youth. He recalls from his reading how during the Reformation, Protestant congregations took over some of the old Catholic churches in Europe, and the first thing the Protestants would do is knock out and break the beautiful stained glass of the Catholic churches they took over. The Protestants got the bare plain un-decorated churches they deserved. This was an image that I could relate to because I can still recall the beautiful stained glass windows of the church of my youth. Ours was a German Lutheran church, but they had the good sense to value and use beautiful stained glass.

I appreciate the stained glass but the images of his marbles and the horse racing colors not so much.

Another positive in ‘Border Districts’ for me was that this attention to one’s visual image memory spurred my own memories. I remembered when after college I got my first white collar job and was bored stiff, so I signed up for an extension Art History course of two semesters which covered art from the Dark Ages until today in two semesters. The guy who taught the course was kind of a shady dark mysterious figure but he made those paintings come alive for me, especially the Renaissance paintings. He became kind of a role model for me. During the Impressionist era, he introduced us to the idea of “the merely pleasant”. Maybe we undervalue “the merely pleasant”. During that time I put up pictures in my room of “La Grande Jatte” by Georges Seurat and “Two Sisters” by Pierre-August Renoir because these represented the merely pleasant for me. I became a crusader for the merely pleasant. As part of the class we went to the Chicago Art Institute, and we actually saw the originals of those two paintings.

The Merely Pleasant?

So ‘Border Districts’ did spur these memories in me, so perhaps I am undervaluing the book also.

However I found the writing in ‘Border Districts’ to be relentlessly flat and the subject matter usually determinedly pedestrian. I considered the sentences rather clumsy and found myself frequently bored by mid-sentence.

In a review in the Washington Post, Jamie Fisher said of ‘Border Districts that “the result is tedious – but fascinating”. For me the bottom line was very tedious and only somewhat fascinating.

 

 

Grade : C

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