A review by shoba
Border Districts: A Fiction by Gerald Murnane

5.0

“Two months ago, when I first arrived in this township just short of the border, I resolved to guard my eyes….I do this so that I might be more alert to what appears at the edges of my range of vision; so that I might notice at once any sight so much in need of my inspection that one or more of its details seems to quiver or to be agitated until I have the illusion that I am being signalled to or winked at.”

An unnamed narrator moves from the city to a quiet township in an unnamed country. The man recalls that while a young boy he would read passages from the books on his father’s and mother’s nightstands. He read of fictional characters, wealthy young women and men, in fictional settings, in large houses with manicured lawns. As he read, one passage flowing into another, the boy became convinced he was reading a “never-ending book”.

“The remembering man remembered….”

The man remembers that when he was a boy he observed the colors and patterns of the panels of stained glass windows in churches and in private homes, the marbles in his collection, and the kaleidoscope he looked through. His memories from his childhood were so vivid that he remembers the hue of the colors from his colored pencil set and the name given to each color.

“…to read aloud one after another of the tiny printed names…to let each colour seem to soak into each word of its name or even into each syllable of each word of each name so that I could afterwards call to mind an exact shade or hue….Deep cadmium, geranium lake, imperial purple….”

Visiting a friend that he knew from his childhood, the narrator photographs the panels of stained glass in his friend’s home. Looking at the photographs later he perceives that the stained glass panels were more vibrant when he saw them in person.

“Ignorant as I am in the fields of optics and physics, I might have decided that no photographic film is quite so sensitive to light as is the human retina. I might simply have decided that I imagined rather than recalled the sight of the actual windows: that this was one more example of the unreliability of memory….when I decided that my seeing the panes of glass in the early morning had consisted of much more than my registering, as it were, certain shapes and colours; that a part of my seeing was my investing the glass with qualities not inherent in it qualities probably not apparent to any other observer and certainly not detectable by any sort of camera; that what I missed when I looked at the photographic prints was the meaning that I had previously read into the glass. And if I could give credence to such an eccentric theory, then I might as well go further and assert that I saw in the glass part of the private spectrum that my eyes diffused from my own light as it travelled outwards: a refraction of my own essence, perhaps.”

It took me about a month to finish this slim novel. I found it necessary to put it aside often because the text at times became overwhelming. I especially loved the passage where the narrator described the photograph of the author on the back of a George Gissing biography that he read years ago. In the author’s photograph, the narrator noticed a possible door in the distance and a light, the source unidentifiable. This novel was about memory and light or the memory of light. Therefore it serves as a record of perceptions, lived experiences, rather than facts. I wasn’t sure how to rate this book, possibly 4 stars since I enjoyed it less than Inland. I then realized that I would reread this book before any other 4 star book I had read this year. I remain, continuing in the glow of Murane’s light.