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And Other Stories (2022), 144 pagina's
User reviews
LibraryThing member thorold
Gerald Murnane has been saying goodbye to his readers since at least the publication of Border Districts in 2017, but this time he seems to be marking a definite end to his career: he has spent a few months reading through his entire output of published books in chronological order and recording
The essays in this book aren't meant as reviews or explanations of the earlier books, of course, but try to pick up interesting and non-obvious thoughts provoked by reading them: sometimes these are about the circumstances in which the books were written or about what was discarded in the writing process, more often they are about Murnane's rather individual approach to writing and to fiction and the way it has developed over the years. Talking about his first book, Tamarisk Row, he admits to being pleasantly surprised: "The author of fifty years ago had thought far less about theories of narration than I have today, but some sort of feeling for the rightness of the narrative was already with him."
Amongst many other things, Murnane talks about a few occasions when he has written what he considers to be a perfect sentence, about the surprising way certain images found their place in his writing years after he had first come across them, about his relationship with Proust, and about his two "ideal readers", one of them a (drowned) young woman he encountered in People of the Puszta by Gyula Illyés, the other Catherine Earnshaw. He also talks about the complex and self-devised horse-racing game he has been playing for many years, set in an imaginary Antipodes which has some sort of connection with the worlds of Gondal and Gaaldine created by the Brontë siblings.
There's some silliness and a certain amount of deliberate teasing of the reader going on, but there's also a lot of very interesting and serious stuff about how and why fiction is (or should be) written.
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his reactions to each one in essay form (being in a book by Murnane, this list necessarily has to be recursive, so the last chapter is about the book called Last letter to a reader).The essays in this book aren't meant as reviews or explanations of the earlier books, of course, but try to pick up interesting and non-obvious thoughts provoked by reading them: sometimes these are about the circumstances in which the books were written or about what was discarded in the writing process, more often they are about Murnane's rather individual approach to writing and to fiction and the way it has developed over the years. Talking about his first book, Tamarisk Row, he admits to being pleasantly surprised: "The author of fifty years ago had thought far less about theories of narration than I have today, but some sort of feeling for the rightness of the narrative was already with him."
Amongst many other things, Murnane talks about a few occasions when he has written what he considers to be a perfect sentence, about the surprising way certain images found their place in his writing years after he had first come across them, about his relationship with Proust, and about his two "ideal readers", one of them a (drowned) young woman he encountered in People of the Puszta by Gyula Illyés, the other Catherine Earnshaw. He also talks about the complex and self-devised horse-racing game he has been playing for many years, set in an imaginary Antipodes which has some sort of connection with the worlds of Gondal and Gaaldine created by the Brontë siblings.
There's some silliness and a certain amount of deliberate teasing of the reader going on, but there's also a lot of very interesting and serious stuff about how and why fiction is (or should be) written.
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Language
Original language
English
Physical description
144 p.; 7.75 inches
ISBN
1913505421 / 9781913505424