A bittersweet farewell to the world and the word by the Australian
master
"The mind is a place best viewed from borderlands...."
Border Districts, purportedly the Australian master Gerald Murnane's
final work of fiction, is a hypnotic, precise, and self-lacerating
"report" on a life led as an avid reader, fumbling lover, "student of
mental imagery", and devout believer - but a believer not in the
commonplaces of religion, but rather in the luminescence of memory and
its handmaiden, literature.
In Border Districts, a man moves from a capital city to a remote town
in the border country, where he intends to spend the last years of his
life. It is time, he thinks, to review the spoils of a lifetime of
seeing, a lifetime of reading. Which sights, which people, which books,
fictional characters, turns of phrase, and lines of verse will survive
into the twilight? A dark-haired woman with a wistful expression? An
ancestral house in the grasslands? The colors in translucent panes of
glass, in marbles and goldfish and racing silks? Feeling an increasing
urgency to put his mental landscape in order, the man sets to work
cataloging this treasure, little knowing where his "report" will lead
and what secrets will be brought to light.
Border Districts is a jewel of a farewell from one of the greatest
living writers of English prose.
