‘A History of Books’ by Gerald Murnane (Review)

A couple of months back, I found time for one of the Gerald Murnane books I’d bought last year in a sale by Giramondo Publishing.  Since then, I’ve been rather busy with my International Booker Prize shadowing duties, as well as the usual review copies, but having found a little breathing space, I’ve finally managed to get around to trying another.  This one, judging by the title, at least, is all about books, yet less naïve readers will focus on the cover photo rather than the title.  Yes, it’s another work all about the man himself, and if you’re already a fan of Murnanian meta-fiction, you’ll be right at home here…

*****
A History of Books is a shortish work consisting of twenty-nine texts, each supposedly focusing on, or inspired by, a work of literature.  Alas, for those of you expecting a trip down a literary memory lane, it’s not quite that simple.  As it happens, the links to the books are rather tangential, with Murnane neglecting to ever mention the name of the work, or even of the writer, hiding the inspiration for most pieces behind a fluffy cloud of circumlocution.

Of course, as is often the case, the main focus here (or, in Murnanian terms, the ‘chief protagonist’) is a thinly-veiled portrait of the writer himself.  Many of the pieces begin with an older man thinking about a younger man (the aforementioned older man several decades earlier) and recalling what this younger self thought about a certain work of literature that he, the younger man, may have read, or have intended to read, at the time recalled by the older man.  Who certainly isn’t Murnane himself – you see, this, as the writer, or perhaps the narrator, is at pains to stress, is a work of fiction.

For those wanting to play detective, there is a list at the back of the book, with authors the book is ‘believed to include’, as it’s nicely put.  Some are fairly easy to spot (e.g. Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game and a couple of mentions of Thomas Hardy) while others are a little more obscure.  Even here, though, our friend will have his fun – one name included in the middle of the list is a certain Gerald Murnane…

With the focus on memory, many of the texts making up A History of Books look back at the writer’s youth:

More than fifty years after the boy had sat in the lounge room and had found in a certain magazine the strip of paper mentioned, the man who had been the boy could remember from all the words that he had read and from all the illustrations that he had looked at in all the magazines mentioned some of the details of each of two black-and-white illustrations and some of the words from the caption beneath one of the illustrations.
pp.27/8 (Giramondo Publishing, 2012)

There’s a young man remembering the countryside he imagined in certain books, and another (the same?) young man struggling to memorise poetry, as well as a young boy in class regarding the girl he supposes he’s in love with.

Of course, there are also glimpses of the artist as a young man, the nascent writer, with his plans for the future a recurring theme:

That image first appeared in the mind of the young man while he was reading one of the many works of fiction that he read in the hope of learning how to write a work of fiction that he had planned for a long time to write but had not yet begun to write. (p.70)

At one point we see the/a young man copying worthy passages from books onto sheets of paper attached to his lounge room walls in the hope that he’ll somehow absorb them, these beautiful sentences helping him to craft his own.

More than sentences, though, Murnane’s obsession is with images.  The writer’s connection with the books he’s read is a rather visual one as he rarely remembers words, instead finding himself accompanied by the images these words conjured up in his mind.  As always, though, he’s quick to remind us of the difference between fact and fiction:

An image-seaport appeared at the centre of the image-seacoast, and a few image-townships or image-villages appeared at intervals in the grassy countryside. (p.43)

A History of Books is populated by image-people and image-landscapes of the kind many readers will be familiar with from their own ventures into literary worlds.

Murnane’s prose is always enjoyable, and there are some nice pieces here, yet if I’m honest, I wasn’t quite as taken with A History of Books as has been the case with the writer’s other works.  The fairly short pieces, some only a few pages in length, can be a little repetitive in a way his other books aren’t, and the work is often at its best when a little different.  A nice example here is a piece late in the book, in which gods and goddesses in a sort of heaven are disturbed by a faint knocking on the outskirts of their realm…

These short texts also suffer when compared to writing included in the same book.  You see, to supplement the short main event, Giramondo have very kindly included three other stories (all of which are also in Collected Short Fiction), ‘As it Were a Letter’, ‘The Boy’s Name Was David’ and ‘Last Letter to a Niece’.  The second of these, in particular, expands upon some of the themes from A History of Books, a lovely piece in which the/a writer looks back at all of the pieces of writing he read as a teacher of creative writing, wondering which will be the last to be forgotten, and why.

It’s not my favourite Murnane, then, but A History of Books is still well worth a read, and is perhaps better suited to a reader more able to take the time to appreciate the texts one at a time rather than marching through them as I tended to do.  While the title may dub it a history of books, in truth, it’s more a history of a reader, and a writer, and the effect books have had on him as he looks back over the decades and teases out images that linger in the memory.

Hmm – I wonder what words, or images, will stay with me from this one…