Border Districts by Gerald Murnane (September 2018)
Though Murnane’s Border Districts is not likely to appear on my 2018 ‘book of the year list’, I did appreciate it for an observation that’s remained on my mind – people read fiction hoping to learn something they would be unable to learn from any other kind of book. In the weeks and months since I finished reading, I’ve considered this idea anytime I’ve started reading a new work of fiction. I’m looking forward to updating you, reader, if these ponderings lead me to anywhere interesting (1).
Technically, the thought highlighted above doesn’t really apply to me for Border Districts since it came my way via recommendation (I suppose I was learning what I thought about the book but that’s probably not what Murnane meant). I did take a couple of other thoughts down, though, that I probably would not have learned from my recent nonfiction choices.
Murnane echoes Proust in one passage and suggests that readers sometimes feel closer to fictional characters than they do to those in their everyday lives because authors are able to fully report a fictional character’s feelings. I suppose this is a good explanation for the specific phenomenon but I would expand the observation and suggest that closeness is often directly related to how feelings are reported among people.
I also liked the thought that people can feel pangs for musical notes after even fifty years have passed. I suppose this speaks to a larger point from the book – things can stay with us for a long time, possibly forever, and even if things do fragment over time the little pieces can remind us of the long-lost whole in the same way a single note can remind us of a once cherished song.
Footnotes / lingering thoughts…
1. Another year…
At the very least, it’ll give me another angle to write about Maniac Magee, a book I’m (unsurprisingly) running out of ways to analyze after reading it every April for seven consecutive years.
