Border Districts by Gerald Murnane

Border Districts by Gerald Murnane

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.

Gerald Murnane was born in Melbourne, Australia, in the year 1939. He has worked as a primary school teacher, an editor, and a lecturer at a university. Tamarisk Row (1974), his first novel, was followed by nine more, the most recent of which is A Million Windows. Murnane received the Patrick White Medal in 1999 and the Melbourne Prize for Literature in 2009. He resides in the western part of Victoria.