My piece entitled "Reading Gerald Murnane's Landscapes with Proust" takes this volume of Murnane's essays as its starting point.

Read it (and much, much more on and by Murnane from the likes of Teju Cole, Scott Esposito, Emmett Stinson, Tristan Foster, Matthew Jakubowski, and others) in Music & Literature Magazine's third issue: order here. ( )

The more Murnane I read, the more I want to force him on everyone I know. The more I want to force him on people, the more I'm forced to consider what they should read first. And the more I consider that, the more I realize that all of his books, and none of them, are ideal first reads. Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs is a case in point.

On the one hand, Murnane spends a lot of time in these pieces explaining what he takes himself to be doing in his (official) fiction. The most interesting essays (/stories) here take Murnane and his works as their topics.

On the other hand, I have no idea what anyone would make of this if they tried to read these bits and pieces without having some idea of what his official fiction looked like. So maybe any friends out there who happen to be reading should read this short review, and then read a couple of his novels or collections, and then read this volume.

A few bits to get you in the right mood: Murnane writes, here, that sentences have a shape or sound that must approximate as much as possible their meaning. He writes that Herbert Read's phrase, "the contour of our thought," helps him "in the way that phrases from the bible or from Karl Marx probably help other people." In other words, his writing is deeply formalistic, but also has a definite subject matter: the shape of the thought of Gerald Murnane.

That thought is primarily about the imagination: what it is ("the strange territory that seemed to be lying all around me and just out of my view"), what it does for Gerald Murnane, how it touches or diverges from whatever isn't the imagination.

This results not only in a unique body of writing, at once entirely autobiographical and utterly fictional, totally fantastic and perfectly mundane, but also in a unique way of reading. "I remembered most clearly and with most pleasure [from all the books of fiction he had read] what I call spaces-within-spaces," either the two ways of Proust's novel in his narrator, or the house and moors of Wuthering Heights, or the infinite rooms he sees in Kafka and Musil.

It also results in a unique way of reading aspiring writers' work. The best fiction, he writes, "is fiction written by men and women not to tell the stories of their lives but to describe the images in their minds. My experience has been that a writer begins to write a piece of true fiction not knowing what he or she is trying to explain."

As for the fiction itself, he offers us "an emblematic scene... a scene that stands for the essence of [his] fiction."

"A man sits in a book-lined room in a house of many rooms. The window-blinds in the room are drawn, but the light at the edges tells me that the day outside is hot and bright. The silence in the room tells me that the house is surrounded by a wide and grassy and mostly level landscape. In the book-lined room, the sitting man sometimes reads and sometimes writes. What he mostly reads about or writes about is, perhaps, a woman or, perhaps, another wide and grassy and mostly level landscape further off from his own."

If you haven't read Murnane, this will sound excruciatingly dull. If you have read him, and enjoyed his work, it will bring back wonderful memories. ( )

http://msarki.tumblr.com/post/58558850190/invisible-yet-enduring-lilacs-by-geral...

Though a big fan of seriously lopsided proportions regarding the work of Gerald Murnane, I seem to be drawn more to the longer form of his short fiction and even more hooked into his longest long ones. Not that his essays are not good and interesting and full of helpful ideas in which I get to know Murnane even better, but the entire idea of having to stay with his object for the end result of a longer fiction gives me more to chew on and less he can get away with. That is, if you know what I mean. In his shorter work such as his so-called essays he has less rope in which to hang himself and less of a chance for making my head spin which is something I am extremely enamored with in my reading of him. Emily Dickinson wanted a poem to blow the top of her head off. I am satisfied with just a fast spin cycle. David Foster Wallace wore a bandana in order to keep his head from exploding, so you see, all of us have different ways in which we go about getting our needs met on the page.

So far in my reading there isn't any essay that stands out above the others, but they are all informative and important in understanding Murnane and his previous work. The piece on Kerouac, On the Road to Bendigo, offers another glimpse into the mind of Murnane and what makes him such a kindred spirit to such a moronic and misguided misogynist as Kerouac was. It seems they both had a marvelous penchant for making up complicated games as young boys they could play by themselves and keep detailed records of. In the case of Murnane he made a horse-racing game with marbles as did Kerouac as well. Murnane did not go in for the baseball card game that Kerouac developed but what is interesting to me is I did both. Of course, my games were not as elaborately detailed as either one of these two literary giants. I relied on the domestic makers of a board game titled The Kentucky Derby for my horse-racing pleasure and I also purchased a card game I think called simply Baseball developed by someone other than Jack Kerouac. I kept my own detailed baseball records and had a full league of teams. I had leaders in several baseball categories including best ERA, most strikeouts, wins, batting average, home runs, RBI's, hits, runs, not to mention the standings for each team in my single league and would spend hours at my desk shuffling and dealing, and learning how to cheat. As I look back I think of myself as compartmentalized in my soft-core cheating, but in a much less diabolical way than most of the rather obscene criminals we have heard gruesome tales of.

Through these collected essays I am also learning more about the books Murnane has read. Much of what he writes between these covers here are in some manner late book reviews, and there are authors mentioned I had never heard of and I am sent scampering to my source of all things literary for new answers on availability and their worthiness to others besides Murnane. And there are also criticisms galore regarding submitted fictions by others in which he plays the part of decider of whether to place the pieces in the magazine he was an integral part of called Meanjin. I liked his editorial style and the way he marked his comments on the margins of the pages he was in charge of filtering down to a final product.

The title essay of this collection, Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, makes the reading of the entire book more than worthwhile. Anyone familiar with Marcel Proust and his masterwork will certainly enjoy this longish piece. The Proust name is mentioned often as is his text, and connections are made to Murnane's life that almost seem remarkable if you weren't already familiar with the way in which Gerald works. Landscapes and connections abound in this piece regarding the author's father and horse racing among many other things not needing to be mentioned here but certainly important to Murnane's story. One interesting example that should be made is Murnane's own lack of a sense of smell which is doubly a detriment one might think to relating to the words of Proust seeing as though taste and scent is so prevalent in his work and memory. I am not one to comment much on Marcel Proust as I have only owned the entire twelve volumes of his masterwork for a period of a couple years at most before selling it online for a very good profit. I had begun the first volume with every intention of finishing the entire masterwork but only ventured in far enough to realize perhaps I had not the gumption to ever finish such a book of several volumes though I immediately recognized a work of great genius and flair. My fear in reading Marcel Proust has always been at the risk of not reading all the other books and authors I have already, and will have, been attracted to in some way. To invest the period of time it would take to read the Proust entire masterwork is something I am unable at this point to do. Perhaps after I have significantly aged and my looks have evolved themselves into effects more resembling a prune, and I can find no other work that might purchase me to the extreme, then, and only then, will I be able to dive in to such a wondrously rich experience as reading Marcel Proust. A complete study of the work of Marcel Proust inevitably amounts to a scholarship escaping me but appears to be something required by others I respect for their reading prowess and discerning ideas of what that means to such a serious literary Bovidae.

Stream System was for me one of the most difficult pieces of Murnane fiction I have ever read. Of course, one may wonder why I use the word fiction here when this is obviously a collection of essays, so to speak. Well, the problem is with Gerald Murnane and not I. At the end of this Stream System he admits what he just related was all fiction and none of it really happened, and for every reason under the sun I still do not believe him. He sounds so truthful when he is speaking to me. And nothing ever sounds made-up. Especially the part about his younger brother being backwards and he avoiding him all his life and his little brother finally dying alone in a room with not one friend in the world including counting his older brother Gerald. And Murnane is only matter-of-fact about the entire occasion of his brother's death. There is no sentimentality at all, but true confessions as to how he hid from and avoided his younger brother all of his life and never was a friend to him. It was only on the day before his brother died at the age of forty-three that Gerald realized that his brother had no friends. For a moment I was a bit disturbed with Gerald Murnane and wondered if my strong affections for him had been too hasty and now felt a bit unseemly. But I may never know the truth about his brother or if Gerald really was as bad to him as his confession stated. He clearly disavowed everything when he claimed the entire piece had been written at a desk and he had never been where he said he had and for that I suppose he must be forgiven.

After struggling through that last so-called essay I sailed through the next two of the last three remaining for me to read. Not exactly all the way through however, as I still had at least half the second to last essay remaining to me when this compulsion came over me to express again my gratitude for Gerald Murnane on this page. These two essays before the last one are amazing in the sense that he is teaching anyone willing to listen and understand why and how it is that he does what he does on the page. He even performs a bit of a creative demonstration for us which is not only marvelous but extremely sensitive in its honesty and forthrightness. Either that or he is again somewhat pulling my leg with another bit of made-up fiction, but I highly doubt it. Murnane is a very humble man, and one who seems he cannot tell a lie even though he admits to writing fiction all of the time. For the sake of clarity the two pieces I am referring to are Secret Writing and The Breathing Author. Both are inside looks into the workings of the mind of Gerald Murnane and which are so fascinating to me I would think them scary for the uninitiated, of which those members would consist of those readers who have yet to read Murnane's long fiction The Plains or his collection of shorter fictions titled Landscape with Landscape. It would behoove anyone wanting to read and study Gerald Murnane to begin with these two above-mentioned books first to prepare oneself for the onslaught of images and ideas that come from everywhere it seems from the mind of Murnane and can cause a bit of consternation and confusion even if the reader is not perhaps fully prepared. It must also be noted that I have yet to read his very first two books as they were not readily available to me at the time when I chose to begin my study, and now my latest obsession, of which I have had too many prior to this new one to list here, and really is not pertinent to this page.

If Gerald Murnane was telling the truth in the second to last essay of this book, then those of us who do outlive him by several years will be the recipients of a multitude of private writings currently held in the personal files he keeps at his home that he says will be made public several years after his death and the deaths of certain others his words might harm or bring undue pain to. I probably won't make it long enough to learn all there is that Murnane wants to share, but I am sure it will be worthwhile and something I am likely to not want to have missed. But then, when that time comes, I will be like the eunuch castrated before puberty who knows nothing of what it might have been like to be a sexual being with all the feelings, good and bad, that sexual passion brings.

Murnane begins his last essay in this book with why he learned the Hungarian language at such an advanced age, if my memory serves, at fifty-six and generally an age too old to be learning a new foreign language. He related how he had become competent during the course of his life in six languages, but never had he become fluent in any to the degree of learning by hearing the languages except for his native English. But Murnane went on then to digress or segue his story into Catholicism, Latin prayers, hymns, The Nicene Creed, horse racing, and a few other examples somehow relating to this main subject, and finally branching off into his personal discovery of a book he read in English written by an Hungarian writer by the name of Gyula Illyes. The title of this English translation was People of the Puszta. He was so affected by the book his consecutive obsessive impulse was to write his next long fiction he titled Inland (which just so happens to be the next Murnane title in my queue) in order to "relieve him of his feelings". Because of being so impressed by this Hungarian novel he decided to learn the language so he could read the book in the original.

Gerald Murnane is such a special talent. It is a shame he is just now being discovered more widely. Many of his books are still hard to find in the USA and come at stiff prices even for those of us who might actually afford them. It is my hope that his Australian publisher Giramondo Publishing will bring all of his out-of-print titles back into circulation again and that Dalkey Archives or some other such publisher in the USA will deem fit to do so as well. ( )