This book is ostensibly a collection of unrelated short stories and yet each story somehow leads into the next. In fact, the name of the following story is in each case embedded into the final pages of the previous one. Not that their plots, subject matter, or timeframe relate at all. This is the beauty and strangeness of Murnane’s fiction. He is a master of writing about writing. “I might even have told her that if I were a writer of a certain fashionable sort of fiction my standing at the supper table and saying those words to her could later have become part of a story of redoubled complexity, but that since I was a writer interested only in what was real, the scope of my question encompassed no one but my real self.” He is able to embed the narrator within the plot and extract him from the story at will. The narrator at once is describing his life, then will switch to pontificate about writing in general, all the while letting the reader know, in no uncertain terms, that what the reader is reading is only fiction, after all. Murnane’s writing weaves and nests story within story so skillfully that the craft of the writing is what impresses most in the end. “I try to make use of the notion that I am a character in a story that I tried to write twenty years ago, and that I could not finish that story because I cannot now imagine how I should have finished it.”
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