This is a novel that any writer would love. It is fundamentally about the process of thinking, the images that one pictures in the mind, and the memories that the brain recalls. “I have learned to trust the promptings of my mind, which urges me sometimes to study in all seriousness matters that another person might dismiss as unworthy, trivial, childish.” The novel’s narrator is a writer, as well as a deep thinker, perhaps, even, a philosopher. The ebbs and flows of internal thought are tremendous. “I supposed the endless-seeming landscapes of my own thoughts and feelings must have been a paradise by comparison with the drab sites where others located their selves or their personalities or whatever they called their mental territories.” There are thoughts wrapped in thoughts wrapped in memory. The narrator describes the craft and process of writing the very book he is supposedly writing. He is full of asides and tangents that flow to where his thoughts and memories happen to take him. He digresses and circles back around to conclude or clarify a point made in previous pages. “The mind is a place best viewed from borderlands.” I am not sure if this novel is supposed to be memoir disguised as fiction or fiction disguised as memoir. The details of the narrator’s life certainly mimic the experiences of Murnane. “I moved to this district near the border so that I could spend most of my time alone and so that I could live according to several rules that I had for long wanted to live by.” This novel definitely engages with the reader’s mind and forces one to grapple with one’s own conception of the world, one’s mental constructs, with one’s own faulty memory, and with the experience of life itself.
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