This is supposedly Murnane’s last book. But he has said that before—twice. He has been writing so-called meta-fiction before that was even a term. In this book, the conceit is that he writes an essay purportedly on each of his previous books, after first rereading them. Indeed, the books often serve as jumping off points before the digressions begin. “In mid-2020, during a so-called lockdown in the state of Victoria, I wrote the first few of the pieces in this book — but only for myself and for future readers of my archives…. I had never sat down and tried to confront any book of mine as though for the first time…. I discovered early in life that the act of reading is much more complicated than most people seem to acknowledge…. I did what I’ve always preferred to do in the presence of a certain sort of text: I followed the workings of my mind…. I judge the worth of a book according to the length of time during which the book stays in my mind…. I learned long ago not to claim that I was talking about a book when what I was talking about were my memories or my impressions or my fantasies…. I know of no better way to appraise a work of fiction than to observe and then to report for one’s own benefit, or for others’, the extent to which the reading of the work has changed the set of one’s mind…. The reading of a work of fiction alters — sometimes briefly but sometimes permanently — the configuration of my mental landscape and augments the number of personages who are its temporary or permanent residents…. My reading — and not just the reading of fiction, but any sort of reading — is no search for facts or truths but rather an endless quest for elements in my unique mythology.”
Murnane is what his wife would call an eccentric. For decades, he has created an entire fictional world, comprised of two independent nations, where horse races are regularly run and winners randomly selected. Its history, the Antipodes, is all in his vast archives. His published fiction blends his real life, his past, and his imagination freely. He calls it true fiction. For him, the line between the real world and his fictional worlds is immaterial, “Each personage strides by day or broods and scribbles by night in his native city, but as though an invisible pane separates him from its other inhabitants and an invisible grip prevents him from living as they live.” Murnane views his mind as a vast physical landscape. “I often declare that I think of my mind as a place, but no place in this, the visible world, could be half so resistant to exploration as even the most familiar of mental landscapes. And if my sort of writing is a sort of mapping of mind, then my atlas should depict nothing more stable than images and feelings.” This leads to a unique process of writing. “Revelations of all kinds occur in the place that I call, for want of a better term, my mind and the benefits that I derive from these processes and from my knowing that these processes take place continually and are taking place even now as I write about them — those benefits are my true reward for writing fiction.”
Occasionally, Murnane does write something that one could almost be sure that he, the breathing author, and not he, the implied author or, he, the fictional narrator, actually believes. An example is his recollection of first reading Proust. “I myself, in that cramped room where I ate from cans and urinated into the sink and spent whole weekends talking to no one, learned from certain passages of Swann’s Way how to look out for what I later came to call the detail that winked: the one significant detail from among the many that appeared to me while I wrote.”
Murnane is not modest about his own writing. “I freely admit to re-reading certain passages from my books simply in order to be impressed by them and to find in them more meaning than I had previously found and much more than I had been aware of while I first wrote the passages.” Finally, he concludes, “I’ve mentioned in my own writings my perception of mind as a sort of space the boundaries of which are far beyond my reach, and the image that most often occurs to me when I try to comprehend the significance of the million and more of my published words is of a vast and variegated landscape.”
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