Stream System

Gerald Murnane is a unique writer. He writes about almost nothing - everyday occurrences in his own life - and produces some of the most significant essays/fiction/observations you will ever read. I am always left puzzling over how he makes the mundane so engrossing.

Five stars for gathering Murnane's short fiction in one place. Four and a half stars for Murnane's stories themselves. This book is an ideal entry for a challenging, but near genius author. His style will divide readers. He reads almost like a technical writer (think Ted Chiang's precision), but he creates worlds more akin to Borges or even Kafka. (More Borges than Kafka, but the magic occurs in his characters' minds instead of objectively.)You get the sense that he is hyper-aware of the worlds he creates with words, and it's helpful to know a little of his biography when reading him. He's never been out of Australia, has never been on a plane, uses minimal technology, and plays memory games of his own invention where he lives alone in a remote town in Australia. The written world (or the dreamed world), for him, seems to be more real than the real world, and this comes out in his stories.For instance, in "Land Deal" (great access point), he observes the inhumanity of a land grab from the perspective of a people wholly subjugated (if I say more I will spoil it). When considering how the exchange unfurls, he comments on the distinction between the possible and the actual. "The almost boundless scope of the possible was limited only by the occurrence of the actual . . . Almost anything was possible except, of course, the actual." To be honest, I don't fully understand what that means. But it's a theme recurring in his work, so I will have plenty of opportunity to figure it out.On that note, be prepared for self-referential stories and recurring themes. Personally, I like this, because in a way you are learning Murnane's language and you will need to spend some time in it for the rewards.Often recurring are meditations on the act of reading itself. Despite Murnane's personal and stylistic idiosyncrasies, he is keenly aware that reading is a collaborative act. Readers supplement the text and overcome its inherent limits with their own memories, breathing life into the stories we read with all sorts of details we gather in life.For instance, (low-level spoiler alert) the story "Last Letter to a Niece" is about a man who can only form connections with people he encounters through the written word. Besides characters from books, he can only bond with his niece, and only because he has never met her. Their relationships exists entirely via letters, i.e., the written word or text. Though he occasionally ventures into "the real world" (and Murnane is skeptical of that classification - the world in his mind is at least as real what we call "the real world"), he ventures outward mainly to build up a stock of visions with which he can supplement and reify the characters he reads about in stories. Vital life exists in text just as much as in flesh.Though some of his prose can be stultifying (see "Boy Blue," which opens "A few weeks ago, the person writing this story read aloud to a gathering of persons another story that he had written."), underlying just about everything he writes are compelling themes, like alcoholism, identity, and anxiety about being forgotten ("Precious Bane"), unemployment, poverty, and family stress ("Boy Blue"), and isolation and imagination ("Last Letter to a Niece"). You are not immersed in the world described as much as you are in Murnane's imagination. His precision is so rewarding in this regard. It's almost like technical writing, like he's giving directions to anyone who desires to recreate the worlds that occupy his mind. He is not primarily trying to convince you with verisimilitude, because oftentimes he wants you to know you are reading an account from his inner world - but he's such a good writer that you are still convinced the world you've entered is utterly true.Here is an intellectual who shuns elitism and a writer who tests the boundaries of language's creative ability. This is my introduction to him and I'm really enjoying it.

First class !!!!

Don’t expect a “page turner.” But this is a beautiful book. There is a comforting slowness in each sentence. A book to be savored and not rushed through. I read 1/2 a story a day and dread the day I finish this book. That’s how you know it’s a good book.

Mr. Murnane is a one of a kind writer who is so unconventional as a "novelist" or writer of fiction that is often hard to see how he's writing fiction at all. His novels Borders Districts and especially A Million Windows are either praised or despised as unreadable. I happen to like his writing but understand exactly why he is almost never considered for major fiction prizes. This isn't fiction as most people understand it. The books are not plot driven in the slightest and fall more into the realm of literary criticism than fiction. To read Mr. Murnane is to engage with a very brilliant and eclectic mind who is concerned with memory and language but not story. Stream System is a collection of short fiction that is more like fiction than his novels, the most striking of which is The Plains from my perspective. It speaks to place and experience in a way that I found very appealing but again is not conventional fiction. You'll either really like being part of Mr. Murnane's world or you will throw the book against the wall in frustration. There is little in between with a writer of this ilk.