A History of Books by Gerald Murnane

Author:Gerald Murnane
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Giramondo Publishing
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

After his thirty-seventh year, a certain man would sometimes catch sight of a certain few volumes on one of his bookshelves or would see in some or another book review or literary essay the name of a certain writer in the German language and would then remember one or another moment from the many hours that he had spent in reading one or another volume of a certain unfinished work of fiction by the writer.

Of the several hundreds of thousands of words in the English translation of the work of fiction mentioned, the man had forgotten, soon after he had read them, all but nine. The man remembered, however, his state of mind on many an occasion while he had been reading the work or while he had paused in his reading.

The man mentioned could have said that the long work mentioned was the most difficult work of fiction that he had tried to read. The man could have said that he had had to read many a passage and even many a sentence twice and more before he seemed to understand it. During the few moments after he had seemed to understand such a passage or such a sentence, the man felt entitled to consider himself an intellectual. And yet, whenever he had tried afterwards to report in his own words what he had understood he had been unable to do so.

Of the nine that were the only words remembered by the man soon after he had read the long work mentioned, four comprised the title of a chapter or a section far into the work while the other five were part of a sentence in that chapter or section. Often, while the man struggled to understand the earlier parts of the work, he looked at the words The lunatics hail Clarisse and felt relieved. He expected that he would readily understand the chapter or the section that bore this title. He even looked forward to finding one or more humorous passages in that chapter or section. The man found the character of Clarisse impossible to comprehend, let alone to like or to admire. The passages reporting her fictional thoughts and feelings were among the densest in the long work of fiction. It seemed to the man that the fictional character Clarisse was concerned mostly with abstractions or with states of mind impossible to describe or even to suggest in plain words, and he hoped that her being hailed by an assembly of fictional lunatics would give rise to a passage of less exacting prose.

How Clarisse came to meet up with the lunatics the man mentioned never afterwards remembered, although he seemed to recall that she had sometimes expressed a desire to study the extremes of human experience and that she had sometimes discussed certain lunatics with a doctor who worked in a certain asylum. Surely Clarisse would have been reported in the long work of fiction as having met up with a number of lunatics during what would

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