NEW RELEASES
Books anticipated or surprising, just out of the carton.
Click through to find out more and to secure your next book.

Blue Self-Portrait by Noémi Lefebvre    $33
A wonderfully written interior monologue, reminiscent of Thomas Bernhard, of a difficult woman obsessed with a portrait of the composer Arnold Schoenberg and thrown off kilter by a romantic encounter with a musician.
>> Read an extract. 

No is Not Enough: Defeating the new shock politics by Naomi Klein          $35
"Trump, as extreme as he is, is less an aberration than a logical conclusion - a pastiche of pretty much all the worst and most dangerous trends of the past half century. A one-man megabrand, with wife and children as spin-off brands." Klein sees Donald Trump's presidency as the conclusion of the long corporate takeover of politics, using deliberate shock tactics to generate wave after wave of crises and force through radical policies that will destroy people, the environment, the economy and national security. This book provides a toolkit for resistance, starting with clarity of perception.
"I count Naomi Klein among the most inspirational political thinkers in the world today." -Arundhati Roy 
"Naomi Klein as a writer is an accusing angel." - John Berger
>> How to jam the Trump brand. 
>> "Trump is an idiot, but don’t underestimate how good he is at that."

Strange Heart Beating by Eli Goldstone            $33
Seb's beautiful, beloved wife Leda has been killed by a swan. Sorting through her belongings after her death, he comes across a packet of unopened letters from Olaf, a man whom Leda had never mentioned. Floundering professionally and sunk by grief, he decides to travel to Leda's home village in Latvia to patch her story together. But with each new person that he turns to for answers, Seb is met instead by more questions about Leda, her past and their life together. 
"Although I began this novel captivated by its wicked humour, confident prose and gripping narrative, it was its savage tenderness that ensnared me. Far more than a tragicomedy of errors and erasures, Strange Heart Beating is about the idea of possession in relationships, and the lie that we can ever fully know someone even when we love them absolutely. Eli is an astonishing writer with a vision that is both acerbic and sympathetic." - Ka Bradley
>> "I can't think of many great books that aren't funny."
>> Read the first chapter here. 

Binary Star by Sarah Gerard            $36
Like a star, the anorexic burns fuel that isn't replenished; she is held together by her own gravity. The saga of two young lovers and the culture that keeps them sick.
"A bold, beautiful novel about wanting to disappear and almost succeeding. Sarah Gerard writes about love and loneliness in a new and brilliantly visceral way." - Jenny Offill
"Rhythmic, hallucinatory, yet vivid as crystal. Gerard has channeled her trials and tribulations into a work of heightened reality, one that sings to the lonely gravity of the human body." - NPR
"Sarah Gerard's debut, Binary Star, radiates beauty. Gerard captures the beauty and scientific irony of damaged relationships and ephemeral heavenly lights. Just as with the stars, it is collapse that offers the most illumination." - Los Angeles Times

Walks With Walser by Carl Selig          $29
A regular visitor to the Swiss author-of-the-small Robert Walser during the last twenty years of his life during his time as a voluntary patient in mental asylums, Selig, who became Walser's guardian and literary executor, meticulously recorded their conversations and is the best biographical source for this period of Walser's life. 
>> How Swiss is it? 

The New Animals by Pip Adam       $30
Gen-Xers and Millennials clash in the world of fashion - will irony or sincerity prevail? Will new animals emerge from the wreckage and waste of 21-st century Auckland?
>> Compare the attitudes.
>> Interview with Pip Adam. 

The Perfect Pencil: The story of a cultural icon by Caroline Weaver         $90

In the digital age, what could be hipper than using a pencil and paper? The humble pencil, once the tool of the infant school, has now become the talisman of designers, artists, writers and other creatives. This book features profiles of pencil crafters, anecdotes about famous writers and their favorite pencils, and essays about the surprising role of pencils in world history and culture. Illustrated with pencil drawings. 
>> Visit a pencil factory. 

Polly Plum, A firm and earnest woman's advocate: Mary Ann Colclough, 1836-1885 by Jenny Coleman          $40
Coleman argues that Colclough was just as important as Kate Sheppard for the New Zealand women's movement in New Zealand. 

A Cup of Rage by Raduan Nassar        $20
A pair of lovers - a young female journalist and an older man who owns an isolated farm in the Brazilian outback - spend the night together. The next day they proceed to destroy each other. 
"A Cup of Rage is a burning coal of a work, superbly translated by Stefan Tobler. You may consider a book this short to be scarcely worthy of the name, but it packs more power into its scant 47 pages than most books do into five or 10 times as many. Each of its seven chapters comes not only as an unbroken paragraph but as a single sentence: you have to read carefully to keep track, and once you have finished you will want to read it again. The writing is chewy - dense, tough, but well worth the effort."- Nick Lezard, The Guardian 

Hamlet, Globe to Globe: Taking Shakespeare to every county in the world by Dominic Dromgoole        $37
Over two years, the Globe Theatre travelled to every country in the world, performing Hamlet. I what ways did the reception differ in different societies and conditions, and in what ways were the responses universal?
>> Off (and on) they go. 

The Egg by Britta Teckentrup           $34
A beautifully illustrated survey of birds in nests and in art and mythology. 

The Bickford Fuse by Andrey Kurkov              $28
Four separate bewildered wanderers bear their symbolic burdens towards a common goal. A satirical epic of the Russian mentality, grand schemes and failures, from World War Two until the collapse of the Soviet Union. 

"Some people see him as a latter-day Bulgakov; to others he's a Ukrainian Murakami." - Guardian

Basic Income, And how we can make it happen by Guy Standing        $28
"Guy Standing has been at the forefront of the movement for nearly 4 decades, and in this superb and thorough survey he explains how it works and why it has the potential to revitalise life and democracy in our societies. This is an essential book." - Brian Eno
>> Protecting the precariat. 

The Nonsense Show by Eric Carle           $16
A preposterous board book. Fun. 

Gauchillos by Toni Meneguzzo        $55
A stunning photographic essay on the culture of the Argentinian rural bandits. 

Outside the Asylum: A memoir of war, disaster and humanitarian psychiatry by Lynne Jones             $35
War and disaster bring an intensity of trauma to ordinary citizens, and compound the difficulties of those already receiving psychiatric care. 

Chromaphilia: The story of colour in art by Stella Paul            $70
Uses 200 artworks to explore the pigments and effects of 10 major colours or colour groups. 
"Stella Paul has written a most useful and readable book on the complex subject of color which addresses expertly both its material and affective properties. The many works of art that she illustrates are in her well balanced text not merely data for a clinical examination of color, but a source of sensitive analysis and interpretation." —Philippe de Montebello, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Upgrade: Home extensions, alterations and refurbishments         $120
Full of excellent examples of marrying old and modern elements without compromising the characteristics of either to make living spaces that are comfortable and pleasing. 

Land's Edge: A coastal memoir by Tim Winton          $26
A new edition of this beautifully written short book about life lived in harmony with the ebbs and flows of the tide. 

The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd         $29
Shepherd's timeless evocation of the Cairngorms and of the way in which humans find meaning and regeneration in the natural world puts her in the front rank of nature writers. This edition has an introduction by Robert Macfarlane.

The Happy Reader, Issue 9        $8
This issue looks at Treasure Island from many angles and follows its many resonances. Robert Louis Stevenson is under-recognised as a prose stylist. Also in this issue, an audience with bookseller, supermodel and actress Lily Cole. 

Our Book of the Week this week is Haruki Murakami's Men Without Women. The book contains seven stories of men choosing loneliness as a way of avoiding pain, even if it brings them close to self-erasure. It includes all your favourite Murakami signatures (cats, pasta, baseball, music, mysterious women).

>> Read Stella's review.

>> There is, of course, a playlist for this book.

>> Murakami's lonely men.

>> Other books by Murakami at VOLUME.

>> A short animated biography.

>> In search of this elusive writer.

>> Murakami's website and FaceBook page.

>> Browse Murakami's record collection.

>> Come along to the MY VOLUME book group at 5 PM on Thursday 22nd June to discuss this book. Register when you purchase a copy.

Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami     {Reviewed by STELLA} Reading this collection of short stories is like watching a movie through a smeared lens, or like trying to listen to a conversation on the other side of a double-glazed window but being able to catch only fragments because there’s a party going on in the room you are in. My initial reaction to these stories made me think of peering down a jar made of thick glass – it’s all a bit opaque. Yet these are far from wishy-washy stories – they are precise, well-paced and ingenious. The reader is held at the exact point that keeps one moving on with increasing curiosity through this collection. Men Without Women is a wonderful observation of loneliness, of choosing aloneness over the pain of closeness. The men in Murakami’s stories often remain elusive, sometimes somewhat bland or hidden, avoiding pain or the risk of pain or disappointment, they make sure their connections with women are tenuous or remote. Despite this, Murakami cleverly draws you in - you have an emotional investment in these men’s tales. Loneliness and avoidance, along with reinvention are themes that run through the stories. The conversations that reveal the men’s relationship dilemmas are played out to the reader through an oblique association or a retelling by a third person, so the reader becomes an observer, a listener, nodding or shaking his/her head in agreement or surprise and always reading on, hankering for a bit more information. The reader is curious, and it is that same sense of curiosity that drives the actions of some of these men also. In the opening story, 'Drive My Car', Kafuku, a theatre actor, must find himself a chauffeur. His mechanic advises him to seek out a taciturn young woman, Misaki, who, it turns out, has the knack of listening well and asking the 'cut to the chase' questions that disarm Kafuku. He finds himself revealing his friendship with his (now deceased) wife's lover. His wife, he reveals, had often taken lovers and, out of curiosity, he strikes up a friendship with last of these after her death. During her lifetime, he had never queried her infidelities, preferring to imagine them not so, to accept her need for others, but as a widower he becomes curious and feels compelled to seek answers, answers that will reveal more about himself than about his wife’s behaviour. In 'Yesterday', a young man is avoiding everything like nothing else: avoiding his feelings, changing his history (he takes on a different dialect just to be different from everyone else), purposely failing his entrance exam, suggesting that his girlfriend date his most recent friend, our narrator of this tale. He’s avoiding what he sees as his pre-ordained life or a relationship that to anyone else makes perfect sense. His story is told through his new friend – a friendship that turns out to be fleeting in many ways, a vehicle only for an escape from connecting in any meaningful way with a young woman he has known most of his life. These tragi-comic stories have all the hallmarks of Murakami’s writing: fascinating observations, clever reflections that reference popular culture, a sense of the unusual in the usual humdrum of everyday existence, and characters that in isolation seem insignificant yet you can’t quite keep the whole cast from sneaking into your subconscious, and Dr.Tokai’s plea to another, “Who in the world am I?” in the haunting story 'An Independent Organ' from resonating well after you have shut the book.

Gecko Press produce excellent books for younger readers, and they have a knack for finding those quirky tales that will make you smile and have children laughing, commiserating and cheering for their favourite story friends. An early chapter book series, with short chapters and plenty of pictures dotted throughout, is 'Detective Gordon', written by Ulf Nilsson and illustrated by Gitte Spee. The First Case introduces you to Detective Gordon, an old toad (he’s 19!) – the police chief of the forest. When Squirrel discovers that 204 of his 15,704 nuts have been stolen he is understandably upset and rushes through the forest to report the crime to the famous detective, insisting that his missing nuts must be found. Detective Gordon stands vigil at the scene of the crime, and, when a young mouse flits away with another nut, he makes to pursue her. Unfortunately, he’s frozen and stuck under a mound of snow. The young mouse digs him out, and then she is promptly taken to the police station, which is warm and snug, with a comfortable bed and plenty of cakes (Gordon has a penchant for a nice cup of tea and cake for every meal and between times too, and he sometimes (but don’t tell anyone) nods off). When the detective discovers the mouse has no name, no home and only stole the one nut due to extreme hunger, he takes pity on her, promptly names her Buffy and feeds and homes his new assistant. And then it's time to solve the crime! Squirrel’s becoming further agitated by his missing nuts and wants the criminals caught, but who is it? With snow falling and the tracks being covered, can the Chief and his new assistant catch the culprits? A lively and charming story with plenty of cake and lots of heart. There are three 'Detective Gordon' books, so far, to be enjoyed. {REVIEWED BY STELLA}

Bluets by Maggie Nelson    {Reviewed by THOMAS} “We love to contemplate blue, not because it advances to us but because it draws us after it,” wrote Goethe. Maggie Nelson’s book, comprised of 240 short numbered, mostly beautifully written passages, describes her life-long affinity for and attraction to (what she calls ‘love’ for) the colour blue in all its literal and figurative senses, along with describing a period of mourning after the end of an intense relationship (also called ‘love’). She is, she says, not interested in learning “what has been real and what has been false, but what has been bitter, and what has been sweet.” To this end, and with the assistance of a range of co-opted “blue correspondents” reporting from art, literature and history, she intimates a field of nuanced responses to the colour blue, even though subjective colour response is almost impossible to communicate. Indeed, blue’s attraction is almost its absence of meaning, or its relief from meaning. “Blue has no mind. It is not wise, nor does it promise wisdom. It is beautiful, and despite what the poets and philosophers and theologians have said, I think beauty neither obscures truth nor reveals it. It leads neither towards justice nor away from it.” More than colour, blue is also merely colour, altering the cast of whatever it is seen upon. Although she attempts to draw correlations between the two (“I have found myself wondering if seeing a particularly astonishing shade of blue, for example, or letting a particularly potent person inside you, could alter you irrevocably, just to have seen or felt it. In which case, how does one know when, or how, to refuse? How to recover?”), there is an apparently unbridgeable gap in Nelson’s life, at least in the period treated in this book, between, on the one side, her intellectual passions and, on the other, her physical passions, between, as she would term it, thinking and fucking. Each side yearns towards the other, but encounters only the seductively nullifying colour of the void between them: blue.

Zone by Mathias Énard  {Reviewed by THOMAS} Enard's text is like a ball-bearing rolling around indefinitely inside a box over surfaces imprinted with every sort of information about the wider Mediterranean, from Barcelona to Beirut, and Algiers to Trieste (the "Zone"), past and present. Enard very effectively uses the necessarily one-directional movement of a sentence to sketch out, through endless repetition and variation, the multi-dimensional complexity of the political, cultural, historical, social and physical terrain of the entire Zone. The narrative, so to call it, takes the form of a single 520-page sentence perfectly capturing (or perfectly inducing the impression of) the thought processes of the narrator as he travels, in ‘real’ time by train from Milan to Rome bearing a briefcase of classified information on terrorists, arms dealers and war criminals to sell to the Vatican, speeding on amphetamines, fatigue and alcohol, in his memory through multistranded loops from his experiences, which include his involvement as a mercenary in Croatia and working for the French secret service as well as his string of personal relationships, and in even greater loops of knowledge and association that pertain to the places in which his experiences took place and the history associated therewith. Enard’s prose is so irresistible and so mesmeric that the reader is effortlessly borne along, its forward movement not at all inhibited by the encyclopedic effect of the loops, and the loops upon the loops, upon the strand of the narrator’s journey, nor by the pieces of painful psychological grit not yet abraded from the narrator’s personal history of involvement in the recent traumas of the Zone. By so seductively inhabiting the mind of his less-than-admirable narrator, a mind caught between obsessive focus and restless discursion, Enard provides a panoramic view of the political and personal violence that has shaped the history and cultures of the Zone, and also intimates the way in which an individual is caught irretrievably in the great web of their circumstances, submission to those circumstances being the price of travelling along them.

UNSTOPPED TEXT
What is the reason for and what is the effect of writing a book without full stops? Although the production of such a gush of text requires virtuosic skills from a writer, reading it does not necessarily require virtuosic skills from a reader (although it may). Written without full stops, does a text more realistically represent the ceaseless flow of thought (often in many different rivulets at once) or perhaps the unstoppable momentum of time? (if there is a difference between the two). The full stop is an artifice, an arbitrary attempt to represent thought and time as if we could control them by the application of punctuation (perhaps not such a bad idea). Here are four books from our shelves, each written in a single sentence: 

Solar Bones by Mike McCormack         $38
Written in one long sentence (in which line breaks perform as a higher order of comma), McCormack’s remarkable and enjoyable book succeeds at both stretching the formal possibilities of the novel (for which it was awarded the 2016 Goldsmiths Prize) and in being a gentle, unassuming and thoughtful portrait of a very ordinary life in a small and unremarkable Irish town. The flow of McCormack’s prose sensitively maps the flow of thought, drawing feeling and meaning from the patterning of quotidian detail as the narrator dissolves himself in the memories of which he is comprised. This wash of memory suggests that the narrator may in fact be dead, the narrative being the residue (or cumulation) of his life, the enduring body of attachments, thoughts and feelings that comprise the person. Few novels capture so well the texture of a person’s life, and this has been achieved through a rigorous experiment in form.

Phone by Will Self          $37
Self’s great achievement and presumed intention is to create, by the breaking and reconstitution of language, a remarkable study of how thought moves in the mind, looping, moving at any one moment on many parallel tracks, in cul-de-sac curlicues and feedback loops. Thought is constantly assailed by interference, often arising from the mechanisms of language itself but also from the instability of referents, and Self’s text is full of rather funny linguistic jokes and precise ironic observations, and is frequently every bit as irritating as your own thoughts. The identities of the narrators segue into one another, the actual world barely registering on, and having no clear delineation from, the loosely bundled and rebundled memories and urges that hardly pass as personhood, the distance between each stitch of ‘actual’ narrative containing great tangled loops and knots of mental thread. If our thoughts cannot define us, what can be the organising principle of our identities?

The Last Wolf by Laszlo Krasahorkai          $36
Written in one virtuosic 73-page sentence which exerts enormous pressure on language to make it more closely resemble thought and which makes form the primary content of this novella, The Last Wolf tells of an academic who is commissioned to travel to Extremadura in Spain where he seeks to determine the fate of the last wolves in that barren area. We read his relation to a Hungarian bartender in Berlin of the accounts of Extremadurans made to him via a translator (and usually based in any case on further hearsay), nesting the subject of the story in several layers of reportage, rumour and translation, the performative complexity of which is repeatedly punctured by the offhand comments of the bartender. Krasznahorkai, as usual, succeeds in being both comic and morose, this hopeless tale of human destruction and the frustrating impassivity of nature is one in which meaning is both invoked and withheld much like the presence of the last elusive wolf (or, rather, much like the story of the last wolf, for it is  narrative that is the true quarry for the hunter).

Zone by Mathias Enard             $45
Enard's text is like a ball-bearing rolling around indefinitely inside a box over surfaces imprinted with every sort of information about the Mediterranean, from from Barcelona to Beirut, and Algiers to Trieste (the "Zone"), past and present. Enard very effectively uses the necessarily one-directional movement of a sentence to sketch out, through endless repetition and variation, the complexity of the political, cultural, historical, social and physical terrain of the entire Zone, as well effectively inducing the narrator's patterns of thought, mesmeric, irresistible, but containing pieces of painful psychological grit not yet abraded from the his personal history and his involvement in the recent traumas of the Zone, in Croatia and elsewhere. 

VOLUME #27 (10.6.17)

Our latest bulletin of reviews, events and new releases.
Subscribe at right. >>

This week's BOOK OF THE WEEK is See You When I See You by Rose Lagercrantz and Eva Eriksson 
Dani is on a school trip to the zoo, and the teacher tells the children how to stay safe and not get lost. But Dani gets separated from the others. Suddenly another class is rushing up the path and at the back of the noisy crowd is someone she recognizes: Ella! The good friends are so happy to be together again and Ella wants to play. What should Dani do? Follow her best friend in the whole world or do as the teacher said? 


>> Read Stella's review. 


>> This is the fifth book about Dani and her friend Ella. Have you read the others? 

My Happy Life
Dani is probably the happiest person she knows. She's happy because she's going to start school. Dani has been waiting to go to school her whole life. Then things get even better  -  she meets Ella by the swings. After that, Dani and Ella do everything together. They stick together through wet and dry, sun and rain, thick and thin. But then something happens that Dani isn't prepared for.

My Heart is Laughing
Dani's been trying her best to stay happy ever since her best friend Ella moved away. But when some girls in Dani's class start being cruel to her, it starts a chain of rather unhappy events. It would all be okay if only Ella would move back.

When I am Happiest
It's the second-to-last day of school and Dani's so happy she could write a book about it! In fact, that's exactly what she's done, although it's not quite finished yet. Now the book is in her backpack with all the other things she has to take home before the summer break. But then Dani gets some bad news. How will she ever be happy again? 

Life According to Dani
Its Dani's first summer vacation and the best ever! She is staying on an island with Ella, her best friend in the world. Dad is still in hospital but he calls every day, and Ella and Dani stay busy building huts, fishing, exploring, and swimming. Then Dad turns up, but with his new girlfriend! This is not the visit anyone had imagined. 






>> Bouncing back!


>> Do you read Swedish?

See You When I See You by Rose Lagercrantz and Eva Eriksson  {Reviewed by STELLA} Swedish duo, writer Rose Lagercrantz, who has a genius for telling a simple story well, for capturing the small yet significant moments in Dani’s world, and illustrator Eva Eriksson, with her delightful, evocative pen-and-ink drawings, bring us the fifth book in the 'Dani' series, a wonderful Gecko Press series about Dani, a young girl who will steal your heart and appeal to the younger children in your life. We first met Dani in the delightful My Happy Life, and since then we have walked alongside Dani as she has started school, made friends, found out about bullies, lost a friend, got into a few scrapes, been happy and sad, scared and worried. Now, in book five, Dani is well at home at school and she is off to the zoo for a class trip. The rules are clear, and if you get lost you must wait where you saw your class last. Well, Dani does get lost, but when a class from a different school runs by in an unruly manner, who should she see? Ella! Her best friend. And suddenly the dilemma, stay put or follow Ella? Of course, Ella has grand plans that involve them adventuring on their own, and headstrong Ella is difficult to resist. Dani is delightful, loyal to her friend, conscious of what she really should be doing, torn between the rules and what feels best. Alongside this innocent adventure, is another : Dani’s father, still recovering from an accident, is doing his best to get Dani to like Sadie, the new person in his life. Yet he’s not quite getting it right. And why is Ella so upset - why does she think their friendship is in danger? Can Dani make it better? The great thing about this series is the ability of the author to create a character like Dani who doesn’t always do the ‘right’ thing, but is always full of heart, with stories that children will relate to, focusing on their concerns and worries, while also creating a sense of joy and a little mischief.

The Strange Library by Haruki Murakami  {Reviewed by STELLA} With the new Murakami collection of stories on my reading pile, I just re-read The Strange Library, a charming illustrated novella about a boy who walks into a library and finds himself in a terrible situation. Wonderfully designed, this book is beautiful: a small hardback with images throughout, laid out perfectly with gorgeous endpapers and compelling details on each page. Yet it is the text that will take you on the best journey. You will open the book and not close it until you reach the end, delving further into the strange library alongside the boy, hoping for an outcome that will deliver you both back to safety. This is Murakami through and through, with its labyrinth of winding passages for feet and mind, and characters who are part-human (the bird girl and the sheep man), its sparseness of text which is somehow expansive, and a sense of unease in which we can place our own fears and apprehensions. Above all it is charming.

Phone by Will Self   {Reviewed by THOMAS} Will Self concludes the threesome of novels that comprise his modernist ‘Busner-Project’ with this 617-page bilge of words pumped straight out of the minds of his characters, notably psychiatrist Zack Busner, drifting into a dementia that weakens his grip on the present and delivers him to the breakfast bar of a Manchester hotel without his trousers, and Jonathan De’Ath, spy and secret lover of Colonel Gawain Thomas, about to lead his troops into Iraq. Self’s great achievement and presumed intention is to create, by the breaking and reconstitution of language, a remarkable study of how thought moves in the mind, looping, moving at any one moment on many parallel tracks, in cul-de-sac curlicues and feedback loops. Thought is constantly assailed by interference, often arising from the mechanisms of language itself but also from the instability of referents, and Self’s text is full of rather funny linguistic jokes and precise ironic observations, and is frequently every bit as irritating as your own thoughts. The identities of the narrators segue into one another, Busner’s actual world barely registering on, and having no clear delineation from, the loosely bundled and rebundled memories and urges that hardly pass as personhood, the distance between each stitch of ‘actual’ narrative containing great tangled loops and knots of mental thread. If our thoughts cannot define us, what can be the organising principle of our identities? (if we are to have identities). The mobile phone is a technological intermediary positioned on the membrane between the so-called internal and so-called external parts of our worlds, positioned, in other words, at the only place where identity could be located, a place of interplay and contention. Do we define our identities or can they only be defined for us by others? Not only do we outsource our memories, our communicating faculties, our (illusory) identities to our mobile phones, these mobile phones are linked, at barely a few steps remove, to all other mobile phones, and it could be said that all phones comprise one vast technorganism, a collective consciousness parasitic upon (and formative of) the thoughts and words of the flaffing and ludicrous individual consciousnesses it auxilliarises.

A Million Windows by Gerald Murnane  {Reviewed by THOMAS} A central concern in Murnane’s writing is the relationship between the fiction he writes and what he calls the ‘image world’ (he insists this is nothing to do with ‘imagination’ in the sense of making things up (he is, he says, incapable of making things up)), and, to a lesser yet strongly implied degree, the relationship between these two and the ‘actual world’, which he seems to regard as little more than an access point to (or of) the image world, and a place of frailties, disappointment and impermanent concerns. When Murnane describes the “chief character of a conjectured piece of fiction… a certain fictional male personage, a young man and hardly more than a boy” preferring the image-world relationship he had inside his head with a “certain young woman, hardly more than a girl” he sees every day in the railway carriage in which he travels home from school to the actual relationship he starts to develop (and soon abandons) with her after they eventually start to converse, he underscores a turning away, or, rather, a turning inward to the more urgent and intense image-world. Like some woefully under-recognised antipodean Proust, Murnane is fascinated by the mechanics of memory, which he sees as an operation of the image-world upon the actual, giving rise to the ‘true fictions’ that allow elements of the image-world to present themselves to awareness in a multiplicity of guises and versions. Murnane differs from many theorists of fiction in that he does not attribute primacy to the text but to the image-world to which the text gives access and which may contain, for instance, characters who have access, perhaps through their fictions (their fictional fictions), to image-worlds and characters inaccessible (at least as yet) to us. The million windows (from Henry James: “The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million”) are those of “a house of two or maybe three storeys”, inhabited by writers, all perhaps versions or potential versions of Murnane himself, who look out over endless plains as they engage in the act of writing fiction, or discuss doing so. The multiplicity of this process stands in relation to an unattainable absolute towards which memories and other fictions reach, or, rather, which reaches to us in the form of memories and other fictions. Murnane’s small pallet, his precisely modulated recurring images and his looping, delightfully pedantic style are at once fascinating, frustrating, soporific and revelatory.