Stream System: The Collected Short Fiction of Gerald Murnane

by Gerald Murnane

Overview

Stories from a mind-bending Australian master, “a genius on the level of Beckett” (Teju Cole)

Never before available to readers in this hemisphere, these stories—originally published from 1985 to 2012—offer an irresistible compendium of the work of one of contemporary fiction’s greatest magicians.

While the Australian master Gerald Murnane’s reputation rests largely on his longer works of fiction, his short stories stand among the most brilliant and idiosyncratic uses of the form since Borges, Beckett, and Nabokov. Brutal, comic, obscene, and crystalline, Stream System runs from the haunting “Land Deal,” which imagines the colonization of Australia and the ultimate vengeance of its indigenous people as a series of nested dreams; to “Finger Web,” which tells a quietly terrifying, fractal tale of the scars of war and the roots of misogyny; to “The Interior of Gaaldine,” which finds its anxious protagonist stranded beyond the limits of fiction itself.

No one else writes like Murnane, and there are few other authors alive still capable of changing how—and why—we read.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374126001
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	04/03/2018
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	560
Sales rank:	224,186
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

Gerald Murnane was born in Melbourne in 1939. One of Australia’s most highly regarded authors, he has published ten volumes of fiction, including Barley Patch, The Plains, and A Million Windows, as well a collection of essays, Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, and a memoir, Something for the Pain. He is a recipient of the Patrick White Literary Award, the Melbourne Prize for Literature, and an Emeritus Fellowship from the Literature Board of the Australia Council. He lives in Victoria, Australia.

Table of Contents

When the Mice Failed to Arrive
Stream System
Land Deal
The Only Adam
Stone Quarry
Precious Bane
Cotters Come No More
There Were Some Countries
Finger Web
First Love
Velvet Waters
The White Cattle of Uppington
In Far Fields
Pink Lining
Boy Blue
Emerald Blue
The Interior of Gaaldine
Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs
As It Were a Letter
The Boy’s Name Was David
Last Letter to a Niece
Acknowledgements

Editorial Reviews

★ 01/15/2018
This impressive collection represents a monumental achievement from one of Australia’s most important writers. Murnane is often categorized as a “writer’s writer” for his tendency to unspool long descriptions and focus his narratives on fiction writers strikingly similar to himself. Almost all of the stories in this book are set in a suburb of Melbourne and in some way involve the impact of memory, horse racing, or Catholicism. Of the 21 stories collected here, “Emerald Blue” is the longest. In it, “the chief character” of the story is a man who can only fall in love with the image of a woman in his mind, despite his many attempts to shun bachelorhood. In “The Boy’s Name Was David,” Murnane writes of a part-time writing professor who looks back on all the students’ stories he has ever read and imagines his competitive students as horses in one long race. Virtually all of Murnane’s stories also illustrate some aspect of his beliefs about the nature and value of fiction itself. Murnane is an accomplished master, and this collection is a vital resource for writing that probes the mind with ceaseless inquiry. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

"This impressive collection represents a monumental achievement from one of Australia’s most important writers. Murnane is often categorized as a 'writer’s writer' for his tendency to unspool long descriptions and focus his narratives on fiction writers strikingly similar to himself. Almost all of the stories in this book are set in a suburb of Melbourne and in some way involve the impact of memory, horse racing, or Catholicism." —Publishers Weekly, starred review

From the Publisher

2018-01-23
This gathering offers some of the Australian author's familiar themes and writing that is eccentric, thought-provoking, and maddening.Despite the "Short Fiction" in the title, one of the pieces runs 106 pages, and two are also included in a 2005 collection of the author's essays. Then again, Murnane (The Plains, 2017, etc.) often blurs fact and fiction. Among the collection's almost conventional stories, "When the Mice Failed to Arrive" has hints of pedophilia and sadism as a teacher reckons with an aborted school project. "The Only Adam" describes a howling and mating ritual among eighth-graders. The title story/essay contains many of the essential Murnanesque elements. The image of two adjacent bodies of water in Melbourne sends the narrator riffing on mustaches, places, and family in an exercise similar to the "chain of thoughts" approach in Border Districts. Such rumination, along with autobiographical details, a love of books, an obsessive geographical precision, and a seeming deafness to word echoes, will characterize most of the remaining fiction: "As a child I could never be contented in a place unless I knew the names of the places surrounding that place." The Tao of Murnane is sometimes amusing, as in "The Interior of Gaaldine," in which a writer attending a literary event in Tasmania is asked for his thoughts on a 2,000-page manuscript that contains "a detailed chronicle of horse-racing" in an imaginary island nation. It can also be tiresome, with a style that sounds like a government report written by a bureaucrat with mild Asperger's. The forced flatness is starkly evident when Murnane now and then slips in something like: "the saturnine men sipping their murky plum liqueurs while sunset reddened the Carpathian peaks above them."There are undoubtedly serious intentions here, and certainly some metafictional fun, but the style is too often dreary, the point elusive, the effect irksome and disappointing.

Kirkus Reviews