A Million Windows

By Gerald Murnane

“The house of fiction,” wrote Henry James, “has . . . not one window, but a million.” In this, his latest work, Gerald Murnane, one of Australia’s most acclaimed contemporary authors, takes these words as his starting point, and asks: Who, exactly, are that house’s residents, and what do they see from their respective rooms? His answer, A Million Windows, is a gorgeous (if unsettling) investigation into the glories and pitfalls of storytelling. Focusing on the importance of trust and the inevitability of betrayal in writing as in life, its nested stories explore the fraught relationships between author and reader, child and parent, boyfriend and girlfriend, husband and wife. Murnane’s fiction is woven from images-the reflections of the setting sun on distant windowpanes, seemingly limitless grasslands, a procession of dark-haired women, a clearing in a forest, the colors indigo and silver-grey, and the mysterious death of a young woman-which build to an emotional crescendo that is all the more powerful for the intricacy of its patterning.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David R. Godine, Publisher
• Release date: Apr 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781567925791

Gerald Murnane

Gerald Murnane was born in Melbourne in 1939. One of Australia’s most highly regarded authors, he has published several volumes of fiction, including Border Districts, Stream System, and Barley Patch, 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 a small town in Western Victoria, near the border with South Australia.

Reviews for A Million Windows

[thorold_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The title of this novel picks up Henry James's image of the "house of fiction", which Murnane turns into a literal house occupied by an unspecified number of male persons seated at desks behind glowing windows and reading sentences that they have just written. Inevitably, since this is Murnane, the house looks out over level grassland. And equally inevitably, all of these male persons have some kind of involvement in the book we are reading, as characters, narrators or implied authors. And, we suspect, without any authority for such a suspicion, they are all pleasingly contradictory versions of a male person who might or might not be called Gerald Murnane and live in an unnamed Australian state...Murnane — aided or hindered by some of these implied authors and narrators — engages us in a debate with the authors of various unnamed manuals of creative writing, books on narratology and so-called great works of literature, trying to establish what we really mean by fiction and how it works. False idols like "dialogue", "characters" and "plot" are cast down, "point-of-view" is taken apart and put back together again unrecognisably, dark-haired women from the narrator's real or purported past wander in and out, and Henry James somehow emerges as the only really trustworthy narrator we have ever known. Great fun, in an austere sort of way, but possibly not for the faint-hearted.