Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs

Gerald Murnane · ★★★★★

My first Murnane and certainly not my last. Oh man do I love this rambling fount of inspiration. I could, in fact, listen to him ramble all day because there is more than just a repetition of imagery from his childhood or declarations over again of the things he has not done, or rhyming actions as evocative as Proust's madeleine (a literary rubberband Murnane overwhelmingly appreciates), there is a compelling wisdom in these essays born of Murnane's natural inclination towards the defining persona register of an essay. Murnane writes to us as someone might write to us in a letter. A letter, not an email and it is a refreshing if nostalgic distinction. Here is why I love these essays. Read this paragraph from the piece titled Stream System: When my father told me this he picked up the page of the newspaper and tapped at a place on the bare chest of the young woman, a little distance above the top of her evening dress. He tapped with his knuckle in the way that he might have tapped at a door that stood closed in front of him. This morning when I remembered my father's tapping with his knuckle at the bare chest of the young woman, I thought of the top part of the evening dress as being the body of pale blue labelled STREAM SYSTEM. I then saw in my mind my father tapping with his knuckle at the face of his father and also tapping at the yellow-brown grass where the dead rats had once lain before my father had ordered the patients to collect them in kerosene tins and to dump them in the swampy ground that was denoted, many years afterwards, by the words STREAM SYSTEM. That hallmark cadence, the way he uses images as associative rhymes to induce the reader into a moment of connection and understanding. More than any other writer I have come across, Murnane has mastered the art of 1. Telling his readers what has happened, then, most importantly, 2. Telling his readers what it is like to have the knowledge of what happened and further, to undertake the task of opening this knowledge to others. He quotes literary critic Warner Berthoff as having given him this framework but the consequences of this structure are borne out actively in Murnane's work. They are what makes him so much more than an episode of James Burke's Connections, they elevate his project into the realm of contribution. 5 enthusiastic stars. Ignore the haters. This is a masterful autodidact you need to know.