A Million Windows
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
This new work of fiction by one of Australia’s most highly regarded authors focuses on the importance of trust, and the possibility of betrayal, in storytelling as in life. It tests the relationship established between author and reader, and on occasions of intimacy, between child and parent, boyfriend and girlfriend, husband and wife. Murnane’s fiction is woven from images, and the feelings associated with them, and the images that flit through A Million Windows like butterflies – the reflections of the setting sun like spots of golden oil, the houses of two or perhaps three storeys, the procession of dark-haired females, the clearing in the forest, the colours indigo and silver-grey, the death of a young woman who had leaped into a well – build to an emotional crescendo that is all the more powerful for the intricacy of their patterning.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Part memoir and part manifesto, Australian writer Murnane's series of fictional and essayistic experiments requires careful consideration and study. The premise of the book extends from the Henry James epigraph that opens it: "The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million." Murnane walks readers through several of his distinctive touchstones of writing, and he illustrates his arguments with multiple vignettes and fictional scenarios. Murnane is brooding and deeply serious about his subject matter. He ruminates on the effects of memory by writing variations of a story in which a man sees a young girl on a train. The encounter opens a door of possibility, and Murnane wants the reader to realize that this story could ultimately be written "in any of a million ways." He often writes in lengthy, spiraling sentences and is prone to making broad pronouncements such as "One of the many devices employed by writers of fiction is the use of the present tense." Murnane frequently contrasts the abilities of fiction with those of film to the detriment of film. Murnane is a master of breathing life into fiction, and his compilation of ideas on the subject holds immense value because those ideas are often so idiosyncratic and contrarian.
