A History of Books by Gerald Murnane

his fortieth year, according to the records that he kept of the books of fiction that he had bought and read. Thirty years afterwards, the man could remember nothing of his experience as a reader of the book. He knew that he had read the first hundred pages of the book because he had recorded that fact at some time during his fortieth year. He recalled, however, not one word of the text of the book, not one image that had appeared in his mind while he read the text, and not one thought or feeling that had occurred to him while he read. According to the man’s records, he had removed the book from his shelves four years after he had read the first hundred pages. He had then given the book, together with several other books by the famous German author, to a person who claimed to admire the author.
    Thirty years after the man mentioned had read the first hundred pages of the book mentioned, he remembered sometimes a certain afternoon when he had been alone in his house while his wife and their children were elsewhere. On that afternoon, the man had first caught sight of a blue disc and a black disc and a red disc on the spine of a certain book on one of his bookshelves and had regretted, as he had often previously regretted, that he had read a hundred pages of the book. The man had next caught sight of an image of part of a glass marble on the spine of another of his books. This book was a hardcover work of fiction that the man had not yet read, although he had often admired the dust jacket and had sometimes read from thedust jacket a short account of the contents, so to call them. The man had then gone to his son’s room and had fetched back to the lounge room, which contained the bookshelves previously mentioned, a jar of glass marbles. The man had then poured the marbles onto the carpet in the lounge room and had stood back from the marbles and had stared at them and had felt while he went on staring at the many-coloured mass of them something of what he had formerly hoped to feel whenever he had looked forward to reading the book of fiction by the famous German author.
    According to a passage on the dust jacket of the book with an image of part of a glass marble on its spine, the chief character of the book was reported in the book as supposing that each of his many glass marbles represented a racehorse and as having sometimes pushed some of those marbles around a mat so that he could see in his mind image after image of the running of a horse-race. The man mentioned in this section of the present work of fiction stared at the glass marbles on the carpet of his lounge room as though each represented a book of fiction that he had kept on his shelves and the contents of which he had tried to foresee before he had read the book.
    The man mentioned began on the certain afternoon mentioned to hear in his mind the name of one after another glass marble or of one or another book of fiction as though it was the name of one after another racehorse about to take part in a famous race. Of all the names that the man thus heard, the name that most affected him, as though the glass marble of that name was themost richly coloured, or as though the book of that name was the most memorable, was the name Das Glasperlenspiel .
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    An image-sky unlike any actual sky that he had seen occupied the upper two-thirds of a reproduction of a photograph of a painting that occupied two adjoining pages of a large illustrated book lying open in front of a man aged about fifty years. Seated beside the man was another man of the same age who had been his friend since the two had been boys at primary school. The man with the book in front of him was the owner of the book and of several hundred other large illustrated books displayed in several glass-fronted cabinets in the room where the men sat. The room, which the owner of the books called his study, was at one side of a substantial house of brick in a certain eastern suburb of Melbourne, which