(no subject)

[skygiants]

So I usually say that I'm not a huge fan of short stories - but there are some definite exceptions to that. I read a few of Jose Luis Borges' short stories in course classes, and I've been meaning to read more forever. Labyrinths is supposed to be the best collection, and it did not disappoint at all.

Borges is deservedly famous for writing these fabulously twisty little concept stories that are usually only a few pages long, but leave you stumbling out the other end with your mind bent into a completely different shape than when you began. Most of the stories have to do, in one way or another, with the boundaries between fiction and belief and reality (so of course they are right up my alley). One story is set in an infinite and circular library full of gibberish; in another, a fictional world gradually becomes reality through the determined preference of the global audience. The essays are also pretty fantastic and there is one passage on writing 'local color' that I am keeping here just for my own future benefit.

Gibbon observes that in the Arabian book par excellence, in the Koran, there are no camels; I believe that if there were any doubt as to the authenticity of the Koran, this absence of camels would be sufficient to prove it is an Arabian work. It was written by Mohammed, and Mohammed, as an Arab, had no reason to know that camels were especially Arabian; for him they were a part of reality, he had no reason to emphasize them; on the other hand, the first thing a falsifier, a tourist, a nationalist would do is have a surfeit of camels, caravans of camels, on every page; but Mohammed, as an Arab, was unconcerned: he knew he could be an Arab without camels.

In other news, I am sitting here at work in this thirty-foot-tall tower and the wind is literally howling outside the windows, incredibly loud and eerie. I would say 'wuthering' but I am not sure that is applicable in the absence of moors; regardless, it's adding sort of an almost gorgeously unnerving quality to my day. I keep half-expecting us to get blown away and carried off to Oz.

Comments

[obopolsk.livejournal.com]

That passage makes me want to read that book.

(One of these days I really need to sort out my TBR list. It's getting ridiculous.)

[skygiants]

- I was going to say 'Borges writes like this all the time, and it is fabulous' and then I realized that actually the whole book is translated from the Spanish so I am not 100% sure that he actually does write like this all the time. But at any rate the good translations that are in Labyrinths are like this all the time!

(Oh man I know. My library shelf alone is overflowing, and that's with me trying to limit myself!)

[genarti]

I had not read that quote before, and I love it kind of a whole lot.

[skygiants]

Isn't it awesome? I don't usually get the urge to spam my LJ with quotes, but . . .