Kenneth Turan’s review of Valkyrie has this great first line.
Hollywood and the people who brought you World War II have been making beautiful music together for decades, and “Valkyrie,” the new Tom Cruise vehicle, doesn’t disturb that melody.
Month: December 2008
Author Interview Shows – El publico lee
I was watching El publico lee on Canal Sur the other day and I began to think about who this show differed from some of the others I’ve seen in the recent past on in the US. For those of you who don’t know, El publico lee is a Spanish author interview show. But it also has people from the general public who have read the book and ask the author questions. Between the sets and the seriousness Canal Sur gives to the author it makes for, perhaps, a better show than those I’ve seen in the US. That said, I’ve never thought Book TV on CSPAN2 was that bad, except that it doesn’t cover any fiction. If you understand Spanish I would give it a look. My one complaint is they don’t archive more than two weeks of shows, so if you miss it, that’s too bad. I never did get to watch the end of the interview with Najat el Hachni and the book sounded interesting.
Bolaño, Enrique Lihn, and Jorge Edwards
I found one review and one story whose discovery were perfectly timed. The first, is a review in Letras Libres of a new book by Jorge Edwards. The second is a short story Meeting with Enrique Lihn by Bolaño in the New Yorker. The two items coincide nicely because the Bolaño story, although not particularly evident in the story what role Lihn performs in Bolaño’s personal pantheon, he is obviously someone, unlike Paz, worthy of moving through a dreamscape.
Edwards book, according to Edmundo Paz Soldán, uses a character based on Lihn to represent a generalized view of one whole generation, the generation of the 40’s and 50’s, before Bolaño and after Neruda. The book has many similarities to The Savage Detectives: the bohemian life style, the traveling here and there, the nightlife, the disgust at the established poet, in this case Neruda. But unlike the savage detectives, the Poet’s writing is what takes center stage.
En Los detectives salvajes, Belano y Lima son la periferia de la neovanguardia, hombres en fuga que para resistir al sistema, a la institución de la literatura, se entregan a la poesía como una experiencia vital. Para el Poeta de Edwards, la experiencia es intensa, pero la obra se antepone siempre a esta: “En los últimos días había empezado a escribir de nuevo en uno de sus cuadernos escolares. Eran hileras de versos que se curvaban, se entrechocaban y se desplomaban por las orillas, asomándose a veces en el otro lado de las páginas.”
In the Savage Detectives, Belano and Lima are peripheral to the neovanguard, men in flight to resist the system, literary instruction, and to live poetry as a vital experience. For Edward’s poet, the experiences are intense, but the work is always first: “In the last few days I had begun to write again in a student’s notebook. They were lines of verse that curve and chatter and tumble down by the shore, peeking out at times on the other side of the page.
It is an interesting article and gives a wider frame of reference to Bolaño, especially given the story in the New Yorker. It seems Bolaño wasn’t the only Chilean poet to reject so throughly what came before.
On a different note, the opening sentence is a great little capsule of Chilean literary controversies of the last few years.
El mundillo literario chileno suele alborotarse cada tanto con polémicas genuinas y otras que son más bien gratuitas. En las últimas décadas le tocó a Alberto Fuguet y Sergio Gómez debido a la antología McOndo, y a Roberto Bolaño y Diamela Eltit, enfrentados por unas declaraciones nada diplomáticas del primero; este año el turno ha sido de Jorge Edwards (Santiago, 1931), ese escritor de modales tan finos que es fácil confundirlo con un diplomático (de hecho, lo ha sido durante muchos años).
The Informer – 1935
Each era makes bad films in its own way and with its own conventions that come from accepted styles of acting and writing that when used well still work 70 years latter, but when misused make a film laughable remnant of a time long past. The Informer commits several sins that it make it hard to take seriously.
The film tells the story of an an ex-IRA man, Gypo Nolan, who was kicked out of the IRA because he couldn’t execute a man and let him escape and as a consequence is now broke. Gypo is desperate to leave Ireland with his girl because neither the English nor the IRA trust him. To raise money he turns in his friend for 20 pounds, the same price for two tickets two America. His friend is killed when the English try to arrest him and Gypo begins to feel guilty and heads out into Dublin on an all night bender where he spends all his money. The IRA figures out it is him and they take him to a trial where he is judged and eventually killed while trying to escape.
What makes the film so silly is not so much Gypo and the adventures he has in Dublin while he drinks. In many ways the Gypo’s drunkenness is one of the best examples of the exuberant internalization acting style of the 30’s, where the actor mixes some of the pantomime from the silent era which gives him pronounced movements with loud and boisterous talk to make the characterization in language as much as in movement. No, what makes it silly are the supporting roles. One could see a Gypo go off the edge, even if to our sensibilities it is more an metaphorical than a realistic portrayal. The supporting characters are stiff and wooden and, worse, they add the weakest of melodramatic elements. The head of the IRA unit is a stiff and by the book man and his love is the sister of the man who was betrayed. In one comic scene they express their love is such melodramatic ways you can’t help but laugh, and if you don’t laugh its because you are wondering what this scene is doing in the film. Moreover, she is the least impassioned woman you have ever seen. Her brother has been murdered and she attends the trial in such a calm manner you’d think she was there for a parking ticket. The week melodrama and the stiff acting don’t balance well with the impressionistic (possibly influenced by the Germans) parts of the film.
The way the IRA is portrayed is also strange. The IRA is a force of complete restraint and law, and not only do its commanders insist on fair trials, but even the accused are willing to accept the verdicts. When Gypo is shot by the IRA and is dying he asks for forgiveness of the sister and accepts that he shouldn’t have betrayed his friend and the IRA. The IRA only has one gun man who is evil, but the IRA is shown to be able to handle him and his desire for excess, and those who do the executions such as Gypo, and latter another young innocent, are too good to do it and will not commit murder. There is little complexity to the role of the IRA and at worst they are a flawed force for good.
Munich
I’m not too interested in whether Munich is a good film (in the sense of well shot, well acted it is) but in what way Spielberg questions the use of violence, since throughout the movie his characters express, hesitation, and finally those still living refuse to have anything to do with violence. Particularly, it is the character of Avner Kaufman that seems to suggest some week thinking on the part of the film maker. It is not so much that Avner looses faith in the mission, nor that Ephraim’s mechanical and ruthless planing is upsetting, but you have the impression that the reason for the movie to be is so that it can have a character renounce the violence. Sure the characters argue about the mission and the growing sense of its endlessness, but it is not the violence they are renouncing, but the endlessness of it. These are two different things, and the movie mixes the two ideas quite freely. They are not the same and what seems like a film that renounces the eye for an eye violence is confused and though it suggest there is an endlessness to it, it does not say attacking your enemies is wrong. Instead, one could suggest it is acceptable as long as the goal is defined (of course, these goals often change once the violence starts). Or one could suggest as long as long as the killing is not endless, or you rotate out your assassins more frequently, these kind of missions are acceptable.
The danger with films that are anti-war or anti-violence is that they seldom are. As Anthony Swaford pointed out, anti-war films are just as easily pro-war films. And in the hands of Spielberg who is often tempted by his great skills as a film maker to make an entertaining film, the message, what ever it is supposed to be, is usually confused.
Mataharis
Maybe its as a relation of a PI (a Pinkerton Man) or just someone steeped in noir, I find the reworking of the detective story fascinating. In Icíar Bollaín’s Mataharis the detective is no longer the tough loner, instead she is a searcher, at times disillusioned, but in control, or at least close to controlling, her private life. I say she because in Mataharis the detectives are three women, one a young devote to the detective arts whose only goal is to be a detective, one a mother coming back to work after having children, and one a middle aged woman, a veteran, who is in a loveless marriage. Most of the work the agency they work for does is following the lovers of their client’s spouses and, of course, catching them cheating. The work, though, doubles back on the women and each finds that what they do is not just a job, but a way of perceiving the world. The young one finds she can’t betray the strikers she’s been set to spy on, and she sacrifices her career for them and the leader who she has grown close to. The mother finds that her work makes her think the worst when her husband begins to act like he is cheating. And the veteran finds in watching the failures of others that her marriage one of habit, not love, is not worth keeping going. It is the interplay between the motifs of the detective, loner, cynic, and the women who have that edge in the sense that the everyday, the suspicious husbands, the failing marriages, makes them suspicious, and yet from those struggles they move on. If the motive of the typical noir detective is to survive, but live on, or so it seems, in much the same manner—the static existence of the hard boiled—Bollaín’s characters use the events to grow and change.
Micro Fiction or Star Trek Fiction (sp)
I always find it fascinating when Star Trek can inspires literary art that really has nothing to do with sci-fi. A few weeks ago, or was it a month now, La Jornada published this bit of fun.
2.- Su cuerpo llega mal acomodado: debe caminar con las orejas, hablar por las uñas, orinar por la nariz, ver por las nalgas, fornicar con un pulmón, escuchar por un ventrículo, sudar hacia el interior, defecar dérmicamente, pensar con los cojones (algo que a muchos nos sucede).
His body arrives in bad shape: he has to walk on his ears, talk with his fingernails, pee trough the nose, see trough his ass, listen with his ventricle, sweat inside, defecate trough the skin, think with his balls (something that we men do).
Horacio Castellanos Moya Interviews
I was on the Talpajocote blog and found links to some interviews with Horacio Castellanos Moya. Each are ten minutes long and worth watching.
In the first, from a Spanish TV station, he talks about how he traveled around Central America when he was young, hoping that the country would become democratic and eventually gave up and moved to Mexico. He returned to El Salvador 10 years later, but left again, disillusioned. He also talks about Tirana memoria his latest book. He mentions the title comes from something a character at the end of Donde no estén ustedes says, which along with Desmoronamiento, is part of a trilogy. He describes what he sees as the focus of the book is: the growing liberty and awakening of a woman while her husband is in prison, as if his imprisonment is her liberation.
In the second, more literary, but a little bit more difficult to understand, he talks about how he sees Mexico as the capital of Meso America, and Salvador as one of the small provinces of the area. Central American and Mexico are not as different from each other as Central America is to South America. He also mentions that a lack of literary tradition in El Salvador has led him to use the language itself as tradition. It is liberating, because unlike a Mexican of Argentinian he has no wave of tradion he rides on. Instead he can search the world over for what he wants to use as an influence, such as Thomas Bernhard.
Ana María Matute in El País
Ana María Matute has a new book out and El País has given it a great review. If you have never read her work, she is definitely worth it. Her sparse short stories are excellent. Her name often comes up around Nobel time (although that may just be in Spain). If you are unfamiliar with her, the description from the article is a great synopsis.
Aunque perteneciente, cronológicamente, a la llamada generación del medio siglo, con cuyos más destacados miembros comparte determinados trasfondos temáticos (la Guerra Civil española, la desolación como paisaje moral de los años de posguerra, la rememoración de la infancia como irreparable pérdida de la inocencia edénica, y el descalabro humano reinante en una sociedad en la que los más débiles sucumben bajo la impiedad de los poderosos), la escritura de Ana María Matute siempre se ha regido por un talante despegado de las consignas tanto ideológicas como estéticas de la época.
Although she belongs, chronologically, to the mid century generation, whose most well know members share certain thematic overtones (the Spanish Civil Way, the desolation as moral voyage through the years after the war, the child’s memory as the irreparable loss of an Eden like innocence, and the reigning human misfortune in a society where the weakest succumb to the impunity of the powerful), the writing of Ana María Matute has always been marked by a talent not tied to ideologies but the aesthetics of the era.
Mexico’s Bestsellers for 2008
The LA Times has a list of Bestsellers in Mexico for 2008. Mostly they are are imports from the US (3 different Stefanie Myers books) and histories of Mexican Politics. Only one book really caught my eye and that is Jorge Volpi’s El Jardín Devastado.
Labyrinth of Solitude – 50 Years Latter
As Scott at Conversational Reading noted, there is a long review of the 50th anniversary of the Labyrinth of Solitude in Letras Libres for those of you who can read it, it is worth the time. If you only read English, I’ll give a quick summary. I haven’t read the book since I was in college at The Evergreen State College in Olympia where I took a class on e quarter (at Evergreen this means my only class of 16 credits for ) called Mexico Since the Revolution. Labyrinth, along with classics of Mexican fiction by Rulfo, Fuentes, Azuella and Yañez, and more anthropological titles like the outdated Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico were on the reading list. In this context Paz, though unique in his approach, did fit within a tradition, which the article makes clear.
Alejandro Rossi, the author, first talks about the publishing history of the book. In its first run it only did 3000 copies and it took another ten years for a reprint to appear, not unlike Rulfo’s Pedro Parama. It wasn’t until the masquers of the students in 1968 did the book gain a wider readership outside of writers. The book first written at the end of the forties, was written in a period of great activity and followed Eagle or Sun, a book of poems which also explores, in part, Mexicanness. (It also includes the wonderful My Life With The Wave)
Rossi goes on to talk about the how Paz used Plato’s conception of the cave to frame his argument. Men crave societal relations which they find in the cave, but to gain insight one must leave the cave, which, of course, breaks the relationship. When the man comes back to the cave he is now an outsider, but through the outsider status they can help lead the group, since they now have special knowledge. Using this metaphor, Paz saw Labyrinth as a way to examine, or leave the cave, of society. What makes this approach unique, is that Paz writes a book that is not academic.
Rossi covers several salient points, but most important for Paz’s relation to Mexican intellectual history of that time, is how Paz sees Mexican History and its relation to the mythic solidarity of the past. (This article was difficult to translate so my apologies if it seems a little choppy.)
La nostalgia de la comunidad no es el anhelo sentimental por una comunidad cualquiera, no, tampoco es la nostalgia de Platón frente a la polis de su época, no, se trata de la nostalgia de la Edad de Oro, que sería precisamente la edad sin máscaras, el sitio, entre otras cosas, donde se da el verdadero amor, el amor sin velos, el amor que es lo contrario del amor rodeado de convenciones, se trata del amor revolucionario, una idea que le viene del surrealismo. […] Pero siempre que habla de autenticidad, piensa en la Edad de Oro. Y la Revolución Mexicana es para Octavio el momento de la sinceridad histórica, sería el momento de la recuperación de este ser original que él intenta descubrir en El laberinto de la soledad. Y dentro de la Revolución Mexicana será el zapatismo el que más se acerque a la autenticidad anhelada. La Revolución restablece el tiempo original, la Revolución busca la fundación de un tiempo mítico anterior.
The community’s nostalgia is not a sentimental longing for whatever community, neither is it the nostalgia of Plato facing the polis of his era, no, it is about the nostalgia of the Golden Age which would be the age without masks, the place, among other things, where they give each other the true love, the love without veils, the love that is the the opposite of the love that is surrounded by conventions; it is about the revolutionary love, an idea that comes from surrealism. […] But always talking about authenticity, you think about the Golden Age. And the Mexican Revolution is, for Octavio, the moment of historical sincerity. It would be the moment of regaining the original being that he wanted discover in the Labyrinth of Solitude. And within the Mexican Revolution perhaps is Zapatismo, the thing closest to the longed for authenticity. The revolution reestablished the original time; the revolution searched for the foundation from a previous, mythic time.
Although Paz does not idealize the Revolution, he does see in it a mythic narrative for Mexico, much as he sees forging of relationships between the Indians and the Spanish through the Catholic church. It is a search for something within the history of Mexico, not something to bring from the outside. These ideas are not unique among those of his generation and there is a desire to fashion something new and unique from the recent past, a breaking of the pre-revolutionary, more Eurpoean, with the more Mexican. Paz, himself, does not see Zapata as the ideal, it is the communal ideals tied up in Zapata that create a national myth and joins the Mexicans in Plato’s cave together.
I’m not sure what Paz thought of the national myths himself, but he does write about them in Eagle or Sun (the title refers to the Aztecs, and by extension, Mexico itself). Taken together, they form a mythic ideal of Mexico, which was also being written by Rulfo in a darker manner.
I don’t know if I’ll read Labyrinth of Solitude again, but the article made me think it was time to look at it again.
New New Zealand Writing – Elizabeth Catton
The Outing is just a brief story, no more than 1500 words, but it is a fun read with a dark and sharp humor. The story, in its briefness, naturally leaves much unsaid, but that briefness is just enough to lead the reader into the richest of questions, those that expand the story and are the logical outgrowth of well drawn characters. In the story, one of the characters takes great pride in telling pedophilia jokes. You don’t know much more about the character and as I put the story down I thought, what does this say about the character? It is that kind of opened question that makes the story more than just a series of jokes.
Amitav Ghosh On The CBC
Tirana Memoria (sp)
Tirana Memoria
Horacio Castellanos Moya
Tirana Memoria is the latest novel by the El Salvadoran novelest Horacio Castellanos Moya, who also published a translation of his novel Senselessness (Insensatez) in English this year. Tirana Memoria, although fictional, is about the 1944 overthrow of General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez and takes place over a month and a half period when a failed coup led to reprisals which ultimately led to the general strike that forced the general to flee the country. Part diary, part convicts-on-the-lam narrative, it alternates between comedy and tension as the characters elude the army and the police and attempt to survive post coup repression.
The novel opens as Haydée, the wife of Pericles, relates in her diary that Pericles has been taken to prison again. Pericles is a newspaper editor known for writing essays opposing the government and imprisonment is nothing new. Haydée writes of going to the prison each day to have lunch with him and bring him daily necessities like cigarettes. She is an upper class woman and even though she doesn’t like going to the prison, she has become used to the daily task. However, she is not a political person and all she wants from her visits are to see her husband and find out when he will be released. She is so unpoliticized and accustomed to his imprisonment that when she thinks Percilies will be released she goes to the hairdresser so she will look nice for him. The sheltering has created a woman who, though dedicated, is not consciously aware of the dangers, almost as if the constant imprisonments are part of an annoying game. She has an almost naive sense of entitlement and only midway through the novel when her political consciousness has awakened does she begin to understand what has shaped her.
Nunca he participado en política por iniciativa propia, sino que siempre he acompañado a Pericles en sus decisiones, con la absoluta confianza de que él sabe lo que hace y por qué lo hace, y con la certeza de que mi deber es estar a su lado. Así fue cuando decidió convertirse en secretario particular del general luego de que éste diera el golpe de Estado que lo llevó al poder, o cuando dos años más tarde aceptó la embajada en Bruselas, o cuando decidió romper con el Gobierno y regresar al país, o cuando debimos salir hacia el exilio en México. Iré a la reunión donde doña Chayito con este mismo espíritu; en cuanto pueda hablar con Pericles le contaré sobre ello y seguiré sus dictados al respecto. Admiro a mujeres como Mariíta Loucel, que luchan en primera fila por sus ideales políticos, pero ella es de origen francés y tiene otra educación. Yo me debo a mi marido.
I have never participated in a political event by myself. Instead, I have always gone along with Pericles decision’s with the absolute confidence that he knows what he is doing and why, and with the certainty that my duty is to be at his side. It was this way when he decided to become the general’s general secretary after the coup that brought him to power, or when two years later he accepted the position of ambassador en Brussels, or when he decided to break with the government and return home, or when we had to leave for exile en Mexico. With this same spirit I will go to the meeting with Doña Chayito. As soon as I can talk to Pericles I will tell him about it and will suggest he give his respects. I admire the women like Mariíta Loucel that man the barricades for their political ideals, but she is French and was raised differently.
Not only does the entry describe who Haydée has been and what she believes her role is, it gives one a sense of who Perciles is. Their relationship, despite his politics, is quite traditional and she has spent most of her life raising her family and supporting him. In the entry, too, one can sense a timidness in the changes she is beginning to experience. By the end of the novel she will begin to use her privileged status to slip through cordons of soldiers who might otherwise stop someone not as well off, and deliver funds to the strikers. But when she writes this she still has more to learn.
While Haydée narrates the happenings in San Salvador, her son Clemen and nephew Jimmy try to flee the country. Clemen is a drunk and wastrel who in a rash moment exuberantly backs the coup while on the radio. He even goes so far to insult the general and now is a wanted man. Jimmy, on the other had, is a captain in the army and had led a soldiers against the government during the coup. Now they are both fleeing, hoping to escape to Honduras. At first they are hiding in the attic of a priest’s house. It is obvious from the beginning they do not get along and Clemen, so used to drinking and doing as he pleases, is unable to sit quietly in the attic and wait for darkness. They argue constantly and the fights form the comic relief of the novel. In the most comic section of the novel, they take a train dressed as priests and Jimmy who is always calm attempts to give confession to a soldier while Clemen holds his rifle. As they continue to flee North the arguments increase until they almost kill themselves in contest between the the spoiled kid from the city and the hardened soldier. If Haydée is just beginning to find something she did not know she had, Clemen is the opposite. He cannot even go one day without a drink and as you learn towards the end of the novel his inability to suffer for even just a moment will lead him to support what he opposed at first.
The contrast between the two narratives not only breaks up with multipul voices what could have turned in to monotonous diary entries, it highlights a divide between the more worldly and cynical Clemen and Jimmy, and Haydée who not only finds a new political voice, but can represent the voice of the country as it rebels against the general. Clemen and Jimmy are two poles of the same idea: a certainty in the way the country should be run, for Jimmy a the point of a gun, for Clemen as a playground for the wealthy. Although different, the certainty leads back to the same assumptions about power where some sort of strong man will make everything better; what ever better is. Haydée, on the other had, is change, but is an amorphous change, because she has no plan. How can she? She has never had the opportunity to work out her ideas. And in the same way, the country rises up against the General, some because he is a blasphemer, some because he is ruining the coffee trade, but there is no plan beyond the coup.
Castellanos Moya plays a bit of a trick on the reader because he ends the first part of the novel on the day the General flees the country. The reader is left with the euphoria of success and if not careful could assume that everything will work out for the country. But there are too many unanswered questions about the future and one only has to look at El Salvadoran history after the coup to realize euphoria never lasts long. The euphoria at the end of the section, becomes fleeting and like the history of so many failed governments, the ideas that motivated the rebels quickly dissipate and the old animosities return. When Haydée writes, God has heard our prayers, you have to wonder if he really has.
So far everything I have mentioned occurs in the first part which makes up the bulk of the book There is, however, a 30 page coda set in 1973. At first it seems a strange addition and, maybe, a bit lazy because Castellanos Moya reviews the the lives of the major characters in the intervening years. Yet despite the awkwardness of the device, there is one very important feature: Pericles speaks for himself. Until the the second part, Pericles is the image Haydée creates in her diary. It is a powerful image, yet an image that lacks real depth. Haydée describes her affection for him, but she doesn’t describe him: what he believes, why he does what he does. Yet he is ever present. All the reader can really know is he has gone to prison many times for his beliefs, which sounds admirable, but what are they? The last section confronts the reader with the true Pericles and asks what character did you create in absence of information? Is it like this man? Since reading, to some extent is projection, the second part does a raise an interesting questions.
Tirana Memoria while not covering new ground in the Latin American novel is a good addition, as Javier Fernández de Castro has mentioned, to the genre of the Latin American strongman. With its different voices and deemphasis on the strongman himself it expands the genre and centers it anxious uncertainties of the ruled. I hope the book makes it into English
Year in Reading Hermano Cerdo Style
Hermano Cerdo is publishing a year in reading much like the Million’s. It is in Spanish, of course, except the Diaz piece, but the most enteresting thing is how many of the readers mention English language books (not translations), not just Spanish Language books. This is a little different from the Millions and gives it an interesting feel.
Castellanos Moya on Words Without Borders
Words Without borders features a blog post by Horacio Castellanos Moya. In the post he describes the death threats he received after the publication of Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador and forced him to stay away from El Salvador for years.
Multi-Dimensional Chinese Poetry
I’m still working my way through fascinating Su Hui poem, but it is an interesting idea.Written to be read left to right, right to left, up and down and diagonally, David Hinton has attempted to not only translate, but recreate the diagrammatic poem in English. This is a case where the translation looses something, not for the work of the translator, but because the two language systems are so different.
The Fifty Minute Mermaid – in the TLS
The TLS has a review of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s book The Fifty Minute Mermaid, which sounds at the same time funny, magical, and yet subversive. It is published in a side by side edition in English and Gaelic and sounds fun.
after she had stumbled across the greatest discovery of all – something even more profound than sex – / by which I mean mascara
My family history is Irish and I have always wanted to learn Gaelic and as a teenager thought I actually would. Perhaps, still, along with Arabic I still can. Until then, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s will have to suffice.
Kafka’s Workplace Writings
When I think of reading something like Kafka’s workplace writings (he was in the insurance trade; how much more boring could it get) I get the chills and think, thank goodness I’m not a literary scholar. I’m sure it has some value, but I’d rather hear a 30 minute interview give me a survey than read it. Maybe someday someone will want to analyze all the code I’ve written, if it still works…talk about ephemeral.
Murray Bail at The Quarterly Conversation
There is a review of Murray Bail at The Quarterly Conversation. I’m always leery of comparisons to Borges because they seldom turn out to be true. The writer always has the intellectual elements, playing with texts, playing with the notions of knowledge, yet they lack the precision and the dedication to the narrative that is in itself a precise search and is part of the play, especially the works that come from Ficciones and The Aleph.
That said, Murray Bail sounds interesting and how often do you a chance to see the Aussie view—of course, you could settle for Australia.
By The Firelight 