.:. Another Likely Story

1. In 1979, Jorge Luis Borges edited a 33-volume anthology of fantastic literature, in Spanish, titled The Library of Babel (like his own marvelous story of that same name).  The Rumpus has found the titles -- though not all are available online, and many are only available in Spanish -- and amassed a number of reading links for one's pleasure here.

2. Borges being one of my favorite authors, if not the most favorite -- I once found out that there was a Borges museum, and was distraught that I couldn't go.  The Significant Other consoled me by pointing out that the Perfect Borges Museum would simply stand you in the lobby, ask you to imagine the most perfect museum to Borges, and then send you out the door saying that was the entire exhibit.

One of my favorite web publications is Words Without Borders, which focuses on short stories translated into English and describes itself as "the online magazine for international literature." I have a difficult time describing why I love translation, but even if you don't care for the art and craft, it's still important as a way of understanding other people, other cultures, other ways of thinking.  Stories that could only have arisen out of other lives, but remind us that we're all living.

My favorite story from the current issue is God's Obituary, by Fernando Paiva, translated by Brent Alan James. It's a simultaneously thoughtful and satirical take on humans "playing God," focusing on a(n athiest!) biologist who is nicknamed "God" after developing some amazing advances in genetic engineering. An excerpt:

In a bombastic interview with Today Science four years ago, God publicly recognized the error of having created genetic architecture, even with the ethical principles that might keep it under control. “It was naïveté on my part to believe that human beings would be capable of adhering to some limit. Controlling the creation is easy. Difficult is controlling the creator,” he lamented.

The rest of the story can be read here.

Other favorites include this hilarious and blackly humorous story, Spaniards Lost in America by Carlos Franz, in which an unknown and penniless Spanish man dies in a foreign country, and his countrymen are called upon to pay for a proper burial. They refuse, and complications ensue, full of hilarity and black humor.  Translated by Marian Schwartz.

Barrales junior left for the cemetery. In the dusty administrative office of the necropolis—besieged by nameless mausoleums, crooked crucifixes, washed-out tombstones—he was taking account of plots and holes in the ground. Visiting them and testing them out, he asked after the minimum dimensions for a man's corpse, checking to see if the cheapest available ditch, one reserved for a five-year stint, could be rented for six months, since his compatriots' donations could only cover that long. This last part, though, he didn't say (he didn't have to since at this point half the city was saying as much anyway).

Read the rest here.

And this one touches the heart, especially at its frosty, dreamy end: None of Your Business by Natalia Klyuchareva. This is a story of the son of two alcoholics who tries to help his parents, and when that fails, takes things into his own hands with drastic results.  A harsh yet beautiful story, like a frozen winter landscape.  Translated by Jonathan Blitzer.

He heaved a sigh from a crushing emotion he couldn't name. He felt as if he were running through a magical forest with silver trees. And he tried as hard as he could to believe in it. But the pitiful little bell cried straight to his heart, not letting him forget that it was never to be.

Behind him the snow creaked guiltily, and reflected in the window was his mother's face.

"You want a tree?" tight drunken tears gurgled in her throat. "We'll buy one. Tomorrow."

Yurka squeezed his eyes shut, clenched, and with a final incredible effort—believed.

"Just like this?" he clarified, hiding in his scarf from the maternal reek.

"I promise," she lied, and turning away she shed silent tears.

The rest can be read here.

I came upon Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Some Reflections on Dolls” in which he describes his nightmarish, visceral loathing of dolls. Granted he had a large assortment of issues to work out with dolls, the foremost being that his mother tried to pretend he was a girl and gave him dresses and dolls and called him "Sophie." Nonetheless, there's something more there:

... I pass over the intimate, the touching, the deserted, thoughtful aspect of many things, which, as I passed them, moved me deeply by their beautiful participation in human living; I will only cite in passing quite simple things: a sewing clamp, a spinning-wheel, a domestic loom, a bridal glove, a cup ... If we were to bring all this to mind again and at the same moment to find one of these dolls–pulling it out from a pile of more responsive things–it would almost anger us with its frightful obese forgetfulness ... it would lie before us unmasked as the horrible foreign body on which we had wasted our purest ardour; as the externally painted watery corpse, which floated and swam on the flood-tides of our affection ...

One: as L notes, "we’re freaked out by dolls and puppets and masks and distortions to the face because we’re programmed to carefully search faces, and abnormal patterns ring atavistic alarm bells." Two: I think that on top of ingrained human responses, Rilke really did see death in his dolls. There is a time when a child thinks a doll is a toy to be animated with imagination, and then the child realizes that humans are mortal, and begins to perceive dolls as lifeless things that don't respond to love and longing and sadness any more than people who have died. Other objects are warm and comforting because they have never changed and will not as long as you lavish care and attention on them, but dolls before and after the realization of mortality are two different things.  It is possible for dolls to die, and Rilke's did.

Maggie Simpson takes up the life of a writer. Most accurate depiction I have ever seen!

On realizing that I really want to watch the movie, I've been trying to finish the book Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.  I quite like it so far, you can really tell the author was one of them (or do I only imagine I think that became we all know Le Carre worked for MI6 ...?).

The plotting is stellar thus far.  With some envy, I note that a good intelligence agent, analyst, etc. is probably as good as many writers are at plotting, since their job is to put together plots, and they deal with much higher stakes than I do.  Also, if you've ever skimmed through any official cables, you find that many people in foreign-based services and such are excellent writers; their reports are often quite delightful and even hilarious to read.  I forget who told me this, but I was once informed that the diplomats et al are generally extremely motivated to write excellent reports, because they know that the cables are basically forever.