tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6327348657265652781.post1936255910190364336..comments2023-10-03T11:41:21.191+01:00Comments on The Truth About Lies: Doctor Brodie's ReportJim Murdochhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12786388638146471193noreply@blogger.comBlogger10125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6327348657265652781.post-77426772239001730842013-03-07T11:07:03.423+00:002013-03-07T11:07:03.423+00:00Thanks for your comment, Gustavo. Sorry to take so...Thanks for your comment, <b>Gustavo</b>. Sorry to take so long to respond but your comment was awaiting moderation and I hadn’t checked there for months. (Google really could make it a bit clearer when comments need moderating.) Don’t worry about your English. I’m a Scot and our English leaves a lot to be desired. It’s been a while since I posted this. I really must find some time to read some more Borges. I know I have one book on my to-read shelf but I keep getting caught up with other things. Too many books, too little time.Jim Murdochhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12786388638146471193noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6327348657265652781.post-18723109101776895332009-08-19T08:42:06.820+01:002009-08-19T08:42:06.820+01:00The 'Big Pointy Thing', Gabe, was actually...The 'Big Pointy Thing', <b>Gabe</b>, was actually a late addition to the book. It was a piece of modern sculpture where my daughter and her pals used to congregate and that's how they referred to it. Hope you manage to find <i>Living with the Truth</i> in that bomb site in which you work. It was only a year ago so there should only be a couple of hundred book on the top of it.<br /><br>Jim Murdochhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12786388638146471193noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6327348657265652781.post-63690303594888641232009-08-19T00:53:25.748+01:002009-08-19T00:53:25.748+01:00Jim: I will loan my son the first soon as I find i...Jim: I will loan my son the first soon as I find it. You and Carrie know how my books are... when I set one down it can take me two years to find it again. I know it cannot be too far distant. I am on the case.<br /><br />Used to be if I suggested he read a book it would never happen (his wife would read it)... but recently he picked up on the Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War that I gave him 10 years ago and it hit the spot for him. I think it dawned on him if I suggest a book might interest him there may be something to it.<br /><br />Out on the LI South Fork along the road in a field, like in almost no place, there is a very large red metal 'modernist' sculpture. I keep saying it is the head of a rooster, he keeps saying, "What rooster. It is a deer head." We talk about what we each think it is and refuse to admit the other is right. So today I wanted to tell him about The Big Pointy Thing and he stopped me, "Hey, you said you were going to let me read the book. Be quiet."Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15887517793752604788noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6327348657265652781.post-57562872932793572682009-08-18T12:02:08.745+01:002009-08-18T12:02:08.745+01:00Well, Jonathan, I'm glad my review piqued your...Well, <b>Jonathan</b>, I'm glad my review piqued your interest. I was a bit worried I'd get hit with a pile of flack for not being appropriately reverent enough but I called it as I saw it. I think it might even have been better <i>because</i> I was unfamiliar with his other work; it got reviewed purely on its own merits. Had I read his 'better' stuff then I likely would have been more disappointed.<br /><br /><b>Gabe</b>, that you would be recommending my book to someone else without even having finished it flatters me. I had been worried sick that it wouldn't live up to people's expectations after the first one. Will you let your son read that first? It doesn't really matter. I'd be very curious to see if the book works on its own with the short synopsis I include at the start.<br /><br />I actually thought about Beckett when I started researching this piece and the way in later years he kept simplifying and simplifying. Borges was working with a limited palette because he was limited, having to dictate his work to another. I can, in part, see him enjoying the challenge. I suppose it's like Stravinsky's interpretation of jazz based on the sheet music that come into his possession which bore little relation to what he heard when he finally did get to hear it played live.<br /><br />And, <b>Art</b>, thanks for the recommendations. I've added <i>Fictions</i> to my wish list and we'll see what Xmas brings; I have more than enough to keep me going until then.<br /><br>Jim Murdochhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12786388638146471193noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6327348657265652781.post-70000582571189074232009-08-18T02:34:09.217+01:002009-08-18T02:34:09.217+01:00Yes, I think it's good to suggest starting wit...Yes, I think it's good to suggest starting with "Ficciones." <br /><br />I also recommend "A Personal Anthology" which is Borges own selections from his work. It's fiction, essay, poetry, and his "sketches" which are indefinable.<br /><br />But I would also offer the suggestion that, since they've been published now for a few years, one might start with "Collected Fictions" or "Selected Non-Fictions," both of high merit, and both should be available at libraries if one doesn't want to invest much at first.<br /><br />If you can find it—it's rare—there is a fantastic book called "Borges at Eighty: Conversations" edited by Willis Barnstone. It consists of 11 full-length conversations (they're a bit more casual and wide-ranging than formal interviews), in which Borges talks openly about his ideas and his work with a candor that's rare in any author. This is what I was referring to earlier, when I mentioned things Borges had said about his own work. It's a terrific book.Art Durkeehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07463180236975988432noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6327348657265652781.post-45115486487619061752009-08-17T23:34:06.774+01:002009-08-17T23:34:06.774+01:00“It is always difficult when faced with a book fro...“It is always difficult when faced with a book from a very different culture to connect with the events being played out on the page.” This statement strikes me as I’ve never been to Scotland, and the Scot portion of the family got to America shortly after the Mayflower, but I find reading Stranger than Fiction to be one of the most comfortable and familiar of reads, in an almost eerie and unsettling manner, that I have ever had. I was telling my son so when we were walking through a mall today to seek him out a hat wherein he mentioned to me he was reading The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, but that he would gladly read your book next in line after. Trust me, I am not reading it while driving.<br /><br />I have at one time or another read a share of Borges, but not this particular collection. Your comments on his attempt to write a ‘normal’ kind of fiction interests me in the sense of say if Van Gogh attempted to paint what he thought of as a normal painting. Conjecture only, not necessarily my opinion, if Borges failed miserably in constructing what many readers would consider a normal fiction, but he succeeded admirably in creating what he thought of as a normal fiction. By doing so may he have created something not particularly readable? The presumption of ‘normal’ in literature is what I find most curious here.<br /><br />I think it was around 1981 when I was working on a project north of NYC and my wife went into Manhattan to visit a writer friend of hers that she had known from her days hanging at St. Marks. I was working long hours at the time. She gave me a call and told me Borges was going to be speaking at NYU that night. Told me if I wanted to drive down her friend could get us in to the lecture. So I cleaned up quickly and drove down, an hour and a half or so. Middle of the week and I had to be back that night and up early the next day. Her friend, a bookish fellow, was intent on that we absolutely had to go to a particular pizza parlor in the Village. It took forever to get the pizza and it was not all that outstanding of one. So we go over to the hall where Borges was to speak and the place was already packed to capacity. We had to stand outside and listen to him speak over a loudspeaker. I was irritated, to say the least, not to even get to see the man off in the distance... but somehow it all seemed the appropriate level of irony. I thank you for reminding me of that adventure.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15887517793752604788noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6327348657265652781.post-32822286854863979282009-08-17T22:39:13.517+01:002009-08-17T22:39:13.517+01:00When I read Labyrinths around thirty years ago, it...When I read <i>Labyrinths</i> around thirty years ago, it was the first thing I'd ever read of Borges, and I thought it was pretty much the best thing I'd ever read. I was (perhaps unsurprisingly) massively disappointed with <i>Dr Brodie's Report</i>, but I'm now thinking of picking it up and having another go. I've got the same edition with that excellent cover, too.jonathan pinnockhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17865393294059636207noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6327348657265652781.post-37375469003541178212009-08-17T18:23:07.696+01:002009-08-17T18:23:07.696+01:00I'm the same, Dick, I may even have a copy of ...I'm the same, <b>Dick</b>, I may even have a copy of <i>Labyrinths</i> kicking around somewhere but even if I'd found it I wanted to reread this one because it's been thirty years since I read it and I was curious if anything was still there. One of these days I will read some typical Borges but not just now.<br /><br />And, <b>Art</b>, it does seem as if I've picked the least typical book Borges ever wrote. After all the research I did for this article I've certainly piqued my own curiosity. Where would you suggest a beginner start with him? Was I right to suggest <i>Ficciones</i>?<br /><br>Jim Murdochhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12786388638146471193noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6327348657265652781.post-61352124072701100122009-08-17T16:25:33.221+01:002009-08-17T16:25:33.221+01:00I know an otherwise smart poet who thinks Borges i...I know an otherwise smart poet who thinks Borges is a terrible writer because his short stories don't fit into any of the usual standards or styles of narrative fiction, or what we expect a short story to be. (Although "Funes the Memorius" was included in an annual anthology of The World's Best Science Fiction in the 1960s—which was how I discovered Borges.) This otherwise smart poet has no clue that Borges wasn't even trying to write your typical short stories. He also doesn't seem able to grasp that what Borges was always doing was a kind of meta-fiction rather than regular fiction. This otherwise smart poet pretty much rejects "meta-fiction" as an entire genre or style, too.<br /><br />My point here is that this otherwise smart poet has made a fundamental category error: he is comparing apples to oranges. He assumes that Borges is a bad writer merely because Borges isn't writing like Raymond Carver or Saul Bellow or Philip Roth. He assumes Borges to be ignorant of the conventions of narrative literature, when in fact Borges was probably better-read in narrative fiction than you or I or any other ten people combined. In other words, my poet friend assumes Borges is in error when in fact Borges's meta-fictions are not even intended to be fictions. They never were.<br /><br />People often make this mistake about Borges. He himself stated in interviews that his writings are a personal labyrinth in which he is exploring himself. They're not intended to be autobiographical stories, they're intended to ask questions about consciousness, about the nature of perception and reality, about the questions raised by what it means to be self-aware (or have a doppelganger, or to meet one's younger self). Borges is an explorer, not a fiction writer per se. Everything he writes is a question, not an answer. Borges once said that his "Ficciones" were not stories, but experiments in consciousness and memory. His narrators are almost always unreliable. His stories often refer to archaic texts and lands that never actually existed, as far as we know. He could be very playful about this. Some of his stories are quite funny when you realize that he's having fun with your expectations of what a story should be or do. Borges does let us in on the joke, but we need to be alert.<br /><br />Needless to say, Borges is one of my favorite writers. My writing style is nothing like his, but his viewpoints and questions have influenced me deeply. At least as much if not more so than Beckett, or Octavio Paz.Art Durkeehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07463180236975988432noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6327348657265652781.post-26671712980672419902009-08-17T08:04:58.302+01:002009-08-17T08:04:58.302+01:00I've meant to read Borges for years but have a...I've meant to read Borges for years but have always felt that some sort of orientation prior to entering his distinctive and demanding territory would be necessary. Here it is. Thanks for this, Jim. I now have an entry point via the short stories.Dickhttp://patteran.typepad.comnoreply@blogger.com