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Mar. 31st, 2010 02:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionForgot one--highly spoiling:
E. Quain's God of the Labyrinth: There is a puzzling murder in the opening pages, plodding converation in the middle, and a solution at the end. Once the mystery is solved, we come upon a long paragraph of retrospection containing this sentence: 'Everyone thought that the meeting between the two chess players had been accidental.' The words lead us to believe that the solution is wrong. The anxious reader, going back over the relevant chapters, discovers a different solution, the true one. In so doing, the reader of this curious book turns out to be cleverer than the detective.
I'm convinced there's something like this going on in The Invention of Morel, a novel reflecting Borges as thoroughly as Frankenstein does Shelley--perhaps the narrator is Morel after amnesia, or Morel is not himself Morel but an earlier Morel-supplanting interloper whose feelings went the way Morel's and the narrator's did. Both possibilities open up the ironic one that the vindicating recording will become an increasingly incomprehensible palimpsest; time will have its revenge on the attempt at timelessness.
The echo chambers in the basement haunt the most. I'd bet anything they were Borges' idea.
E. Quain's God of the Labyrinth: There is a puzzling murder in the opening pages, plodding converation in the middle, and a solution at the end. Once the mystery is solved, we come upon a long paragraph of retrospection containing this sentence: 'Everyone thought that the meeting between the two chess players had been accidental.' The words lead us to believe that the solution is wrong. The anxious reader, going back over the relevant chapters, discovers a different solution, the true one. In so doing, the reader of this curious book turns out to be cleverer than the detective.
I'm convinced there's something like this going on in The Invention of Morel, a novel reflecting Borges as thoroughly as Frankenstein does Shelley--perhaps the narrator is Morel after amnesia, or Morel is not himself Morel but an earlier Morel-supplanting interloper whose feelings went the way Morel's and the narrator's did. Both possibilities open up the ironic one that the vindicating recording will become an increasingly incomprehensible palimpsest; time will have its revenge on the attempt at timelessness.
The echo chambers in the basement haunt the most. I'd bet anything they were Borges' idea.
