proximoception

13. Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami
14. Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson
15. Poems of the Night, Jorge Luis Borges
16. The Sonnets, Borges
17. Seven Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges
18. Selected Poems (1999), Borges
19. A Doll's House, Henrik Ibsen
20. Ficciones, Borges
21. Introduction to American Literature, Borges
22. Introduction to English Literature, Borges
23. Conversations (Ed. Burgin), Borges
24. On Argentina, Borges
25. All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy
26. All the Names, Jose Saramago
27. On Mysticism, Borges
28. The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, Philip Pullman

Probably shouldn't count On Mysticism, as it only contains about 15 pages of new material so that's all I read of it. On Argentina was about half new, mostly taken from the long-suppressed prose of his 20s, and pretty interesting, though the translation was garbly at times--allegedly Borges' early, baroque-modernist Spanish is practically impenetrable.

The Pullman book's pretty interesting too. The message is simple enough, but the task of keeping it feeling organic to the original material is occasionally beyond him--though there's an impressively high number of striking felicities in among the march of overall (relative, honorable) failure at a pretty much impossible job that I'm becoming used to with him.

Actually, here especially it's truly bizarre that the fusion of old text and new commentary works as well as it does, kind of reminding me of Taymor's success with Titus, a reading which you'd think would be entirely against the grain of the material it's working with, and in fact in places proves to be, but in others feels so astonishingly right that some sympathetic vein or countercurrent in the original must truly exist for that to even happen. The real Shakespeare hates violence, the real Jesus agrees with Pullman. Except at other times not.

The Saramago, which I'd taken several aborted stabs at over the years, proved amazing and mysterious. I grasped only some of what he's saying but became enthralled anyway, an experience I've become unused to but which probably characterized much of the reading of my younger days. Even in the many places where I probably do know what he's saying I don't feel sure I do, because he's coming in from some original, dream-guided angle--probably a lesson for Pullman, if this sort of thing can even be taught. I'll be reading more of him.