#175 Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote- Jorge Luis Borges

#175 Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote- Jorge Luis Borges

Ok, I found this odd at first, but its genius quickly revealed itself. Writers writing about writer’s writing is always a touch-and-go technique that can fall prey to gimmick and hackishness. However, this was pretty amazing.

Borges imagines a fictional author, Pierre Menard penning a re-write of Cervantes’ Don Quixote. It wasn’t going to be a newly imagined or a polished version, or even a sequel. He was going to re-write it word for word…but as himself therefore giving it a fresh take.

“To be a popular novelist of the seventeenth century in the twentieth seemed to Menard to be a diminution. Being, somehow, Cervantes, and arriving thereby at the Quixote—that looked to Menard less challenging (and therefore less interesting) than continuing to be Pierre Menard and coming to the Quixote through the experience of Pierre Menard.”

This is great literary satire, poking fun at meta concepts and over-thought criticism and analysis. Such a great concept, it reads at first like an academic piece. That kind of threw me off center until I saw what he was doing. Then I wished it was longer. This passage I found laugh-out-loud funny. I can picture some dusty, bookish, professor that looks like he shits tweed say this at a pompous campus cocktail party:

“Menard has (perhaps unwittingly) enriched the slow and rudimentary art of reading by means of a new technique—the technique of deliberate anachronism and fallacious attribution. That technique, requiring infinite patience and concentration, encourages us to read the Odyssey as though it came after the Aeneid.”

Perhaps this is just funny to book nerds, but I found it hilariously brilliant.

Rating: 9-10-10-9 Total=38

#170- The Human Fly- T.C. Boyle

#170- The Human Fly- T.C. Boyle

With a name like the Human Fly, you’d expect Metamorphosis, and then when you get a Kafka quote at the head of the story, its from The Hunger Artist. Then you start reading it and it’s about a circus performer pushing the boundaries of his daring and you think about First Sorrow and the trapeze artist that wants to stay on his trapeze a all times. Cleary this is literary tribute to Franz Kafka.

This homage comes in the form of an inside look at the world of a low-level entertainment agent. At this moment, he had three clients: “A nasally infected twelve year-old with pushy parents…a comic with a harelip that did only harelip jokes; and a soft rock band called Mu, who believed they were reincarnated court musicians from the lost continent of Atlantis.”

That was until a man dressed in a red cape with a swim cap walked into his small back office. The man was Zoltan Mindszenty aka. La Mosca Humana, the Human Fly. He wanted to be famous. He had already gotten press for his public climbing stunts in Mexico, but wanted exposure here. He began by hanging himself 21 stories above the street in a sack.

“As it turned out he, stayed there, aloft for two weeks. And for some reason—because he was intractable, absurd, mad beyond hope or redemption—the press couldn’t get enough of it.”

Sounds like a familiar mix of modern reality TV and David Blaine. He survived the stunt, and a few more before taking one step too far. But he did become famous. Boyle, like many writers seem to have a love/hate thing for entertainment agencies. They can be

“…a mercenary, a huckster who’d watch a man die for ten percent of the action.”

While they always disdain the agency or the business, the agent themselves seem to be written with a more gentler pen, be it respect, empathy or just pity, who knows?

Rating: 8-7-8-7 Total= 30