The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges

The plot of this allegory... is curious: One of the splendid feathers of the distant King of the Birds, the Simurgh, falls into the center of China; other birds, weary with the present state of anarchy, resolve to find this king. They know the name of their king means "thirty birds"; they know that his palace is in the Mountains of Kaf, the mountains that encircle the earth. At the beginning, some of the birds reconsider their rashness, and grow cowardly: the nightingale excuses itself from the journey-quest because of its love for the rose; the parrot, because of its beauty, which is the reason it lives within a a cage; the partridge says it cannot live without the high mountains, while the heron pleads its need for marshes, the owl, for ruins. But at last the birds undertake the desperate quest. They cross seven wadis or seven seas. The penultimate of these is called Vertigo; the last, Annihilation. Many pilgrims abandon the quest; others perish on the journey. At the end, thirty birds, purified by their travails, come to the mountain on which the Simurgh lives, and they contemplate their king at last: they see that they are the Simurgh, and that the Simurgh is each of them, and all of them.

--"Simurgh"


I am writing this review on July 6th, 2010. God knows when you'll read it, since I actually bought Borges' Book of Imaginary Beings as a late birthday present for Nathan. Since he lives in another state, who knows when I'll be able to give it to him (I don't trust the postal system), and since it's going to be in my possession for a while, well, I figured I'd just go ahead and read it.

Borges is perhaps the most notable Spanish-language author since Cervantes, and in a book I'm reading concurrently (sure to be reviewed before this one), How to Read and Why, Harold Bloom identifies him as the purest example of a line of short fiction writers preoccupied with phantasmogoria and the fantastic, including Kafka. A bestiary of imaginary creatures, then, seems as if it would appeal to Borges, both in the brevity of its format and the whimsicality of its subject. Some, like the dragon and the unicorn are common enough; others, like the Lamed Wufniks or A Bao A Qu, less recognizable. Some belong to ancient religion, others to modern authors like Lewis, Flaubert, and Kafka himself. Though no entry is more than a few pages, some are mystifyingly laconic:

Hochigan

Descartes tells us that monkeys could talk if they wanted to, but they have decided to keep silent so that humans will not force them to work. The Bushmen of South Africa believe that there was a time when all animals could talk. Hochigan hated animals; one day it disappeared, taking the gift of speech with it.

Who is Hochigan? What is Hochigan? Does it belong to the tradition of the Bushmen, or does it appear in the works of Descartes?

Typified in this very short entry is Borges' synthetic power, which is his most significant contribution to his source material. By bringing Descartes and the Bushmen together, he is suggesting the existence of a larger human tradition of cryptozoology; these traditions, likely not mentioned simultaneously until their inclusion here, speak to a common need to create new life and augment the natural world.

We expect much of Borges, but he is strangely reticent to show his face; often, he provides no comment on his sources at all, including wholesale selections from other works as complete entries. Elsewhere, Andrew Hurley tells us in his translator's note, Borges hews almost exactly to unattributed sources. But Borges' genius is not absent: there is near-heresy in placing "An Animal Dreamed by Kafka" in the same volume as the great dragons of Chinese tradition. I do not think that Borges is suggesting that religion is a fiction, but quite the opposite: these creatures have a considerable impact on human existence. To have seen the great unicorn tapestries of the Metropolitan Museum's collection is to understand that the unicorn, through its powerful symbolism and command over the human imagination, has a certain kind of realness of its own. In his preface, Borges explains:

We do not know that the dragon means, just as we do not know the meaning of the universe, but there is something in the image of the dragon that is congenial to man's imagination, and thus the dragon arises in many latitudes and ages. It is, one might say, a necessary monster, not some ephemeral and casual creature like the chimaera or the catoblepas.

Yet Borges seeks to categorize both the necessary monsters and the casual, because they all speak to the human in ways that a bestiary of tangible beasts would certainly not. In this way it is a very anti-academic exercise masquerading as an academic one, as if to classify and collect these animals were to bring them a little bit closer to being flesh-and-blood. In the end, it is an exploration of ourselves, who, as the birds in the story of the Simurgh above, seek endlessly to understand the Other but are faced with only our own image.

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

I was sitting in Reagan National Airport, on the phone with Brent, talking about this book. I told him that I didn't really like it. It wasn't all that bad, but it was kind of boring and simple. At that point I was a little under 100 pages into The Alchemist. I took a break from reading, got some coffee, boarded my plane, and settled into the well-worn, faux-leather seat. In no time we were in the air. I am not all that sure if the book actually got better, or if some combination of the recycled air, the perfume of the woman beside me, and the high altitude made me less discerning. But I kind of started to like it...or at least not dislike it so much.

The book follows Santiago, a shepherd boy who has a dream about treasure at the pyramids in Egypt. At the behest of a crazy gypsy woman and a king, the boy sets out on a quest for this treasure -- something Coelho refers to as the boy's "Personal Legend" (he does it just like that...capitalizing both words). It didn't take me very long to realize that this book was meant to be personally uplifting and motivating. A strong undercurrent of positive realism flows through the book. I told Brent that it was like The Secret in novelized form. (Admittedly, I have not read The Secret, but I think I have the gist of what it is all about.) The book was rife with quasi-religious statements. These sentiments fell somewhere between spirituality and religion, for example, "The camel driver understood what the boy was saying. He knew that any given thing on the face of the earth could reveal the history of all things." or "Remember that wherever your heart is, there you will find your treasure." or "The world is only the visible aspect of God."

The basic storyline of the book was exceedingly simple and there wasn't much character development. As I was reading it, I couldn't help thinking of Aesop's Fables, Candide, Vision Quest... The Alchemist bears many similarities to these works. The second half of the book was appreciably better than the first, and it had a strong ending.

This is the book that put Coelho, a Brazilian novelist, on the international map. It was originally published in 1988, and was translated into English in the early 1990s, at which point it enjoyed quite a lot of buzz. President Clinton was photographed reading the book. Julia Roberts said that she absolutely loved The Alchemist. Laurence Fishburne negotiated the rights to produce a movie of Coelho's little book. But based on my personal experience, I wouldn't recommend reading this book unless you were 30,000 feet in the air.

Triple Espera

This is a collection of three short novels, No One Writes to the Colonel by Gabriel García Márquez, Aura by Carlos Fuentes, and Goodbyes by Juan Carlos Onetti. They are all writers from the latino 'boom.'

No One Writes to the Colonel is one of García Márquez's most popular short works. It depicts a poor, retired colonel living in an impoverished Colombian town controlled by a corrupt government. The colonel's last hope for making enough money to eat is his prized gamecock. A good novella; I also like One of These Days which is much shorter but just as good.

Aura was my favorite of the three. It's a gothic story set in Mexico City. Think Edgar Allen Poe meets Voodoo. The most interesting part is that it's written in second person. "You wake up." "You read an ad in the newspaper." "You take a job." "Then all sorts of crazy witch doctor stuff happens to you." It works even better in Spanish, because there are two forms of "you" that kind of signal who is talking to who.

Goodbyes is a really confusing story. It's about a guy in an insane asylum that gets letters from people. You never know what's real though. It's all about whether you trust the narrator, the characters, the letters. Probably deserves a second reading on my part.