I remember the blurb on the back cover said, "One of the most horrifying books of the decade -- or is it?" and compared the author to Borges. (In fact, I assume the author's name -- a foreign form of "George B.," containing the string -orges -- is a distortion of Jorge Luis Borges, one of whose books I had just bought the day before the dream). There was some sort of "infinite regress" conceit that was central to the plot. I believe there were a lot of ordinary hogs, and a lot of angry hogs that wanted to kill them, then a third tier of angrier hogs that wanted to kill the angry hogs, and so on ad infinitum. I'm not sure how the angry man fit into the scheme of things, but perhaps he was angry about having paid good money for a novel with such a ridiculous plot!
10 comments:
Sounds as good as JL Borges, at any rate...
I used to read a lot of Borges ages ago, back when I was very much into "clever" writers like Joyce and Nabokov. I happened to find a very cheap copy of Ficciones at a secondhand bookshop and bought it for old times' sake. I think I'm quite likely to find it's no longer to my taste, though, which I suppose is what the dream was trying to say.
The more I think about it, the more obvious it is that this book and its author represent Borges. "Borges" begins with the syllable Bor- -- i.e. boar, i.e. hog. The first name also suggests "hog," keeping in mind that Spanish j sounds like "h." It also so happens that the evening before the dream, my wife had ordered cerdo ibérico at a restaurant, serving to connect hogs and Spanishness in my mind.
I find the reactions of Charlton and Tychonievich to Borges to be somewhat surprising- I thought his works would be very much to your taste. Borges, like the Inklings (especially Charles Williams), wrote about the intrusion of magic into mundane life- he was very much unlike the typical materialist "realistic" authors of the twentieth century. A lot of his stories deal with glimpses of supernatural realities seen in ordinary objects like a coin, a book, or a house. But I suppose different writers speak to us at different times...
I in addition to my buddies ended up checking the good ideas from your web page while instantly got a horrible feeling I had not thanked you for those secrets. These men had been absolutely thrilled to study them and have in effect very much been using them. I appreciate you for indeed being indeed helpful as well as for getting some perfect resources most people are really desirous to know about. Our sincere regret for not saying thanks to sooner.
desert safari with quad bike
Kristina, I'm so glad to hear that these secret resources about fictional works of fiction have proven so thrilling to "those men"! It's the kind of thing that keeps me blogging.
Okay, I'm genuinely curious . . . what are these secret resources?
I'm sorry, Francis, but if you want to find out you'll just have to rent a quad bike and join us on our annual super-secret desert safari.
I wish I could, but the critically confidential canoe caravan eats up all my free time.
By the way, I got a real kick out of "super-secret desert safari" - sounds like a long lost, yet-to-be discovered Beach Boys single.
♬ If everybody had a desert, across the USA... ♬
Post a Comment