Readings: No major works read this month, but still much of interest.
Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson -- There have been about 4 movies made based on this long-ish short story and probably a dozen others that borrowed heavily. A psychic investigator gathers a group of folks in a haunted house. Spooky things occur. Personal inter-dynamics mash-up with the psyches of the group. In time, one of them falls under control of the house or is lost to insanity, your call. Tragic ending (in the story anyway -- the movies tend to have Hollywood endings).
Jackson is all about dialogue as a tool. She is exceptionally skilled at moving the plot along and developing the characters simply by letting the conversations do the heavy work. Much of the dialogue is unadorned with adjectives, leaving the reader to fix the voice, it's a tricky task if you are trying to portray madness and it takes some getting used to.
Though a ghost story on the surface, the pleasure in reading this comes not from any suspense or action but in the sharply drawn characters and how they react to each other in the ambiguity of their situation. It goes without saying that it is not about the ghost.
Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius by Jorge Juis Borges -- A real jaw dropper, this short story. A man stumbles across an obscure reference to a long defunct country in central Asia called Uqbar, from whence came an encyclopedia called Orbis Tertius. Orbis Terius is the sum of the efforts of the finest minds of Uqbar to create a fictional world called Tlon.
In the worldview of imaginary Tlon, reality itself is denied. Everything exists only in so far as it affects one through one's senses. For example, in one of Tlon's languages there are no nouns. Instead of "The moon rose over the water" you would have "Upward beyond the onstreaming it mooned." More such examples of the strange epistemology of Tlon are described.
Eventually, it is revealed that Uqbar as well as Tlon, is an invented place, devised sometime in the 17th century by a secret society of intellectuals. By the mid 1800s it had fallen into the hands of a wealthy industrialist who was financing the completion of the encyclopedia, under orders that it have no moral underpinnings (this is related in the form of the project having "no truck with that impostor, Jesus Christ"). By contemporary times (the story was first published in 1940) the encyclopedia was well known and the precepts of the unrealism practiced in fictional Tlon were rapidly subsuming the real world.
This is certainly the best short story I have ever read, and certainly one of the finest pieces of literature of any genre. Borges prose is constructed with the greatest care, as one would suspect of an old master, but the real mind blower is the depth of imagination. Fiction and non-fiction is blended. Levels of reality are created, destroyed, then re-created. It's a detective story. It's an alternate history. Top it all off with the underlying critique of relative morality and post-modernism in general and you can't help but wonder how it all can be done in a little under 6000 words.
You can read it here in translation, side by side with the original Spanish, provided you can put up with white letters on a purple background. Probably better to pick up hard copy somewhere.
Lay of the Land (preview) by Richard Ford -- This is the third in the multi-decade trilogy (The Sportswriter and Independence Day are the first and second) of the life of Frank Bascombe, regular guy. I am only about a third of the way through this but when I picked it up at the tail end of August I dropped everything else I was reading at the time. Often thought of as a more contemporary counterpart to John Updike's Rabbit books, there is nothing in these books but a quiet suburban life, richly told. As such, many people dismiss these as boring. But they were no small inspiration to me when I was writing novels about the absurd shenanigans of normal people, without belittling them or the drama of their lives. Anyone can take a dump on normalcy. Few people can see the beauty in it.
Anyway, I'll have more to say about this next month when I'm finished.
