"false memories of a place neither of them has seen, of events neither witnessed, and people neither have met"

The Sixty-Five Years of Washington
By Juan José Saer
Translated from Spanish by Steve Dolph
203 pages
Open Letter Press
November 16, 2010





You could say the memories parasitize other experiences, but they don't, for this reason, lose force, sense, or cohesion. In fact most of the details are familiar and, because of this, it's not difficult for him to piece them together, in contrast to Leto who, new to the city, or relatively new at least, has to patch them up - with assorted memories that are unconnected to the objects being evoked or with images that aren't traceable to any experience related to the events - alongside the fragmentary, scattered, and sometimes confused images the story produces in him and which, paraxdically, because of its fragmentation and hypothetical nature, just like a fairy tale, leaves profound and vivid traces in his memory. . .

Juan José Saer (1937-2005) was born in Sante Fe, Argentina to parents of Middle Eastern origin. His writing was noted for its clean, straightforward style and often focused on either his provincial home town or adopted city of Paris, where he moved in 1968. Of particular concern to his twelve novels, dozens of short stories, and poetry was the idea of zona, the connection of several narratives through a single spatial-temporal plane to enable identical characters and events to appear in different forms. Saer later moved on to explore "the impossibility of writing" and sought to dismantle the chronological narrative in such novels as Nadie Nunca Nada (1980) and El Entenado (1983). Glosa, originally published in 1986 and translated by Steve Dolph as The Sixty-Five Years of Washington, continues in this vein, developing similar themes regarding imagination and personal and collective memory.

It is the 14th or 16th - or maybe it's the 22nd or 23rd - let's say the 23rd, actually - of October or November, 1960 or '61 - okay, it's October 23, 1961 - and Ángel Leto, age twenty, is a gawky newcomer to Sante Fe, where he and his mother had relocated a year earlier following his father's suicide. It is a bright spring morning and he is skipping work on a whim, walking down the street and puzzling over his mother's cryptic comment at breakfast - He suffered so much. He meets up with an acquaintance several years his senior, a wealthy intellectual known as the Mathematician, a former rugby player who cuts a striking figure with his European tan, crisp white suit, and white moccasins purchased in Florence (and worn sockless). For the next hour they will stroll along for fifteen blocks as the Mathematician relates what one Botón had recounted to him, last week when they met by chance on a ferry, about what transpired at the sixty-fifth birthday party of Washington Noriega, writer, professor, lecturer, persecuted statesman. Neither of them had attended this event - the Mathematician had been in Europe and Leto had not been invited . . . Perhaps they simply forgot or thought he was close enough to the group that he did not need a formal invitation? A second version of the party will come from Tomatis when he joins Leto and the Mathematician briefly before departing under a dark cloud.

The story also shifts seamlessly from one time period to another as both memory (the past) and as a matter-of-fact relation of events that have not yet occurred with the complete certainty that they will occur (just not yet). One day, in about ten years' time, the presently-single Mathematician's wife will be shot and he will flee to Paris in exile. One day Leto will join the radical underground and, surrounded by armed men, will swallow his trusty cyanide pill.

Saer certainly knew his Borges. His simple premise turns out to be labyrinth of questions and possibilities surrounding the relationship between objective reality (if such a thing even exists) and subjective experience. Memory, imagination, opinion, expectation, and the passage of time crisscross and intersect like the Sante Fe streets the two young men follow to the city center. From the start, the narrator is established as unreliable, confused as he is regarding the date of this particular walk. Not only does our understanding of Leto and the Mathematician come entirely from this present-tense, quasi-first-person voice - who occasionally interjects ("as I was saying, no?") to remind us of his presence as an invisible character floating somewhere outside normal time-space - but our images of Washington's party are based solely Leto and the Mathematician's reactions to the first-hand accounts of biased individuals, such as Tomatis, who is generally seen as rather disreputable and whose claims are colored by his current bad mood.

Saer's novel is definitely very thought-provoking but I think there is also a reason Borges's best works tend to be short. At 203 pages, The Sixty-Five Years of Washington may not seem like a long book, yet its seeming endlessness is an unfortunate testament to Saer's use of convoluted, clause-choked syntax to express some highly abstract and complex ideas. It's the type of prose you have to constantly be rereading because you got lost somewhere after the sixth comma.

People - man, no? human beings, who altogether compose what they call humanity, or rather the sum of individuals since the appearance of the species, as they call it, in, it would seem, east Africa, through a qualitative jump across adjoining evolutionary branches, and the specific attributes they attribute to themselves - man, we were saying, or rather yours truly, the author, was saying, has given it that diminutive or pejorative name for mosca, or fly in Spanish, no doubt following an anatomic classification by size, imprecise enough in any case, but ultimately, in any case, imprecise or not, there's nothing for it, the naming has to happen.

The whole book is like that. It's obviously a stream-of-conscious style, and very reminiscent of some of Faulkner's works (i.e. Absalom, Absalom!), but I suspect a good number of readers are going to just give up. Which is too bad, because The Sixty-Five Years of Washington introduces some wonderful concepts and paints a vivid portrait of Argentina's intellectual crowd between two Perón regimes. Still, I hesitate to recommend it.

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Review Copy

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Death on the Pampas

My Borges edition didn't include "The South" ("El Sur"), which was this week's selection, but I found it online here. It's a very short piece and the general plot is thus: a Buenos Aires resident named Juan Dahlmann knocks his head on a recently painted door someone had forgotten to shut. He comes down with septicemia, which leads to a hallucinatory stay in a hospital followed by a sanitarium. Upon his release, Dahlmann seeks out the family ranch, which he hasn't seen in years. Unfortunately, a simple lunch at a local store soon spirals out of control. On his way to the subsequent knife fight, Dahlmann finds that he is unexpectedly fearless and actually proud to be headed towards an honorable death.

Now Dahlmann has been established as both a bibliophile (he was carrying a special edition of The Thousand and One Nights at the time of his accident) and an ostentatious Argentinian patriot. As Amateur Reader recently noted, Argentina and the United States share a common history: "the immigrants, the frontier, the cowboys, the wars with indigenous people." I'm assuming, then, that the gaucho occupies a cultural space similar to that of the American cowboy - as the rough-and-tumble hero of untamed lands. So basically what we have here is a coalescing of various elements.

The general store at one time had been painted a deep scarlet, but the years had tempered this violent color for its own good. Something in its poor architecture recalled a steel engraving, perhaps one from an old edition of Paul et Virginie. A number of horses were hitched up to the paling. Once inside, Dahlmann thought he recognized the shopkeeper. Then he realized that he had been deceived by the man's resemblance to one of the male nurses in the sanitarium.

Given the dreamlike quality of "The South" as a whole, juxtaposed against the improbability of its climactic incident (a guy throws a couple of breadcrumbs and now we're having a knife fight?), I'm inclined to think that the whole episode actually ends with the sanitarium. The rest is all in Dahlmann's head, the whole episode a fever-vision of a remote, romanticized Argentina that only exists in Dahlmann's imagination. His death at the hands of a gaucho is active and idealized, as opposed to a passive succumbing to illness in a modern clinical setting. His fantasy gives him agency: this ending he chose.

In reading "The South" I was reminded of a Thomas Man story I covered awhile back called "Tristan." It's about an airheaded writer staying at a convalescent home even though there's really nothing wrong with him. He meets a sick woman and falls in love with her, imagining her as a wildly romanticized wilting flower and her son and husband as a pair of brutes undeserving of her ethereal presence. The ensuing narrative is a parody of those emo artist types who view real life through the lens of their own overwrought, fiction-fueled imaginations. Although "The South" is obviously a more serious work, we have essentially the same thing happening here, only to a much greater extent. It all goes back to a theme I often write about regarding chaos, the narrative, and human cognition. In essence, reality is how we perceive it.

"The South" may comes across as a very different Borges story, but his familiar topics of time, reality, and perception are all present if you look closely enough. Though less conceptual than "Pierre Menard" and "The Library of Babel," it is also more accessible to the general reader and may serve as a great launchpad for other Borges works.

"The South" also inspired a short story by the late, great Roberto Bolaño called "The Insufferable Gaucho."

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The Non-Structured Book Club read three short pieces by Borges for the month of May. Our schedule went as follows:

May 7: "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote"
May 14: "The Library of Babel"
May 21: "The South"

This week's participants were:

Claire
Nicole
Richard
Rise

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People of the Books

Last week my relationship with Jorge Luis Borges underwent a dramatic improvement thanks to our supplemental reading assignment. Now let's see if the momentum has continued.

"The Library of Babel" tells of an unnamed first-person narrator who lives in a massive Library. It is composed of hexagonal galleries beyond number, linked by bottomless staircases and reflected into infinity by endless hallways lined with mirrors. Technically speaking, it's the universe, but Borges chooses the metaphor of the Library to organize the vastness of the heavens into a recognizable format. The sheer volume of human knowledge already compiled on religion, metaphysics, philosophy, mathematics, and science, in addition to all that remains undiscovered, is enough to overwhelm the individual mind. To comprehend this enormous amount of STUFF requires an intellect of no less than godlike proportions. We mortals simply lack the psychological capability to process the universe as raw data.

The image of the Library is also the springboard for Borges's exploration of language as the means by which information is discovered, recorded, and disseminated. Some of the books in the Library appear to be pure gibberish. If any words can be deciphered at all, they are meaningless phrases such as "the plaster cramp" and "the combed thunderclap." One tome consists entirely of the letters MCV in various combinations. Yet, as the narrator notes, the number of characters utilized is always limited to the period, the comma, the space, and twenty-two letters of the Latin alphabet. It has been determined that the Library is actually finite in area, as it contains no more than the total number of books needed to record every possible sequence of these twenty-five orthographical symbols. Each volume is 410 pages with 40 lines each, composed of 80 letters each.

As such, the Library contains some 25^(410x40x80) = 25^1,312,000 books. That's more books than our real universe has atoms.

If the sum total of all possible knowledge is expressed through language, and all possible languages are expressed through all possible arrangements of a small number of symbols, then it can be said that all languages lead back to the same source. Says the narrator,

I cannot combine some characters

dhcmrlchtdj

which the divine Library has not foreseen and which in one of its secret tongues do not contain some terrible meaning. No one can articulate a syllable which is not filled with tenderness and fear, which is not, in one of these languages, the powerful name of a god. To speak is to fall into tautology. . . (An n number of possible languages use the same vocabulary; in some of them, the symbol library allows the correct definition a ubiquitous and lasting system of hexagonal galleries, but library is bread or pyramid or anything else, and these seven words which define it have another value. You who read me, are You sure of understanding my language?)

I saw this as an argument in favor of pluralism. Borges's metaphor portrays religious leaders, sects, and zealots as librarians and library patrons who ransack through card catalogs and throw "heretical" books down the air shafts. The realization that the Library contains all Truths for all humans of all time, but said Truths remain lost in gibberish or the very immensity of the Library, drives some people to madness or suicide. To spend one's life obsessively searching for a specific, pre-ordained bit information in an infinite sea of information is ultimately tragic and absurd. All books - that is all faiths and modes of believing - are but different facets of the primordial Truth. We are in no position to squeeze the universe into one iron mold.

To be God is not to allow for one Truth and condemn all others as falsehoods (by destroying their books), but to know how all Truths fit together.

We also know of another superstition of that time: that of the Man of the Book. On some shelf in some hexagon (men reasoned) there must exist a book which is the formula and perfect compendium of all the rest: some librarian has gone through it and he is analogous to a god. . . Many have wandered in search of Him. For a century they exhausted in vain the most varied areas. . . In adventures such as these I have squandered and wasted my years. It does not seem unlikely to me that there is a total book on some shelf of the universe; I pray to the unknown gods that a man - just one, even though it were thousands of years ago! - may have examined and read it. If honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell. Let me be outraged and annihilated, but for one instant, in one being, let Your enormous Library be justified.

Like the Library it speaks of, Borges's little story is open to multiple interpretations from myriad different angles (i.e. mathematical, philosophical). I've only just scratched the surface. You can even make the case that the Library can be likened to the Internet as a immeasurable storehouse of information that exists in another realm (cyberspace) without physical form. (So it's transcendent, then? No wonder William Gibson likes this guy!) But of course, that's an anachronistic perspective that Borges could not have thought of, which brings us back to the questions raised in "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote."

But above all, I saw "The Library of Babel" as an affirmation of the human drive for knowledge and understanding. By presenting the universe as a Library, and the Truths as language - that is, as recognizable forms - Borges posits that it is technically possible for humans to glimpse divinity if we search long and hard enough. "The Library of Babel" opposes narrow-minded dogma, celebrates diversity, and binds intellect and spirituality. I'm impressed. Borges and I are on good terms now. Finally!

To fully appreciate what Borges has done with "The Library of Babel," check out this amazing article, including the comments, which get us into parallel universes.

And also: a virtual Library of Babel for English and French!

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The Non-Structured Book Club is reading three short pieces by Borges for the month of May. Our schedule is as follows:

May 7: "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote"
May 14: "The Library of Babel"
May 21: "The South"

This week's participants were:

Claire
Emily
Jill
Nicole
Richard
Rise
Sarah

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Menard Stands Alone

Borges and I have never agreed with each other. Same with Kafka. The puzzling thing is that I've loved other authors who either influenced them or were influenced by them (such as Macedonio Fernández, Georges Perec, and Ferenc Karinthy), and I came into Kafka and Borges wholly expecting to love them. I studied both in college too, but that still didn't help. (Actually, the best insight into Kafka I've ever gotten was from an anthology about the Iron Curtain called The Wall in My Head.) So when I heard that our Non-Structured Book Club was going to be doing an extracurricular Borges reading, I initially opted out and chose to simply read everyone's posts instead. But then I found myself intrigued by what was being said about "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," so I decided, why not? Maybe I should give Mr. Borges another chance.

"Menard" is written in the form of an article from an academic journal. The author/narrator was a friend of the late Pierre Menard, a French literary critic, and is utterly infatuated with what he perceives to be Menard's brilliant project involving Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote. Menard wanted to write it himself. Not copy it. He wanted to somehow channel Cervantes and compose the Quixote word for word. As Menard explained it:

When I was ten or twelve years old, I read it, perhaps in its entirety. Later, I have reread it closely certain chapters, those which I shall not attempt for the time being. I have also gone through all the interludes, the plays, the Galatea, the exemplary novels, the undoubtedly laborious tribulations of Persiles and Segismunda and the Viaje del Parnaso . . . My general recollection of the Quixote, simplified by forgetfulness and indifference, can well equal the imprecise and prior image of a book not yet written. Once that image (which no one can legitimately deny me) is postulated, it is certain that my problem is a good bit more difficult that Cervantes' was. My obliging predecessor did not refuse the collaboration of change: he composed his immortal work somewhat à la diable, carried along by the inertias of language and invention. I have taken on the mysterious duty of reconstructing literally his spontaneous work.

Menard rejects the idea of literally becoming Cervantes by forgetting all the history of Europe since 1602, fighting the Turks as Cervantes did, and so forth on the grounds that such a thing would be impossible. Of course, he acknowledges that the whole undertaking is impossible, but of all the ways of going about it, that would be the least interesting.

Borges's imaginary academic nevertheless believes that Menard's endeavor was quite successful, even perceiving his friend's signature style in certain passages of the Quixote which are completely identical to those of Cervantes. He claims to recognize the influence of Shakespeare and further praises Menard's mastery of a foreign language and alien dialect (Renaissance Spanish) compared to Cervantes's advantage of writing in his own native tongue. Why, it's astounding, he goes on, that Menard was able to ignore the work of William James and, like Cervantes, proclaim history to be the origin of reality instead of an inquiry into reality! In short, the narrator is arguing that Menard's word-for-word duplicate of the Quixote is richer, deeper, and a grander achievement than Cervantes's original.

As Emily notes in her post, Borges brings up a multitude of questions surrounding context, subjectivity, and perspective. Although the two texts are identical, the copy is held to be superior because its reader (the author of the article) was able to locate more meaning in it. In other words, he examined the copy as an artifact of the environment in which it was produced: the early twentieth century, presumably in France, as opposed to Spain in the late 1500s. Since the narrator views this Quixote as having arisen entirely in the mind of Menard, it's like a copy without an original.

It was then that the heavens opened, a light shined down, and Borges started to make sense.

I'm a big fan of Ghost in the Shell, a (post)cyberpunk Japanese franchise that began with the Ghost in the Shell manga by Masamune Shirow and has since expanded to include two manga sequels, three acclaimed anime films, and a popular anime television series. Like The Matrix, which it greatly influenced, GitS is deeply concerned with postmodern philosophy and social theory. The title of the TV show, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, refers to a concept developed over the first season. The "stand alone complex" is basically a "phenomenon where unrelated, yet very similar actions of individuals create a seemingly concerted effort." For example, say a building catches fire and burns down. While accidents like that happen all the time, depending on the greater context of the time and place in which said building was located, people can get it into their heads that the fire was the work of an arsonist motivated by whatever political or religious ideology is currently making news (i.e. Islamic terrorism). Several malcontents then get on the imaginary bandwagon and commit their own acts of arson in the name of Allah. A chain of spontaneous order is then created out of the chaos of society, politics, media, and random accidents. But the copycats have no original.

And then I realized I was doing the exact same thing as Borges's fictional academic! I was anachronistically analyzing an older text ("Pierre Menard: Author of the Quixote" by Jorge Luis Borges) from the perspective of someone familiar with literary and philosophical ideas that would not be developed until decades after said text was written. "To attribute the Imitatio Christi to Louis Ferdinand Céline or to James Joyce, is this not a sufficient renovation of its tenuous spiritual indications?" Menard's disciple asks. (I like Emily's translation better: ". . . a sufficient renewal of those faded spiritual warnings?") Just as Cervantes's position regarding the power of letters v. arms could not possibly have been influenced by Nietzsche (as Menard's completely identical passage is claimed to have been), Borges could not possibly have written "Pierre Menard" with any knowledge of Japanese cyberpunk anime.

And thus: the meaning of a text is ultimately subjective, as the reader's response always occurs within the context of the reader's knowledge and experience, which may be completely and utterly different, especially given the passage of time, from those of the author.

I get it! I like Borges now!

My Borges edition, incidentally, has an introduction by William Gibson, whose Neuromancer trilogy is widely regarded as the origin of the cyberpunk genre. I knew I was onto something.



It's the audio from the Matrix: Reloaded trailer with images from GitS: SAC, starring Togusa as Neo, Motoko Kusanagi as Trinity, and Daisuke Aramaki as Morpheus.

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The Non-Structured Book Club is reading three short pieces by Borges for the month of May. Our schedule is as follows:

May 7: "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote"
May 14: "The Library of Babel"
May 21: "The South"

This week's participants were:

Claire
Emily
Nicole
Richard
Rise
Sarah

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Of Love, Life, and Death

The Museum of Eterna's Novel (The First Good Novel)

By Macedonio Fernández

Translated by Margaret Schwartz

Open Letter Press

238 Pages
February 23, 2010




Humans, breathers, those innumerable incessantly stirring the world's air, relentlessly ordering it into your chests, elevating your eternally open mouths to an eternal heaven, beings of the heartbeat and the voice that either brightens or breaks, which perhaps every day demands alternately an end or an eternity, there's beauty to give us all understanding of the Mystery, and to stop all pain. But where is it? Is it in Art, in Conduct, in Understanding, in Passion? In Cervantes, or Beethoven, or Wagner, or in some great delirium: in adoring intonation, dazzled by Walt Whitman's Man?

Argentinian author Macedonio Fernández (1874-1952), though largely unknown in the English-speaking world, has been something of a cult figure to several well-known Latin American authors of the twentieth century, including his protege, Jorge Luis Borges. Fernández's adult life began in conventional bourgeoisie comfort until the death of his wife in 1920, following which he abandoned his profession as a lawyer, sent his children to live with various relatives, and drifted through a series of boarding houses. Translator Margaret Schwartz likens his place in literary mythology to the role of Socrates: as the founder of a new, uniquely Argentinian way of looking at eternal things who dramatically influenced ensuing generations, his voice and teachings revealed through the writings of his students. Fernández was also noted for his eccentricities, such as the time he gave away his guitar to a random stranger in the street, and the other time he tried to establish an anarchist colony in Paraguay only to give up after one night of mosquitoes.

The Museum of Eterna's Novel (The First Good Novel) was commenced in 1925, went through five drafts, and remained in an unedited, unfinalized state at the time of Fernández's death (similar to another great product of Latin American literature, Roberto Bolaño's 2666). Like his contemporary Louis Aragon, as well as many other writers of the Modernist era, Fernández sought to reinvent the rules of the novel, starting with a very basic premise: Why risk love when death is inevitable? In tackling a question that has haunted countless thinkers before him, Fernández takes a deeply metaphysical approach that influences the very form of his greatest work. Dedicated to the caprices of the "Skip-Around Reader," whom Fernández claims will unwittingly find themself reading in order, The Museum of Eterna's Novel is a work of philosophical metafiction that uses its medium to explore the cosmic complexities of human life and human love.

Fernández was of the opinion that Art should not imitate Life. "I want the reader to always know he is reading a novel and not watching the living, not attending to a 'life.' The moment the reader falls into Hallucination, that ignominy of Art, I have lost rather than gained a reader." In fact, the bulk of The Museum of Eterna's Novel is not a novel at all, but a series of prologues, some fifty in total, with titles such as "Prologue That Thinks it Knows Something, Not About the Novel (It's Not Allowed That), But About the Doctrine of Art," "The Essential Fantasmagoricalism of the World," "The Man Who Feigned to Live" (which is one big footnote), and "For Readers Who Will Perish if They Don't Know What the Novel is About." Some meditate on the process of creating The Museum of Eterna's Novel from the perspective of both the author and the characters, including the cook who decided to resign and left the remaining characters with nothing to eat. Other prologues, in dense and difficult but ultimately rewarding prose, set up the mystical underpinnings of the main story.

The actual novel takes place on an estancia called "La Novela," owned by the President, who has gathered together his closest friends, including Maybegenius, Sweetheart, The Lover, Simple, the Gentleman Who Does Not Exist, and Eterna, who is both the President's love interest and the personification of idealized beauty and eternal love. There, the characters exist in the moment and only for each other, spending each day in one another's company and speculating on the nature of companionship and eternity. And here we come to the crux of the matter: the definition of "Totalove," the theme connecting all the musings and mind exercises of both prologues and novel. Fernández describes it as "the Highest form of Daydream." It is a rapturous state of passion that prevails only in the present and is the ultimate form of love: for a beloved, for friendship, or for art and beauty. The problem then becomes how to sustain a moment that is only that: a moment. The Action is only one aspect of Totalove. There is also the anticipation, like the weeks building up towards Christmas and the sadness one feels after the presents have been opened and the rest of the day still remains. Once the Action has occurred, there is nothing left but loss or even death.

Hence the prologues: The Museum of Eterna's Novel is a novel that doesn't want to begin because in our beginning is our end.

The Action initiated by the President is the conquest of Buenos Aires by beauty, which is achieved by eliminating all references to history and the past, including statues of famous men and all homages to the memory of heroic deeds. Streets are given new names such as Peace, Hope, Happiness, The Bride, and Youth. "In the end, something happened to non-flowing time, like history, and there was only a fluid Present, whose only memory was of what returns to being daily, and not what simply repeats, like birthdays. That's why the city almanac has 365 days with only one name: 'Today,' and the city's main street is also named 'Today.'" But the Action fails to bring fulfillment to the President and his relationship with Eterna. He is unable to achieve Totalove and the result is a gradual break-up of La Novela and the final good-bye between all the characters. I realize you may want me to continue on, Fernández assures the reader, and force me to bring good tidings to all these characters you have fallen in love with, but Posterity likes tragedy and not comedy, and thus, we too must reluctantly take leave.

Clearly, Macedonio Fernández was a fascinating, complicated man. That is evident from this book alone, and not to mention his biography. The Museum of Eterna's Novel is a brilliant, thoughtful and frequently hilarious work that brings to mind everything from Mark Twain's irreverent humor to Jorge Luis Borges's mental labyrinths to Edgar Allen Poe's preoccupation with death and idealized beauty. It's definitely slow reading - Fernández's prose is often deliberately obtuse. Translator Schwartz describes it as "baroque" and likens it to Fernández's presentation of himself as a relic of the colorful past bumbling his way through sleek, fast modernity. But what struck me about The Museum of Eterna's Novel was how little it fit the image I had developed of Latin American literature, which I had classified as writers such as Isabel Allende, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Roberto Bolaño (despite all their political and artistic disagreements with one another). The Museum of Eterna's Novel felt more like a work of a European avant-gardist, written in a cafe in Paris while hanging out with the Surrealists or the American expatriates. In fact, it fits into no box I can think of. I'll warn you: it's a difficult read and this review took me forever because I just couldn't figure out how to describe it. But if you're up to the challenge, this book is truly worth it.



Review Copy

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For some reason, this video just seems to fit. I think it makes more sense if you read the book.

Music: "Silence," Delerium feat. Sarah McLachlan, Karma
Images: Final Fantasy VIII