version

Well-known member
The House of Asterion, The Immortal, The Three Versions of Judas and Paradiso, XXXI, 108 are my favourites atm.
 

version

Well-known member
Paradiso, XXXI, 108 :: J. L. Borges

Diodorus Siculus tells the story of a god, broken and scattered abroad. What man of us has never felt, walking through the twilight or writing down a date from his past, that he has lost something infinite?

Mankind has lost a face, an irretrievable face, and all have longed to be that pilgrim — imagined in the Empyrean, beneath the Rose — who in Rome sees the Veronica and murmurs in faith, “Lord Jesus, my God, true God, is this then what Thy face was like?”

Beside a road there is a stone face and an inscription that says, “The True Portrait of the Holy Face of the God of Jaen.” If we truly knew what it was like, the key to the parables would be ours and we would know whether the son of the carpenter was also the Son of God.

Paul saw it as a light that struck him to the ground; John, as the sun when it shines in all its strength; Teresa de Jesus saw it many times, bathed in tranquil light, yet she was never sure of the color of His eyes.

We lost those features, as one may lose a magic number made up of the usual ciphers, as one loses an image in a kaleidoscope, forever. We may see them and know them not. The profile of a Jew in the subway is perhaps the profile of Christ; perhaps the hands that give us our change at a ticket window duplicate the ones some soldier nailed one day to the cross.

Perhaps a feature of the crucified face lurks in every mirror; perhaps the face died, was erased, so that God may be all of us.
Who knows but that tonight we may see it in the labyrinth of dreams, and tomorrow not know we saw it.
 

version

Well-known member
He's brilliant. And the longest thing you'll get from him is maybe twenty pages, so he's not much of a commitment.
 

catalog

Well-known member
I read the universal history of iniquity and enjoyed it, and Tower of babel, but can't really remember much. But yeah, the brevity appeals
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
I recently read someone saying the murders made it too on the nose and it would have been better without them
have to very strongly disagree, firstly as it's (almost) impossible to be too on the nose with literary satire in general.

but specifically, the murders are what give that satire its vicious bite. without them it's as you say a boring straightforward take on yuppies.

the also function in similar ways to the endless repetition of clothing and food (and working out, renting/returning videotapes, etc)

both as a kind of Greek chorus for a narrator who's basically without internal dialogue and as evidence of that narrator's mounting unreliability

i.e as the book goes on his accounts of violence, like everything, become increasingly deranged and blurred into normal reality

like A Clockwork Orange I think the denouement - when his lawyer says it's all bullshit he made up - is crucial

whether it's true or not isn't the point. the very point is the truth of it doesn't matter.

what is probably too on the nose is the hell is other people Sartre reference of the very last line "This is not an exit"
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
I will say that when I reread it I skipped over all the violence, but it's important that it's there

there are definitely times when violence is gratuitous or excessive, but this is not one of them

as far as other Ellis, Less Than Zero is pretty great, basically a test run for American Psycho. Rules of Attraction is OK in an extended-universe sense of those two.

the rest, eh. he's yet another guy who's been rewriting the same book - sometimes literally for his entire career with diminishing returns.

but Less Than Zero/American Psycho are legitimate capital a Art about the gross heart of darkness of the American dream in the age of empire

one thing I've been doing during quarantine etc is reading a great deal about Rome - always an interest

and Easton Ellis reminds me not a little bit of Juvenal
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
You got a favourite Borges story?
"The Library of Babel"

both of itself and for its unintentional prescience about human experience of reality post-Internet

the problems of having so much information readily available that discerning between it becomes increasingly difficult if not impossible

especially in the sense of discerning between that is true and false, useful and not, etc
 

craner

Beast of Burden
have to very strongly disagree, firstly as it's (almost) impossible to be too on the nose with literary satire in general.

but specifically, the murders are what give that satire its vicious bite. without them it's as you say a boring straightforward take on yuppies.

the also function in similar ways to the endless repetition of clothing and food (and working out, renting/returning videotapes, etc)

both as a kind of Greek chorus for a narrator who's basically without internal dialogue and as evidence of that narrator's mounting unreliability

i.e as the book goes on his accounts of violence, like everything, become increasingly deranged and blurred into normal reality

like A Clockwork Orange I think the denouement - when his lawyer says it's all bullshit he made up - is crucial

whether it's true or not isn't the point. the very point is the truth of it doesn't matter.

what is probably too on the nose is the hell is other people Sartre reference of the very last line "This is not an exit"

Completely agree.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
I will say that when I reread it I skipped over all the violence, but it's important that it's there

there are definitely times when violence is gratuitous or excessive, but this is not one of them

as far as other Ellis, Less Than Zero is pretty great, basically a test run for American Psycho. Rules of Attraction is OK in an extended-universe sense of those two.

the rest, eh. he's yet another guy who's been rewriting the same book - sometimes literally for his entire career with diminishing returns.

but Less Than Zero/American Psycho are legitimate capital a Art about the gross heart of darkness of the American dream in the age of empire

one thing I've been doing during quarantine etc is reading a great deal about Rome - always an interest

and Easton Ellis reminds me not a little bit of Juvenal

Totally
agree.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
and Easton Ellis reminds me not a little bit of Juvenal

Brilliant. One of those sentences you could only read on Dissensus.

"Octavia was wearing a red-hemmed tunic like some common three-sestertius whore of the Circus Maximus, which I'm sure she'd done just to embarrass me in front of Flavius and Lucius. I was enjoyably fantasizing about eviscerating her with a gladius when the stuffed dormice arrived..."
 
Milkman by Anna Burns, set where I grew up and booker prize winner was the draw. A difficult style with no names but it's nailing the suspicious tribal psychology and humour of belfast during the troubles
 
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