30 Novels, day 14: Jorge Luis Borges, The Golden
Thread
In the acknowledgements to my novel Salamander (a book about the creation of an infinite book) I
mention that my work was inspired by “The Book of Sand,” a short story by the
great Argentinian fabulist Jorge Luis Borges.
Then I added
“The novel Borges never wrote was also a great inspiration.”
I’ve always been fascinated by books that don’t exist. Fictional
books, as opposed to books of fiction. (When my wife and I visited her aunt and
uncle in Ireland, I looked at the uncle’s shelf of books and noticed it
contained only works of engineering, history, and biography. I asked him if he
had any novels and he said proudly, “I’ve never read a fictitious book in me
life.” I was tempted to tell him, “Neither have I.”)
Literature is full of mentions of imaginary books. Nabokov’s Pale Fire. The novels of Umberto Eco. J. R. R. Tolkien goes to great lengths to convince us his Lord of the Rings is
actually a retelling and translation of an earlier volume of lore, The Red Book of Westmarch, which
contained much that has been lost and forgotten.
But Borges is the undisputed master of the imaginary book. The
story goes that he had trouble writing fiction until he hit upon the idea of
adapting the genre of the literary review to write about books that don’t
exist.
And yet he never wrote a novel. Perhaps it was because in his fiction
he’d already described the ideal books he wanted to write, or at least to read.
So, in homage to Borges, I imagine that his unwritten novel
actually does exist, and that I am reading it. I’ve been reading it for years. I
haven’t finished it yet. Perhaps it’s an infinite book and I never can finish
it. But I can tell you about some of the things it contains. There are mirrors
in it, and a labyrinth, of course, although this labyrinth looks invitingly
like a straight line. There are stories within stories within stories. Are they
all telling the same story? There is a creature haunting this novel, a fabulous,
elusive bird-beast whose wings make the sound of pages being riffled somewhere
else in the book.
Sometimes I imagine Borges’ unwritten novel is about a writer who
begins to realize that the book he’s been working on and can’t finish is actually
a book that contains everything. It is the world, and he himself is a minor character
in it, a nobody at the fringes of the story. And yet somewhere else in this
vast book is the murderer who killed his beloved wife. Can he track the
murderer down before the book ends? Can he change the story and turn this book
into his book, this world into his
world?
Illustration by Rafal Olbinski
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