Antología De La Literatura Fantástica (2007) - Plot & Excerpts
cross-posted at booklikes and the mo-centric universe. originally posted in 2010. at first blush, i was excited to find this anthology because nothing would suit me better than to sit at Jorge Luis Borges' knee, and have him tell what his favourite stories were, or even have him read them to me. of course, this book was not just edited by Borges, but also Silvina Ocampo, and Adolfo Bioy Casares, who is quoted thusly by Ursula K. Le Guin in the intro, saying the book came out of a conversation "about fantastic literature... discussing the stories which seemed best to us. One of us suggested that if we put together the fragments of the same type we had listed in our notebooks, we would have a good book."and so i began. i read the first story, and liked it. then i read the second. it is quite short, so i include it for your enjoyment here:A Woman Alone With Her SoulThomas Bailey AldrichA woman is sitting alone in a house. She knows she is alone in the whole world: every other living thing is dead. The door bell rings.i stopped. i read it again. i thought, "who is this Thomas Bailey Aldrich? why haven't i heard of him?" i read the short biographical info provided by his name: Thomas Bailey Aldrich, North American poet and novelist, was born in New Hampshire in 1835 and died in Boston in 1907. He was the author of Cloth of Gold (1874), Wyndham Tower (1879), and An Old Town by the Sea (1893). i thought, "okay... maybe this story was never published in his lifetime. i didn't expect people were writing stories like this in the 19th century." and, "wow. doorbells have been around a long time. this story seems like it could have been written by Ben Loory when my back was turned except this anthology has been around since 1940, and the last revision was in 1976. okay. i'd better do a google search on Aldrich, a man writing stories that could have been written yesterday."and so i researched. i found that Aldrich has been given a lot of credit: the first appearance of a detective in english literature (The Stillwater Tragedy - 1880), and that critics feel the semi-autobiographical novel he wrote in 1870 (The Story of a Bad Boy) anticipated Huck Finn. All this despite the fact he was primarily a poet (rhyming verse), editor, and writer of travel books. i began to suspect that Aldrich was eldritch. i kept on, looking through materials at Project Gutenberg, hoping to find other stories by Aldrich like "A Woman Alone With Her Soul" but nothing read like it did. i kept looking for the collected volume cited in the sources and acknowledgements of my anthology, and found that all 322 pages of vol. 9 had been scanned by somebody at the University of Toronto library (for some reason i found this creepy) and posted online. there was a 'search text' function so i copied the title of the story in and there were no matches. i was confused. i flipped through pages of the book; again, nothing read like this story read, or was as short as it was... nothing matched up. i stopped, pondered, and did another search, this time for the story's title, and found it in a listing of sci fi stories had the following note: "this is most likely by Jorge Luís Borges" with no further elaboration. i found this statement on a couple of other sites, and then i began to think that Borges was making me believe in books that didn't actually exist again (his own "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" appears in this anthology, with its tricksy encyclopedia). i wrote Ben, asked him if he had written the story, told him that Borges might have, apologized for bothering him, and searched on, and finally came upon a trail of emails by a Dennis Hien, from a mailing list called Project Wombat that gave me something. somebody had been searching for the shortest sci fi story ever written there, at Project Wombat, in 2004 and Hien did some research (though he couldn't find the initial conversation string... the text i read was from 2007. it turned out another one of my favourites, Dashiell Hammett, in an introduction to an anthology he had edited called "Creeps By Night" in 1931, said, "One of my own favorites is that attributed, I believe, to Thomas Bailey Aldrich A woman is sitting alone in a house. She knows she is alone in the whole world: every other living thing is dead. The doorbell rings.That has, particularly, the restraint that is almost invariablythe mark of the effective weird tale.", There is no reference to the title of the story as it appears in my anthology, and I will need to seek out the Hammett anthology to see if it can provide any further clues. My gut tells me that Borges/Ocampo/Casares must have stumbled upon this story in Hammett's anthology, at some point in the nine years that elapsed between the publication of the two, and decided to use it. and yet, this story was not in the vol. 9 text. but Hien cast further light (i imagine through his own researches because no references were included) by revealing that the kernel of the story idea was Aldrich's, that it was published in his essays "Leaves from a Notebook" collected in a book called the Ponkapag Papers, which was in its turn collected in that self-same volume 9, that i had discovered on line. The text that Aldrich wrote is as follows:"Imagine all human beings swept off the face of the earth excepting one man. Imagine this man in some vast city, New York or London. Imagine him on the third or fourth day of his solitude sitting in a house and hearing a ring at the door-bell!"and so, this is not the story attributed to Aldrich i had read. it is a seed yes, but the differences are striking, and it is not the idea, but that micro short that resounds in my mind (and in others' minds: i found a lengthy blog entry from 2007 dissecting the tiny gem in the course of my research). it seems to me that this was as close as Borges felt he could get to finding the genesis of the story that Hammett shared, that originated with Aldrich, and so he referenced the works vol 9, and it seems likely that Borges invented the title, and finally, led me on this merry chase seventy years later. i wonder if Hammett actually read the story the way he quoted it or if i respond to it because this version is his version of what he had read in Aldrich. i still have many questions and am doubtful that i will find answers. i realize this is not really a review of the Book of Fantasy. i am after all, only on page 16, and there are many stories to read but this chase has reminded me of my passion for Borges, and how razor-sharp the line between truth and fiction is, that life is mystery, and reverberating in my mind is PKD quoting Dante in The Transmigration of Timothy Archer: God is the book of the universe". i am tempted to give the book five stars right now though. i mean, how can i not?********************************************************i just realized i never came back and finished the review for this. i did end up changing my rating to four stars: i was really blown away by some of these stories: - "the man who collected the first of september", 1973 by tor age bringsvaerd i've already re-read several times since first finding it in this book, and can't quite get over it.- b. traven, another favourite of mine has a story "macario" included which i'd never read before that has really reverberated in my mind, and i can't recommend enough. then there was a sleeper: months later, walking down the street, i found myself preoccupied by the recollection of the story called "the horses of abdera" by leopoldo lugones (i've subsequently realized borges had written a biography about him). i was also thrilled to find included stories i already adored by may sinclair, rudyard kipling, saki, and wilde, and of course, borges himself. there was also the inclusion of a waugh story called "the man who liked dickens" which i recognized as the ending of his novel a handful of dust, which had seemed out of keeping with the rest of the novel when i first read it (my review of that is here: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...) finding the publication history made me realize waugh had published that story on its own before marrying it to his novel which really explains a lot. another literary mystery solved!i did not love the story contributions of borges' fellow editors, bioy casares, and ocampo as much. i found some of the minor authors they added to the collection perhaps could not stand up against the finesse and craft of the greats i've already mentioned, and others by our old pals tolstoy, poe, and de maupassant. i'm pretty sure borges only loved the ones i do, anyway. :) that said, i think this is an impressive collection that is a requisite for anyone who loves the bent, and the strange, the fable and the twilight. *****************************************************yet another update:i just found out something exciting! as i said in the review, and my status updates as i read this collection, how thrilling it was to find that borges liked the same stories as i do, and i was convinced that he selected the ones i liked best. as i noted above, one selected was from a collection i had happened upon six months earlier, the haunting short story by may sinclair, "where their fire is not quenched" i was looking up obscure books today, and decided i needed to try to find may sinclair's novel, the dark night, and while i was searching, this came up on alibris:Cuentos Memorables Segun Jorge Luis Borgesby Jorge Luis BorgesIn a 1935 magazine article, celebrated author Jorge Luis Borges explained why he chose Mary Sinclair's short story "Donde su fuego nunca se apaga" as the most memorable story hed ever read, while he mentioned 11 other of his personal favorites. Inspired by Borges statements in the article, this anthology gathers an array of magnificent short stories by authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, and O. Henry, among others. http://www.alibris.com/booksearch?qwo...how exciting! will we love the same o. henry story? I'LL FIND OUT!!! :) This work by Maureen de Sousa is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Well to begin with this is not Fantasy as in the modern sense but tales of the fantastical but in my opinion even that is using the term loosely. I feel that this book of stories chosen by Jorge Luis Borges and his friends were either very personal to them or appreciate on a scholarly level. As the feeling towards them was not shared; only a few of the stories i enjoyed. The compilation started of okay and went down hill from there. They story don stand the passage of time as they are from the early 20th late 19th century and further back or are appreciated by at different culture level, as i found them dull, predictable, overly god fearing religious or just stupid. Many of the stories are of the same theme and become repetitive with little or no variance or surprise. I am glad i borrowed this book and didn't buy as it has been one of the most disappointing compilations I've read and is doubly disappointing as the book contains a few authors whose other work i have enjoyed. This book comes as academias version of fantastical tales
What do You think about Antología De La Literatura Fantástica (2007)?
The metaphysicians of Tlon are not looking for truth, or even for an approximation of it; they are after a kind of amazement. They consider metaphysics a branch of fantastic literature.
—Miriam
Siempre me gustaron las antologías porque me permiten conocer autores nuevos y me generan la inquietud de conocer más acerca de sus obras. Esta, además, tiene el condimento especial de que fue compilada por tres grandes autores argentinos.Me encantaron (5 estrellas) [28%]:- Sennin- Sola y su alma- Enoch Soames- Los goces de este mundo- Odín- El sueño del Rey- Un auténtico fantasma- El gesto de la muerte- Casa tomada- El árbol del orgullo- Vivir para siempre- Un creyente- Un hogar sólido- Los ganadores de mañana- Definición del fantasma- Ante la ley- Punto muerto- La verdad sobre el caso de M. Valdemar- Sueño infinito de Pao Yu- El caso del difunto Mr. Elvesham- La protección por el libroNo me gustaron (entre 1 y 2 estrellas) [15%]:* Los ojos culpables* En forma de canasta* La obra y el poeta* Una noche en una taberna* El ciervo escondido* La esperanza* Los caballos de Abdera* El gato* El pañuelo que se teje solo* Los donguis* Los ciervos celestiales"Ni fu ni fa" (entre 3 y 4 estrellas) [57%]
—Alexia Polasky
81 stories in 384 pages. That averages out to 4.74 pages per story, but in fact half of the pieces here are roughly a page or less - fragments, folk tales, myths, very brief allegories, and so on. I can’t fully articulate why this was so disappointing to me, but it made the book feel rather empty and ephemeral. Of the remaining, fuller stories, many just fell flat for me, and several others I read relatively recently in Alberto Manguel’s Black Water: The Book of Fantastic Literature (a collection about which I had similar reservations, and which appears to have been inspired by this one). It also bears noting that the 1988 English edition published by Carroll & Graf, with an introduction by Ursula K. Le Guin, has a truly astounding number of typos, climaxing with the transposition of a number of pages at the end of the Oscar Wilde story.The first edition of this book came out in Argentina in 1940 (Antología de la Literatura Fantástica), and I’ve seen it claimed that this is the first anthology to use the word “fantasy” to describe a collection of “genre” works, but I don’t know how accurate that is. I also don’t know if it was Le Guin or the original editors who selected the newer materials added to this edition - it appears that updated versions were published in 1965 and 1976.Because I love quantifying things, I will also tell you that of these 81 pieces, 15 are by Latin American authors, 57 are by European/North Americans, 9 are by Asians, and 0 are by Africans, Australians, or Native Americans. Note that several of the European-written works are actually derived from Asian folklore, though.Maybe “slight” is the word I’m looking for to describe many of these. Borges once said that there is “a kind of lazy pleasure in useless and out-of-the-way erudition," and while I’m not sure that this is a sentiment with which I agree, I can see how it would lead to a collection of this sort. For example, the following selection from James Frazer’s study of mythology, The Golden Bough, does not, in my view, add anything to the collection, or impart much of anything to the reader, it just proves how wide-ranging and useless the wisps collected here can be:A fourth story, taken down near Oldenburg in Holstein, tells of a jolly dame that ate and drank and lived right merrily and had all that heart could desire, and she wished to live always. For the first hundred years all went well, but after that she began to shrink and shrivel up, till at last she could neither walk nor stand nor eat nor drink. But die she could not. At first they fed her as if she were a little child, but when she grew smaller and smaller they put her in a glass bottle and hung her up in the church. And there she still hangs, in the church of St Mary, at Lübeck. She is as small as a mouse, but once a year she stirs.If you find reading something like that without any kind of context enjoyable, this book is for you - “People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like,” and so on. This quote, often attributed to Abraham Lincoln for some reason, actually originates with Max Beerbohm, which brings me to the part of the review where I actually talk about the stories that resonated with me enough to bother writing about.The stories are presented alphabetically by author, so just to give you a better idea of what we’re dealing with here, here’s what we start with:We open with “Sennin,” (1952) by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, which is a 3-page reworked koan about a wanderer who wishes to become a sennin (a kind of wise, mystical hermit). A doctor and his wife lie and say they will teach him to do so if he acts as their slave for 20 years - after this period is over the wife tells him to leap from the top of a tree, but instead of killing him his belief transforms him into a sennin. Next is Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s “A Woman Alone with Her Soul” (1912), about which you should read Maureen’s review. This is followed by Leonid Andreyev’s “Ben-Tobith” (1916, text available here as “On The Day of the Crucifixion”), which is the story of a man in Jerusalem who has a crippling toothache on the day of the Crucifixion. John Aubrey’s “The Phantom Basket” (1696) is another entry that I can just reproduce in its entirety:Mr Trahern B.D. (Chaplain to Sir Orlando Bridgman Lord Keeper) a Learn’d and sober Person, was the Son of a Shoe-maker in Hereford: One night as he lay in Bed, the Moon shining very bright, he saw the Phantome of one of the Apprentices sitting in a Chair in his red Wastcoat, and Headband about his Head, and Strap upon his Knee; which Apprentice was really abed and asleep with another Fellow-apprentice in the same Chamber, and saw him. The Fellow was Living 1671. Another time, as he was in Bed he saw a Basket come Sailing in the Air along by the Valence of his Bed; I think he said there was Fruit in the Basket: It was a Phantome. From himself.J. G. Ballard’s “The Drowned Giant” (1964) examines, in a quintessentially Ballardian clinically-detached manner, the decay of a giant human corpse that washes up on the beach following a storm. Initially an object of great spectacle, it soon becomes just another part of the landscape, vandalized by teenagers, treated as a playground by children, dismantled by profiteers, then taken for granted and eventually forgotten altogether by everyone except for the narrator.Which brings us back around to Max Beerbohm. His “Enoch Soames” (1916), also collected in Black Water, is a fantastic examination of a desperately untalented author who sells his soul to the devil in order to have a glimpse of his place in posterity by transporting him briefly to the reading room of the British Museum 100 years hence: June 3rd, 1997. It’s also a delightfully Borgesian approach to metafiction: the narrator of the story is Max Beerbohm of 1916 (a real person), looking back on his association with Enoch Soames (fiction) around the turn of the century. The artist William Rothenstein (real) also figures in the story, in which he draws a portrait of the fictional Soames, which the real Rothenstein actually did create in 1916, backdated to the 1890s. In the future, the one reference Soames can find to himself is as the fictional centerpiece of the story “Enoch Soames,” by Max Beerbohm.From the vantage point of 2013 I can also report that on June 3rd, 1997, the magician Teller (of Penn and fame), waiting with a crowd of fellow Beerbohm fans in the Reading Room at the appointed time, saw a man matching the description of Soames looking desperately through the bookstacks (later reported in the article “Being a faithful account of the events of the designated day, when the man who had disappeared was expected briefly to return” - some have claimed this man was an actor hired by Teller, but Teller is keeping his mouth shut).If only this collection had had more of this kind of labyrinthine metafiction, but I think it’s just this one, Aldrich’s story, and one other presented with a fictional author, which name is presumably a pseudonym for one of the editors.I’ll write up some things about the other stories that stuck with me enough to invite comment later.
—Zach
