Looking for a Story

One of the problems of being a voracious reader is that sometimes stories told by wildly divergent authors seem to merge and flow into one half-remembered mess. This is further compounded when the reader is bilingual and has read stories told in both Spanish and in English translation. I found myself today just sorting through some of my books, trying to reorganize my double-stacked bookcases and seeing what memories I had of those tomes and the stories told within.

Glancing at shelves where a Jorge Luis Borges sat beside an Angela Carter, or where China Miéville and Jeff VanderMeer shared space with a Thomas Wolfe or an Ernest Heminway, a world of literatures encapsulated within a five-shelf bookcase in which there were no distinctions made by genre or even language. As I glanced at this seeming mélange of various fictions and non-fictions (and even Derrida's Of Grammatology, fittingly enough), I started to find myself lost in thought.

I wonder if there were a story out there, one told in a first (or perhaps even a second person view) of a world in which some of Borges's ideas on labyrinths had been explored. A story which utilized the wit of a Jane Austen or perhaps the deep sympathy of a Charles Dickens. A tale in which humor abounded, perhaps not like Terry Pratchett's satirical works, but mayhap more akin to that of a W. Somerset Maugham. Such a story, if it exists, might have the beautiful flow of a Gabriel García Márquez, with his magical butterflies and tragic tales of tenderness to be found in the arms of a humble whore, or maybe the polemic of an Upton Sinclair.

Surely such a historia exists, somewhere, if not in English, perhaps in Spanish, German, Latin, or another language known or unknown to myself and others. I envision such a tale to have something, that je ne sais quoi, that would spark a reaction from its reader. Perhaps this story is found in prose form, or in a poem, or maybe even within a song lyric. I do not know. But I am looking for it. Have you seen a story, whether it be long or short, rich or poor, happy or sad, or all of the above and then some? If so, please share that story (or stories) with this humble reader, as he is looking for a part of himself that seems to be missing, out there.