Ian McDonald, The Dervish House

The white bird climbs above the city of Istanbul:  a stork, riding the rising air in a spiral of black-tipped wings.  A flare of the feathers; it wheels on the exhalations of twenty million people, one among ten thousand that have followed the invisible terrain of thermals from Africa to Europe, gliding one to the next, rising up from Lake Victoria and the Rift Valley, following the silver line of the Nile, across the Sinai and the Lebanon to the great quadrilateral of Asia Minor.  There the migration splits.  Some head north to the shores of the Black Sea, some east to Lake Van and the foothills of Ararat; but the greatest part flies west, across Anatolia to the glitter of the Bosphorus and beyond it, the breeding grounds of the Balkans and Central Europe.  In the autumn the stork will return to the wintering grounds in Africa, a round-trip of twenty thousand kilometres.  There has been a city on this strait for twenty-seven centuries, but the storks have been crossing twice a year for time only held by the memory of God. (p. 9)

This opening paragraph to Ian McDonald's third near-future city/country novel of the past five years, The Dervish House, may grab many readers' attentions.  This evocative paragraph illustrates, through the flight of wandering storks, the importance and centrality of the ancient city now known as Istanbul.  One might be pardoned if s/he wonders if this novel will be an ode to this ancient crossroads of traffic.  But this is a false start, one that, when compared to the quote below, may present a novel whose thematic elements do not add up to a whole greater than the sum of its parts:

Necdet sees the woman's head explode.  He was only trying to avoid more direct, challenging eye contact with the young woman with the good cheekbones and the red-highlighted hair who had caught him looking in her direction three times.  He's not staring at her.  He's not a creep.  Necdet let his eyes unfocus and wander mildly across the passengers, wedged so politely together.  This is a new tram at a new time:  twenty minutes earlier, but the connections get him into work less than an hour late, thus not upsetting Mustafa, who hates having to act the boss.  So:  his tram-mates.  The boy and girl in their old-fashioned high-button blue school uniforms and white collars that Necdet thought they didn't make kids wear anymore.  They carried OhJeeWah Gumi backpacks and played insatiably with their ceptep phones.  The gum-chewing man staring out the window, his mastication amplified by his superb moustache.  Beside him the smart man of business and fashion scanning the sports news on his ceptep.  That purple velvet suit must be that new nanofabric that is cool in summer, warm in winter, and changes from silk to velvet at a touch.  The woman with the curl of silver hair straying over her brow from under her headscarf and the look of distant rue on her face.  She frees her right hand from the crowd, lifts it to touch the jewel at her throat.  And detonates her head.

The sound of an exploding skill is a deep bass boom that sucks every other sound into itself so that for a moment after the blast there is only a very pure silence. (p. 11)

This second quote, following immediately after a long expository introduction from which the first quote was chosen, is attention-grabbing.  There is no attempt to embellish the scene, other than to reveal who else was present.  A woman commits suicide, but was this a suicide bomber?

From here, a mystery begins, one that involves not just Necdet, but five other characters, who find themselves over the course of five days in April 2027 trying to come to grasp with certain, apparently nefarious, mysteries that are beginning to reveal themselves in the ancient Sublime Porte.  McDonald takes on an ambitious double narrative here.  First, he has crafted a narrative in which a slacker (Necdet), a reluctant, infirm nine year-old boy-turned-detective, a Greek businessman with a sordid past, a rogue energies trader, an arts dealer, and a nanotech marketing graduate have their lives intertwined for the five days leading up to the concluding events.  This alone could have easily taken up hundreds of pages of plot and character development, but to this McDonald adds the task of devising a near-future scenario in which Istanbul, portrayed here as approaching 20 million in population, with Turkey now an emerging power for the first time in centuries, becomes a major quasi-character in its own right.  Although several will find the results to be superb, I found several problems with the characters/city dual narratives.

For the most part, the characterizations are handled well.  McDonald is economical with his dialogue, allotting just enough space for his characters to develop and to forward the various subplots.  When the focus is strictly on character interactions, the story shines brightest and my interest then was at its peak.  However, mixed in with this was a ton of created backstory surrounding the city and country's development over the imagined past 17 years and that interrupted the flow of the narrative.

It is hard for authors to resist showing just how much forethought they put into developing their settings.  Taken separately, McDonald's vision of Istanbul and Turkey in 2027 as being the gateway to the Central Asian and Russian natural gas pipelines, as well as becoming one of the foremost nanotech developers, is at times quite plausible and almost always interesting.  But sometimes the setting creeps too much into the character-based narrative, with discussions of the city and its problems and accomplishments interrupting the flow of the plot development.  There were several times where I found myself noting that McDonald forced the issue, interjecting elements of Turkish history into interactions where the characters conceivably would not need to think or declare out loud so much about past (real and imagined) Turkish history.  It was distracting and at times detracted from the scenes.  Sometimes, not everything has to be explained and unfortunately, there were times when too much was added, clogging up the narrative flow.

These problems with the two narrative strands did not mean that I did not enjoy the story.  In fact, McDonald did a superb job twisting those various subplots together to create a conclusion that was better than the ones he provided in his last two novels, River of Gods and Brasyl.  As noted above, his characterizations were top-notch and the interactions were intriguing and well-handled.  It's just that at times, his vision of Istanbul overwhelmed these characters and their events, creating lacunae that lessened my overall enjoyment of the book.  The Dervish House is a very good novel, but its flaws keep it from being among the more enjoyable books that I have read this year.  However, it is a book that I would recommend for others to read.  Perhaps they will find themselves being more able to immerse themselves in the setting than I was able to achieve.

Borges Month: El idioma de los argentinos (1928)

Borges begins his third essay collection, El idioma de los argentinos, with an interesting prologue:

Ningún libro menos necesitado de prólogo que este de formación haragana, hecho sedimentariamente de prólogs, vale decir, de inauguraciones y principios....El prólogo quiere ser el tránsito de silencio a voz, su intermediación, su crepúsculo; pero es tan verbal, y tan entregado a las deficiencias de lo verbal, como lo precedido por él.

Esta vocación de vivir que nos impone las eleciones ominosas de la pasión, de la amistad, de la enemistad, nos impone otra de menos responsable importancia:  la de resolver este mundo.  Nadie puede carecer de esa inclinación, expláyela o no en libro.  Este que prologo es la relación de mis atenciones de ese orden, durante el veintisiete.  Su aire enciclopédico y montonero - esperanza argentina, borradores de afición filológica, historia literaria, alucinaciones o lucideces finales de la metafísica, agrados del recuerdo, retórica - es más aparente que real.  Tres direcciones cardinales lo rigen.  La primera es un recelo, el lenguaje; la segunda es un misterio y una esperanza, la eternidad; la tercera es esta gustación, Buenos Aires.  Las dos últimas confluyen en la declaración intitulada Sentirse en muerte.  La primera quiere vigilar en todo decir. (pp. 9-10)

No book less needs a prologue that this one of lazy formation, done in sediments of prologues, well to say, of inaugurations and beginnings...The prologue wants to be the transit of silence to voice, its mediator, its twilight; but it is so verbal, and so embedded in the deficiencies of the verbal, like that preceded by it.

This vocation of living that imposes on us the ominous choices of passion, friendship, and enmity, imposes another of less responsible importance:  that of resolving this world.  No one can lack that inclination, displayed or not in a book.  This which extends is the relation of my attention of that order, during 1927.  Its encyclopedic and monotonous air - Argentine hope, rough drafts of philological inclination, literary history, hallucinations or lucid metaphysical finales, pleasing of memory, rhetoric - it is more apparent than real.  Three cardinal directions govern it.  The first is a suspicion, language; the second is a mystery and a hope, eternity; the third is this gustation, Buenos Aires.  The last two conjoin in the declaration entitled "To Feel [Oneself] in Death."  The first wants to watch over in all that is said.

In reading the essays contained in this book, it is not difficult to see what Borges meant in his final paragraph about the three "cardinal directions."  In the opening essay, "Indagación de la palabra" ("Investigation of the Word"), Borges breaks down the semantic meanings behind the famous opening to Don Quixote.  It truly is a wonderful philological essay to read and while doubtless some would jump all over this pages-long exposition on a phrase from a book that was later referenced in his story "Pierre Menard," I would caution against making that causal claim; Borges does, after all, reference Cervantes' masterpiece in a great many essays.  But this essay is worth reading, along with the eponymous "El idioma de los argentinos" ("The Idiom of the Argentines"), for Borges' deft exploration of the connections between Language and Art.  Borges certainly was not approaching this from a semiotic point of view (considering that this school of interpretation was founded after 1928), but there are certainly some parallels between Borges' approach to the Word and that which latter grammarians and philologists took. 

Borges also covers metaphysical issues at length.  Besides the above-mentioned "Sentirse en muerte," which is in the beginning a recounting of a feeling that he had just prior to composing the essay, Borges touches upon issues of death and after-death (if one does not prefer "afterlife" to describe these sensations) in passing in several other essays in this collection.  But it is the third "cardinal direction," that of his native Buenos Aires, that receives the most love here.  Borges waxes eloquent on the scandalous tango in "Ascendencias del tango," as well discussing milongas in "Apunte férvido sobre las tres vidas de la milonga."  Although there were a few occasions where Borges' love for his city seemed to be too much for a foreigner such as myself to grasp, it does merit attention, considering how much Argentina, and especially Buenos Aires, factors into several of Borges' first fictions, which were beginning to be composed around this time.

El idioma de los argentinos continues the developments seen in Borges' first two essay collections.  Here, the fervent, passionate declarations are fewer, as a more sober viewpoint has begun to manifest itself in these essays.  There is more of a discussion of metaphysics here, along with issues regarding the manipulation of language.  Although I cautioned readers in my previous review not to read too much into the topics here, it might be worth considering his latter fictions in light of these essays, rather than considering these earlier essays in light of the latter fictions.  This collection was easy to read, despite the weighty materials discussed and for those who are curious to learn more about Borges as a critic and thinker, El idioma de los argentinos is an important period in Borges' development as an essayist.

Borges Month: El tamaño de mi esperanza (1926)

If Borges' first collection, Inquiciones, demonstrated how the young Borges at 25 had already begun developing certain techniques in his critical readings of literary texts, his second collection of essays, El tamaño de mi esperanza, published nearly a year later in 1926, covers more topics that later creep into his fictions.  In her introduction to the 1995 Alianza Editorial edition, Borges' widow, María Kodama, shares an interesting anecdote from 1971 that revolves around this particular book:

Un tarde de 1971, después de recibir su Doctorado honoris causa en Oxford, mientras charlábamos con un grupo de admiradores, alguien habló de El tamaño de mi esperanza.  Borges reaccionó enseguida, asegurándole  que ese libro no existía, y le aconsejó que no lo buscara más.  A continuación cambió de tema y me pidió que le contara a esa gente amiga algo más interesante; por ejemplo, nuestro viaje a Islandia.  Todo pareció quedar ahí, pero al día siguiente un estudiante lo llamó por teléfono y le dijo que el libro estaba en la Bodleiana, que se quedara tranquilo porque existía.  Borges, terminada la conversación, con una sonrisa me dijo:  ¡Qué vamos a hacer, María, estoy perdido! (pp. 7-8)

One afternoon in 1971, after receiving his honorary doctorate in Oxford, while we were chatting with a group of admirers, someone spoke of  The Size of My Hope.  Borges reacted immediately, assuring her that the book didn't exist, and he counseled her not to seek it any more.  Next he changed the topic and he asked me to tell this genteel friend something more interesting; for example, our trip to Iceland.  Everything seemed to remain there, but the following day a student called him on the telephone and said to him that the book was in the Bodleian Library, that he could remain tranquil before it existed.  Borges, ending the conversation, with a smile said to me, "What are we going to do, María, I am lost! 

This story is interesting for several reasons.  First, why would Borges deny the existence of his second book of essays?  Second, if Borges was being truly serious (and based on Kodama's following statements, it seems to be more than just a playful denial of a youthful work), then what does this collection contain that cause him to deny its existence in front of a group of admirers?  Finally, could this be related to how many people look back with some embarrassment on their earlier accomplishments?

In reading El tamaño de mi esperanza, I found myself thinking at several points, "Oh, so maybe this is where he first began to explore in his writing some of the concepts that appear in Ficciónes!"  or "Interesting how his viewpoint on the relationships between Word and Idea have shifted somewhat over the years."  Even for an author such as Borges who enjoys playing metatexual games, there seems to come a point where the author would rather the reader to stop trying to suss out the games within the text and just find that darn "Story" and read/interpret it for what it is for them. 

But yet despite this, it is worth reading El tamaño de mi esperanza precisely to discover possible sources for some of his story motifs.  Oh, this is not to say that Borges' essays, particularly his youthful ones, should be used as an interpretative guide (because, as Umberto Eco stated rather baldly in Baudolino, at the heart of stories are a bunch of "lies"), but rather as a way of understanding other facets of Borges' writing career.  I am one of those rare readers, it seems, who enjoys reading non-fiction published by a writer, not because I want to use their non-fiction to interpret their stories, but rather to understand how they approach the art of reading and interpreting other texts, so I could learn more about them as people rather than trying to predict the specific source materials for their fictions.  Borges's non-fiction is invaluable in this regard, as I have covered in my previous review of Inquisiciones.  Here in his second collection, what he covers is of a more metaphysical nature and it is his ideas on Language that interested me the most.

One particular essay that I would like to single out for attention is "El idioma infinito."  Although I will not at this time translate passages from it (in large part because the entire six page essay is so tightly interwoven that it would be much better to summarize than to choose a single bit), I will note that Borges' love of language, which he later covers in a third book of essays, El idioma de los argentinos (which I'll be reviewing this weekend), shines through.  He notes briefly the debate between a regulated language, as embodied by the Real Academia Española, and those who favor a more free-form approach.  Here, Borges is a bit more sympathetic to the slang-loving side, a position that did shift somewhat later in his career.  "The Infinite Idiom" reveals Borges' love of word play and the associations made with adjectives and synonyms.  Perhaps some will see this as the precursor that led inevitably to later fictions such as "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," but to me, that seems to be placing Effect before Cause here.  Borges' opinions on issues of language and its application in prose and poetry are still in flux here; more hopefully will be said when I review his next book, El idioma de los argentinos.  

El tamaño de mi esperanza is also of interest to Borgesians due to its treatment of issues such as the matter of angels ("Historia de los ángeles"), of the relationships between Adventure and Order ("La Aventura y el Orden") and his essay on analysis ("Ejercicio de análisis").  These topics, as well as several others covered here (mostly on various poets and writers that Borges was reading at the time), are also treated in later essays, so for now, I will just mention them in order to give some idea of the scope of this particular essay collection.  El tamaño de mi esperanza is, more so than Inquisiciones, a look at the young Borges as Critic.  He is starting to find his "voice" as a literary analyst and if at times he appears to be too strident compared to the older Borges, perhaps that is just as well, as reading and following the evolution of the author as essayist can be an illuminating experience for those of us, such as myself, who look to Borges as one possible model for how to approach the art of wrestling with a text.  For this alone, this collection is worth reading, and for those who I suppose would rather want to see if they can detect where Idea X or Y that is treated in his fictions first appears, this book may be of some value as well.  But for me, El tamaño de mi esperanza reveals much more about how one critic plays with ideas rather than an author who's developing ideas to explore.  It may be a subtle difference, but it is an important one to consider.  Regardless, for those who are fans of Borges' works, this is a recommended collection, even if there are a few underdeveloped ideas in these essays.

A Shrine

May you have the fortune of squirrels watching over and protecting your books as well.

June 2010 Reads

Was a bit too tired the other day to post these, but here goes.  28 books, most of which were read in the last 10 days of the month (BAF 4 readings dominated the first 20 days).  Several re-reads as well.  Anyways, the list:

171 Zoran Živković, Писац у Најам (Serbian; already reviewed)

172 César Aira, Parménides (Spanish; already reviewed)

173  Steven Erikson, Midnight Tides (re-read; review forthcoming)

174  Ian Cameron Esslemont, Night of Knives (re-read; reviewed years ago)

175  César Aira, Un episodio en la vida del pintor viajero (Spanish) - enjoyed this one quite a bit.  Not likely to review it in the near future, though.

176  Steven Erikson, The Bonehunters (re-read; review forthcoming)

177  Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel - posted three essays based on essays in this book, might write four others later.

178  Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares, Crónicas de H. Bustos Domecq (re-read; Spanish; review forthcoming)

179  Jonathan Strahan and Lou Anders (eds.), Swords & Dark Magic (already reviewed)

180  Robert Freeman Wexler, The Painting and the City (already reviewed)

181  William Hope Hodgson, The Boats of the 'Glen Carrig' (review forthcoming on the SFF Masterworks blog)

182  William Hope Hodgson, The House on the Borderland (see above)

183  William Hope Hodgson, The Ghost Pirates (see above)

184  Steven Erikson, Reaper's Gale (re-read; review forthcoming)

185  Ian Cameron Esslemont, Return of the Crimson Guard (re-read; review forthcoming)

186  Dan Simmons, Endymion (re-read; review forthcoming)

187  Jorge Luis Borges, El idioma de los argentinos (re-read; review forthcoming)

188  Jorge Luis Borges, Evaristo Carriego (re-read; review forthcoming)

189  Mia Couto, The Last Flight of the Flamingo - this was a short, funny, enjoyable read, with more layers to it than just satire.

190  William Hope Hodgson, The Night Land (review forthcoming on the SFF Masterworks blog)

191  James Blish, A Case of Conscience (review posted on the SFF Masterworks blog)

192  Gene O'Neill, Taste of Tenderloin - decent to good collection of horror-tinged stories.

193  Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race - essay based on this non-fiction will be forthcoming

194  Pope John Paul II, Gift and Mystery - book about his fifty years as a priest.  Interesting.

195  Jorge Luis Borges, Inquisiciones (Spanish; already reviewed)

196  Jorge Luis Borges, El tamaño de mi esperanza (Spanish; review forthcoming)

197  Rachel Swirsky, Through the Drowsy Dark - one of the best 2010 story collections I have read.  Must-read.

198  Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves - This 2006 collection may be the best slipstream-ish collection I have read to date.


In Progress:

Steven Erikson, Toll The Hounds (re-read)

Cordwainer Smith, The Rediscovery of Man (to be reviewed on the SFF Masterworks blog)

E.R. Eddison, Mistress of Mistresses (to be reviewed on the SFF Masterworks blog)

Borges Month: Inquisiciones (1925)

By the time he was 25 years old, Borges had already become a sort of minor literary celebrity in his native Argentina.  His first poetry collection, Fervor de Buenos Aires, had received some positive reviews, perhaps due to the rather unique ways that Borges and his friends distributed it (sticking it in editors' coat pockets, passing some copies out for free, the sort of promotional decisions one can do when one's father paid for the entire print run of 300 copies).  Borges began contributing essays and reviews for the publications of the time, including Martín Fierro and Proa, who published his first collection of non-fiction, Inquisiciones, in 1925.

There is this image many readers have of Borges:  weathered, blind, leaning on a cane while he dictates some of the most erudite commentaries on books, when he's not composing in his head marvelous fictions.  Put that out of your head now.  Imagine a 25 year-old neophyte writing about 17th century Spanish poets, then casually switching to writing about the philosophical underpinnings of George Berkeley or Sir Thomas Browne.  Considering that some hold the oft-erroneous belief that a youth/young adult cannot have the "experience" and "maturation" necessary to contemplate such "weighty" matters, the fact that Borges in his early and mid-20s was able to speak at length and with penetrating analysis on these subjects is perhaps all the more remarkable when considered from the vantage point of his contemporaries rather than a quarter-century after his death.

This is not to say that Inquisiciones was a perfect, fully-formed Borgesian literary critique/essay collection.  There are some gaps in his coverage, gaps that he did later fill in with books released in his 50s and 60s.  There perhaps are places where Borges waxes poetic a bit too much for some readers' liking.  But these complaints can be made about virtually any essay/review collection ever published.  What I found within this short book (178 pages in my Alianza Editorial edition) were far more gems than duds.  Below I want to highlight a few of the many interesting essays and reviews that I read.

One of the first things that struck me about several of Borges' essays is the use of a more florid style to introduce his topics.  Take for instance the opening to his essay "La traducción de un incidente":

La amistad une; también el odio sabe juntar.  Dos nombres hermanados por una fraternidad belicosa como de espadas que en ardimiento de contienda se cruzan son los de Gómez de la Serna y Rafael Cansinos Asséns.

Friendship unites; hatred also joins.  Two brethren names through a bellicose fraternity like swords which in ardent restraint cross are those of Gómez de la Serna and Rafael Cansinos Asséns.

Yet despite this being a bit too florid for my personal tastes, I have to admit that such an introductory sentence drew me in to reading what turned out to be a fine essay on those two Spanish writers and a host of other issues.  Borges later has an interesting thing to say about these two writers and their writings:

Antes, quiero adelantar una salvedad.  No es intención de estos renglones el comparar, en menoscabo de cualquiera de ellos, las personalidades verdaderas de los dos escritores.  Son dos países muy distintos y enmarañados que distan un incaminado trecho el uno del otro, tan bravamente incomparables como lo pueden ser, por ejemplo, la perfección de dejadez y huraño vivir que en todo arrabal porteño me agrada y la nerviosa perfección de codicia que alborota las calles céntricas.

Before, I want to make an exception.  It is not the intent of these lines to compare, in diminishing any of them, the true personalities of the two writers.  They are two very distinct and entangled countries that are an unfathomable distance from one another, so wildly incomparable as they are able to, for example, like the perfection of carelessness and unsociable living that in all the outskirts of Buenos Aires it pleases me and the nervious perfection of greed which excites the central streets.

Yes, young Jorge Luis Borges sometimes got a bit carried away with his metaphors and his comparisons of two renowned writers.  But despite these excesses, his analysis at times could be quite direct and penetrating.  One example of this is found in his review of James Joyce's Ulysses.  Published in France in 1923 due to strict obscenity laws in Great Britain and the United States, Ulysses was not readily available during the 1920s, a fact Borges alludes to in his introduction, when he says "soy el primer aventurero hispánico que ha arribado al libro de Joyce (I am the first Hispanic adventurer who has managed [to get] Joyce's book)."  In his fairly positive appraisal of the book, Borges first compares it to other works by Irish writers of the 18th and 19th centuries, writers whose works rocked the English literary establishment.  This was not something that I recalled encountering in previous studies of Joyce, yet in reflecting upon what Borges wrote here, it does make quite a bit of sense.  And then there is Borges' note of the time issues in the novel:

Si Shakespeare - según su propia metáfora - puso en la vuelta de un reloj de arena las proezas de los años, Joyce invierte el procedimiento y despliega la única jornada de su héroe sobre muchas jornadas de lector (No he dicho muchas siestas).

If Shakespeare - according to his own metaphor - covered in the turn of an hourglass the feats of years, Joyce inverts the procedure and unfolds the single day of his hero over many days of reading (I did not say many siestas).

This point about the inversion of time in Joyce's most famous works presages much of the latter commentary that followed in the decades after the book finally was allowed to be sold in the UK and US, years after Borges had managed to snag one of the copies printed in France.  Here, Borges is not as baroque in his expressions.  He is more concise, yet probing to find connections between Joyce's works and those of other writers with whom Joyce may have shared some similarities in theme and approach.  It is a style that he later improved upon in his latter essays.

So the young Borges of Inquisiciones already displays several of the traits associated with the elder Borges - an eye for developing mood with vivid introductions, combined with an ability to connect a piece being considered with those of other writers.  It is not his strongest collection, yet it is an impressive first effort worthy of being read and re-read several times in the years to come.

My review of James Blish's A Case of Conscience now live at SFF Masterworks

Just click on the magic link and go read and (hopefully) comment.

My review of William Hope Hodgson's The House on the Borderland and Other Novels will go live early Saturday morning and I'll be writing a review of Cordwainer Smith's The Rediscovery of Man in a few days to be posted on July 10th.

Plus there will be several other reviews from other excellent online reviewers going live in the next few days, so be sure to bookmark the site and visit frequently.