Subject: (urth) Tales

From: Nicholas Gevers <vermoulian at yahoo.com>
Date: Tue, 26 Oct 1999 03:12:17 +0000

Reading the fascinating discussion of narrative forms
and strategies on the list, two points occur to me:

1) Someone (I think alga) states that "The Tale of the
Student and His Son" would not work as a short story
in a magazine, but is very effective in its NEW SUN
context. This may well be true, but the "Tale" did in
fact appear as an independent story, in THE MAGAZINE
OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, October 1981.

2) I've speculated previously that THE BOOK OF THE NEW
SUN IS "The Brown Book" (in addition to all the other
things that Sev's narrative can be taken to be). In
other words, NEW SUN is an anthology of folk tales,
myths, and legends, woven into a narrative which for
all its modernist first-person presentation is
sufficiently episodic that each set-piece adventure of
Sev's still functions as a tale in itself, conforming
to some recognizable pattern (rituals of initiation,
confronting the ogre, overcoming captivity, whatever).
It's been frequently remarked that the five Brown Book
tales Wolfe has given us in full each tell Sev's story
in some compressed, generally allegorical, form; but I
think this logic runs deeper: just as Wolfe's essay
"Books in THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN" implies that Sev
brings Thecla a copy of THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN in
SHADOW, so Sev is in a sense carrying a copy of his
own narrative with him throughout his wanderings on
Urth. 

=====

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From: Ol' Pappy <cglst7+ at pitt.edu>
Date: Thu, 28 Oct 1999 10:21:14 +0000

>SUN IS "The Brown Book" (in addition to all the other

No, that can't be right. I like the sentiment, though. A friend of mine
who read the BOTNS suggested that the Brown Book and the Book of Gold are
the same: besides the obvious conflict of editions, I can't see that
either. Symbolically, sure. 

My candidate for the most recent Brown Book is Borges and Bioy Casares'
*Extraordinary Tales*. It's out of print now, having been translated and 
finished up by Herder and Herder in 1971 and suffering obscurity even
among Borges' own works. It fits Severian's exposition and the Brown
Book's own subtitle-- my first edition has featureless brown cloth
binding.

(My first edition, which is the only book I scrupled to steal from my old
college's library upon my departure. An act I made well with myself
because it hadn't been checked out since the Carter administration, and
which bears a romanticism that didn't register with me until recently, 
even though I had read the series only two years previous to the theft)

O.P.P.

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From: Jim Jordan <jbjordan at gnt.net>
Date: Thu, 28 Oct 1999 10:20:12 +0000

>Book's own subtitle-- my first edition has featureless brown cloth

	Could this be *The Book of Fantasy* by B & BC, published by Viking in
1988? It's a collection of stories by other authors first pub'd in 1940 in
the Argentine. The first is by Akutagawa, but this edition is arranged
alphabetically (aleph-abetically?) by authors. There's a Bradbury, a couple
of Chestertons, etc. 
	Let us know if it's the same book.

Nutricious

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From: Ol' Pappy <cglst7+ at pitt.edu>
Date: Thu, 28 Oct 1999 15:41:29 +0000

Nutricious sez:

>1988? It's a collection of stories by other authors first pub'd in 1940
>in the Argentine. The first is by Akutagawa, but this edition is arranged
>alphabetically (aleph-abetically?) by authors. There's a Bradbury, a
>couple of Chestertons, etc. Let us know if it's the same book.

No. They are similar but not the same. The longest story in *Extraordinary
Tales* is four 5x7 pages. Both books have the same mission statement, and
are peppered with the same Borges sine qua nons: "On Cartography" and "The
Magician," I think, are two. 

*Extraordinary Tales* is better, for reasons previously stated.

O.P.P.