Funes the Memorious

António Pedro Marques · 24 Jan 2011, 12:19 · from 2011-January.txt.gz

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From: entonio at gmail.com (=?UTF-8?B?QW50w7NuaW8gUGVkcm8gTWFycXVlcw==?=)
Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2011 12:19:43 +0000
Subject: (urth) Funes the Memorious
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Mr Thalassocrat wrote (24-01-2011 07:36):
> A Borges story I hadn't read before, about a man with perfect memory
> (...)
> Nice to ponder on what use Wolfe might have made of it in constructing Sev
> (...)

Heh. Borges excelled in that. He got some idea and he wrote a story with the 
right amount of substance to illustrate it - differing from other authors in 
that there's barely no scenery. Almost his entire work is like that. Read 
almost all of it a long ago... and sadly haven't gotten the time to reread, 
though it's itching. My impression is that it's got everything there. There 
are few, if any, ideas, in Wolfe or anyone else, which Borges didn't 
present. Borges of course got them from a myriad of sources, directly or 
indirectly. There's even a Borges story where some guy from the future, 
which has a life span of centuries, mentions he's read only a couple of 
books in his life, as what is important is rereading. GW responds to Borges 
in a way I haven't seen anywhere else; where Borges could be considered the 
philosopher, GW is the engineer, finding practical application for the 
other's ideas. (Again, neither Borges came uo with them on his own, nor is 
GW some kind of imitator: their roles are quite different, complement each 
other and neither is subordinate - GW didn't necessarily get his ideas from 
Borges, and had there been no Borges, he could have built his work, or 
another of comparable value, all the same.)

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