Borges and Vance

Michael Straight · 27 Oct 1999, 09:32 · from urth-v0028.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: Michael Straight <straight at email.unc.edu>
Subject: Re: (urth) Borges and Vance
Date: Wed, 27 Oct 1999 09:32:41
Message-ID: <urth-v0028-0271 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0028/0271.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

On Tue, 26 Oct 1999 David_Lebling at avid.com wrote:

> Alex David Groce writes of Borges' influence on Wolfe:
> <<Borges is also always looming over Wolfe's work ... "Funes the Memorius=
" and
> "The Circular Ruins" are obvious ones.>>
>=20
> I'd like to add, as a less obvious one, also from _Ficciones_, "The Appro=
ach to
> al'Mutasim." =20

I'd also like to add "The Immortal," a story which reminds me more of
Wolfe's style than any other.  For instance, the narrator gives offhanded
comments from which one can infer his cruelty, not because he's trying to
hide anything, but because torturing slaves for information or crucifying
seditious soldiers is such standard operating procedure that it hardly
bears mentioning.

Also the cool, distanced tone of the narrator reminds me of one of Wolfe's
narrators (Severian, Latro).

-Rostrum

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net