Haunted Boardinghouse

Jack and Melissa Holcomb · 16 Feb 2000, 22:09 · from urth-v0028.mbox · original

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From: "Jack and Melissa Holcomb" <jackandmel at socket.net>
Subject: Re: (urth) Haunted Boardinghouse
Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2000 22:09:22
Message-ID: <urth-v0028-0804 at digest.urth.net>
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>Maybe someone made this point already, but I'm pretty slow these days.
> At any rate, in this story we have a labyrinthine building, a library, a
>murder mystery, and lots of latin phrases. Sound a famous novel by another
>Roman Catholic writer? Anybody find any roses in "The Haunted
Boardinghouse"?
>
>Nutria

Hi. I'm new here, and I haven't yet read the story in question, so this is
an impertinent response from the get-go--but those elements (labyrinth,
library, murder mystery) are bits that Eco borrowed (intertextualized?) from
Borges for _The Name of the Rose_.  The labyrinthine building/library thing
is a very big deal for Borges-- see "The Library of Babel," "The Garden of
Forking Paths," "Death and the Compass," all in _Labyrinths_.  (Also, the
librarian in _Rose_ is George de Burgos, or something like that -- an alter
ego for Borges.  Blind, too.)

I've been thinking about Borges and Wolfe a bit recently -- it's actually
one of the reasons I subscribed to this list.  I just got hold of the
_Lexicon Urthus_ and was kind of surprised to see no mention of "The
Circular Ruins" in the discussion of the Theseus story from the brown book.
The first few pages seem like a very clear allusion to that Borges story, to
me.  Plus there's Baldanders, and the _Book of the New Sun_ is set mostly in
Argentina, Borges' homeland.  Can anyone point me toward a more thorough
treatment of Borges and Wolfe, esp. in the Book?

Thanks for listening.

Jack Holcomb
jackandmel at socket.net

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

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