uskglass

By accident, I've read three metafictional books this year inspired by Jorge Luis Borges: Paul Auster's City of Glass and Ghosts, both from the 80s, and last year's The Melancholy of Untold History by Minsoo Kang. I love Borges' stories and I wish there were more things like them, so I was hopeful; alas, all of them disappointed me to greater or lesser degree, though in different ways between Auster and Kang. Re. Kang and Melancholy, I think I had my first sinking feeling when I saw that Cloud Atlas was one of its jacket comp titles. I also love Cloud Atlas, but unlike with Borges, I'm automatically wary when I see something comped to it: it has somehow produced a rash of really uninteresting multi-time-period literary sci-fi in its wake.

I read Auster a month or two ago and mostly forgot about him until I picked up Melancholy, read it, got increasingly annoyed, and was like "huh, this is like with those Auster books... why does this keep happening to me?" No more postmodern metafiction this year. Maybe. Admittedly I do have a book out from the library I haven't tried yet called Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea, but, uh, maybe it is something different. (I've also read some good slipstream stuff I liked a lot this year, including Theodora Goss' collection In the Forest of Forgetting, but this whole postmodern Borges curse thing is haunting me now.)

Anyway, the books:

( City of Glass & Ghosts; The Melancholy of Untold History )