Book Review: Hell's Corner by David Baldacci

Is Hell's Corner to be the last adventure of the members of the Camel Club as the back cover suggests? If it is, we’ll have to say “well done” to David Baldacci for withdrawing his likeable characters at the top of their game. To tell you the truth though I believe that Oliver Stone, who’s the driving force behind this series of novels, still has a lot to give, but I guess my opinion doesn’t really matter.
     As you’d expect from a novel by this author it is action-packed. It begins somewhat slowly, at a leisurely pace, but the narration starts picking up momentum after the first hundred pages, and from that point on it just keeps getting stronger. It soon explodes into a racy thriller, full of twists and turns, with the usual conspiracy theories adding to the mix.
     First things first though. It all begins when Stone receives an invitation to visit the White House and meet with the president; an invitation that’s even for him impossible to refuse. The president asks the veteran, yet retired, agent to serve his country for the very last time, by taking charge of a high-risk, covert mission. His job is to infiltrate and bring down a Russian cartel, that’s supposedly taken over the illegal drugs trade on the American continent. But his mission, even before it begins, is about to change dramatically. A bomb is detonated at a park in front of the White House and Stone accidentally finds himself at the scene of the crime. The intended target was most likely the British prime minister who was just on his way out of the White House, after a meeting with the president. Under the circumstances they have no choice but to ask Stone to work on the case, along with an attractive female MI6 agent, Mary Chapman, and a contact with the FBI.
     Before too long though Stone comes to realize that this case will not be an easy one to crack. For every answer he and his co-workers get, a few new questions arise and, as it looks, they are not about to get an easy ride trying to figure things out. There are too many “unknowns”. For starters: How did the bomber or bombers managed to fetch the explosive device into the well guarded park, without setting off any alarms, or even provoking a reaction by the bomb squat’s trained dogs? And then questions have to be asked about the people; the strangers who were hanging around there that night. Who was the armed man who bumped onto Stone? What was the woman sitting on a bench and talking on the phone really up to before all that happened? Who was the man that was standing in front of a statue studying its inscription in the middle of the night? What about the fat guy? Did he have anything to do with the explosion or was he simply an innocent bystander and its only victim?
     The more they investigate the case, the more the mystery deepens. Their bosses seem to be hiding a lot of crucial evidence from them, while someone is trying now and again to kill Stone. And as time goes by more bodies start piling up. Stone, realizing that he’s come to a dead end, once again decides to ask for help from his friends at the Camel Club. But even then things don’t seem to quite work out for them, since the people behind the attack always seem to be a step ahead. The investigators receive just bits and pieces of information and now it’s up to the ageing agent to connect the dots and find the answer to the riddle; an answer which he doesn’t quite expect, since his opponent is a master manipulator; someone who seems to know him better that he knows his self.
     This is a well-crafted thriller, as good as you’ve come to expect from a writer of David Baldacci’s caliber.

Joseph Conrad - Freya of the Seven Isles

One day--and that day was many years ago now--I received a long, chatty letter from one of my old chums and fellow-wanderers in Eastern waters. He was still out there, but settled down, and middle-aged; I imagined him--grown portly in figure and domestic in his habits; in short, overtaken by the fate common to all except to those who, being specially beloved by the gods, get knocked on the head early. The letter was of the reminiscent "do you remember" kind--a wistful letter of backward glances. And, amongst other things, "surely you remember old Nelson," he wrote.
Remember old Nelson! Certainly. And to begin with, his name was not Nelson. The Englishmen in the Archipelago called him Nelson because it was more convenient, I suppose, and he never protested. It would have been mere pedantry. The true form of his name was Nielsen. He had come out East long before the advent of telegraph
cables, had served English firms, had married an English girl, had been one of us for years, trading and sailing in all directions through the Eastern Archipelago, across and around, transversely, diagonally, perpendicularly, in semi-circles, and zigzags, and figures of eights, for years and years.
There was no nook or cranny of these tropical waters that the enterprise of old Nelson (or Nielsen) had not penetrated in an eminently pacific way. His tracks, if plotted out, would have covered the map of the Archipelago like a cobweb--all of it, with the sole exception of the Philippines. He would never approach that part, from a strange dread of Spaniards, or, to be exact, of the Spanish authorities. What he imagined they could do to him it is impossible to say. Perhaps at some time in his life he had read some stories of the Inquisition.

Continue at the source


Image taken from here


Book Choice: Victory

The best books of 2010?

While browsing the net the other day I’ve run into the New York Time’s list of the best books of 2010.
Going though it I found out that foreign literature, or rather any kind of foreign writing, doesn’t play such an important role in the literary circles of the Big Apple. All the authors featured were born or at least raised in the west. Asia seems to be a far and away land with nothing to offer; Africa, well, is Africa; Europe? Who gives a shit about the old continent, anyway? Oceania? Is that a spa or something?
I guess we Europeans are a little luckier when it comes to reading foreign literature. We just love the Japs; we do well with the Arabs; we adore the Africans, who every now and then find their way into our bookshops; and, well, the French, the Scandinavians, the Italians, the Spanish and the Germans, and even the South Americans are not bad either. Can any of them hit it big in the U.S.? I have my doubts. With the exceptions of Stieg Larsson and a few heavy weights from Britain, the rest of them are more or less doomed. Now you will say: the Americans did give The National Books Critics Award to Roberto Bolaño for his masterpiece 2666. Well, I will say that that’s just not enough.
     Let us now take a look at the list:

Fiction

1.    Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. Will I read this one? I just don’t know yet. I didn’t like The Corrections, but maybe the Greek translation is to blame for that.

2.    The New Yorker Stories by Ann Beattie. Well, I don’t think this will ever find its way to my far distant land, so there’s nothing I can really say about it.

3.    Room by Emma Donoghue. This comes highly recommended by the British press, so I should give it a try.

4.    Selected Stories by William Trevor. No hesitations here. The moment I get it I will read it. A master storyteller.

5.    A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. I’ve just read a great review about this one in The Guardian; and in The Guardian, most of the times, I trust.

Nonfiction

Truth be told, biographies and poetry apart, I don’t read many nonfiction books, so I’ll just give you the titles and authors of the “5 best” on the list, with just a nasty comment about one of them:

1.    Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet by Jennifer Homans.

2.    Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff.

3.    The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee

4.    Fishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) With Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes by Stephen Sondheim. I got tired just by reading the title.

5.    The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson.

James Joyce - The Dead

LILY, the caretaker's daughter, was literally run off her feet. Hardly had she brought one gentleman into the little pantry behind the office on the ground floor and helped him off with his overcoat than the wheezy hall-door bell clanged again and she had to scamper along the bare hallway to let in another guest. It was well for her she had not to attend to the ladies also. But Miss Kate and Miss Julia had thought of that and had converted the bathroom upstairs into a ladies' dressing-room. Miss Kate and Miss Julia were there, gossiping and laughing and fussing, walking after each other to the head of the stairs, peering down over the banisters and calling down to Lily to ask her who had come.

It was always a great affair, the Misses Morkan's annual dance. Everybody who knew them came to it, members of the family, old friends of the family, the members of Julia's choir, any of Kate's pupils that were grown up enough, and even some of Mary Jane's pupils too. Never once had it fallen flat. For years and years it had gone off in splendid style, as long as anyone could remember; ever since Kate and Julia, after the death of their brother Pat, had left the house in Stoney Batter and taken Mary Jane, their only niece, to live with them in the dark, gaunt house on Usher's Island, the upper part of which they had rented from Mr. Fulham, the corn-factor on the ground floor. That was a good thirty years ago if it was a day. Mary Jane, who was then a little girl in short clothes, was now the main prop of the household, for she had the organ in Haddington Road. She had been through the Academy and gave a pupils' concert every year in the upper room of the Antient Concert Rooms. Many of her pupils belonged to the better-class families on the Kingstown and Dalkey line. Old as they were, her aunts also did their share. Julia, though she was quite grey, was still the leading soprano in Adam and Eve's, and Kate, being too feeble to go about much, gave music lessons to beginners on the old square piano in the back room. Lily, the caretaker's daughter, did housemaid's work for them. Though their life was modest, they believed in eating well; the best of everything: diamond-bone sirloins, three-shilling tea and the best bottled stout. But Lily seldom made a mistake in the orders, so that she got on well with her three mistresses. They were fussy, that was all. But the only thing they would not stand was back answers.

Continue at the source


Image taken from here


Book Choice: Dubliners (Norton Critical Edition)

D.H. Lawrence - England, My England

He was working on the edge of the common, beyond the small brook that ran in the dip at the bottom of the garden, carrying the garden path in continuation from the plank bridge on to the common. He had cut the rough turf and bracken, leaving the grey, dryish soil bare. But he was worried because he could not get the path straight, there was a pleat between his brows. He had set up his sticks, and taken the sights between the big pine trees, but for some reason everything seemed wrong. He looked again, straining his keen blue eyes, that had a touch of the Viking in them, through the shadowy pine trees as through a doorway, at the green-grassed garden-path rising from the shadow of alders by the log bridge up to the sunlit flowers. Tall white and purple columbines, and the butt-end of the old Hampshire cottage that crouched near the earth amid flowers, blossoming in the bit of shaggy wildness round about.

Continue at the source: Literature org


Image taken from here


Book Choice: Sons and Lovers: (RED edition) (Penguin Classics)

Robert Burns – To a Mountain Daisy

Poems and Songs of Robert Burns 

I

 

 EE, modest, crimson-tippèd flow'r,
Thou's met me in an evil hour;
For I maun crush amang the stoure
Thy slender stem:
To spare thee now is past my pow'r,
Thou bonie gem.

 

II
 
Alas! it's no thy neebor sweet,
The bonie lark, companion meet,
Bending thee 'mang the dewy weet!
Wi' spreckl'd breast!

When upward-springing, blythe, to greet
The purpling east.
 
III
 
Cauld blew the bitter-biting north
Upon thy early, humble birth;
Yet cheerfully thou glinted forth
Amid the storm,
Scarce rear'd above the parent-earth
Thy tender form.
 
IV
 
The flaunting flow'rs our gardens yield,
High shelt'ring woods and wa's maun shield;
But thou, beneath the random bield
O' clod or stane,
Adorns the histie stibble-field,
Unseen, alane.
 
V
 
There, in thy scanty mantle clad,
Thy snawie bosom sun-ward spread,
Thou lifts thy unassuming head
In humble guise;
But now the share uptears thy bed,
And low thou lies!
 
VI
 
Such is the fate of artless maid,
Sweet flow'ret of the rural shade!
By love's simplicity betray'd,
And guileless trust;
Till she, like thee, all soil'd, is laid
Low i' the dust.
 
VII
 
Such is the fate of simple Bard,
On life's rough ocean luckless starr'd!
Unskilful he to note the card
Of prudent lore,
Till billows rage, and gales blow hard,
And whelm him o'er!
 
VIII
 
Such fate to suffering Worth is giv'n,
Who long with wants and woes has striv'n,
By human pride or cunning driv'n
To mis'ry's brink;
Till, wrench'd of ev'ry stay but Heav'n,
He, ruin'd, sink!
 
IX
 
Ev'n thou who mourn'st the Daisy's fate,
That fate is thine -- no distant date;
Stern Ruin's ploughshare drives, elate,
Full on thy bloom,
Till crush'd beneath the furrow's weight,
Shall be thy doom!

Edgar Allan Poe - The Oval Portrait

The chateau into which my valet had ventured to make forcible entrance, rather than permit me, in my desperately wounded condition, to pass a night in the open air, was one of those piles of commingled gloom and grandeur which have so long frowned among the Appennines, not less in fact than in the fancy of Mrs. Radcliffe. To all appearance it had been temporarily and very lately abandoned. We established ourselves in one of the smallest and least sumptuously furnished apartments. It lay in a remote turret of the building. Its decorations were rich, yet tattered and antique. Its walls were hung with tapestry and bedecked with manifold and multiform armorial trophies, together with an unusually great number of very spirited modern paintings in frames of rich golden arabesque. In these paintings, which depended from the walls not only in their main surfaces, but in very many nooks which the bizarre architecture of the chateau rendered necessary- in these paintings my incipient delirium, perhaps, had caused me to take deep interest; so that I bade Pedro to close the heavy shutters of the room- since it was already night- to light the tongues of a tall candelabrum which stood by the head of my bed- and to throw open far and wide the fringed curtains of black velvet which enveloped the bed itself. I wished all this done that I might resign myself, if not to sleep, at least alternately to the contemplation of these pictures, and the perusal of a small volume which had been found upon the pillow, and which purported to criticise and describe them.
     Long - long I read - and devoutly, devotedly I gazed. Rapidly and gloriously the hours flew by and the deep midnight came. The position of the candelabrum displeased me, and outreaching my hand with difficulty, rather than disturb my slumbering valet, I placed it so as to throw its rays more fully upon the book.
     But the action produced an effect altogether unanticipated. The rays of the numerous candles (for there were many) now fell within a niche of the room which had hitherto been thrown into deep shade by one of the bed-posts. I thus saw in vivid light a picture all unnoticed before. It was the portrait of a young girl just ripening into womanhood. I glanced at the painting hurriedly, and then closed my eyes. Why I did this was not at first apparent even to my own perception. But while my lids remained thus shut, I ran over in my mind my reason for so shutting them. It was an impulsive movement to gain time for thought- to make sure that my vision had not deceived me- to calm and subdue my fancy for a more sober and more certain gaze. In a very few moments I again looked fixedly at the painting.
     That I now saw aright I could not and would not doubt; for the first flashing of the candles upon that canvas had seemed to dissipate the dreamy stupor which was stealing over my senses, and to startle me at once into waking life.
     The portrait, I have already said, was that of a young girl. It was a mere head and shoulders, done in what is technically termed a vignette manner; much in the style of the favorite heads of Sully. The arms, the bosom, and even the ends of the radiant hair melted imperceptibly into the vague yet deep shadow which formed the back-ground of the whole. The frame was oval, richly gilded and filigreed in Moresque. As a thing of art nothing could be more admirable than the painting itself. But it could have been neither the execution of the work, nor the immortal beauty of the countenance, which had so suddenly and so vehemently moved me. Least of all, could it have been that my fancy, shaken from its half slumber, had mistaken the head for that of a living person. I saw at once that the peculiarities of the design, of the vignetting, and of the frame, must have instantly dispelled such idea- must have prevented even its momentary entertainment. Thinking earnestly upon these points, I remained, for an hour perhaps, half sitting, half reclining, with my vision riveted upon the portrait. At length, satisfied with the true secret of its effect, I fell back within the bed. I had found the spell of the picture in an absolute life-likeliness of expression, which, at first startling, finally confounded, subdued, and appalled me. With deep and reverent awe I replaced the candelabrum in its former position. The cause of my deep agitation being thus shut from view, I sought eagerly the volume which discussed the paintings and their histories. Turning to the number which designated the oval portrait, I there read the vague and quaint words which follow:
     "She was a maiden of rarest beauty, and not more lovely than full of glee. And evil was the hour when she saw, and loved, and wedded the painter. He, passionate, studious, austere, and having already a bride in his Art; she a maiden of rarest beauty, and not more lovely than full of glee; all light and smiles, and frolicsome as the young fawn; loving and cherishing all things; hating only the Art which was her rival; dreading only the pallet and brushes and other untoward instruments which deprived her of the countenance of her lover. It was thus a terrible thing for this lady to hear the painter speak of his desire to pourtray even his young bride. But she was humble and obedient, and sat meekly for many weeks in the dark, high turret-chamber where the light dripped upon the pale canvas only from overhead. But he, the painter, took glory in his work, which went on from hour to hour, and from day to day. And be was a passionate, and wild, and moody man, who became lost in reveries; so that he would not see that the light which fell so ghastly in that lone turret withered the health and the spirits of his bride, who pined visibly to all but him. Yet she smiled on and still on, uncomplainingly, because she saw that the painter (who had high renown) took a fervid and burning pleasure in his task, and wrought day and night to depict her who so loved him, yet who grew daily more dispirited and weak. And in sooth some who beheld the portrait spoke of its resemblance in low words, as of a mighty marvel, and a proof not less of the power of the painter than of his deep love for her whom he depicted so surpassingly well. But at length, as the labor drew nearer to its conclusion, there were admitted none into the turret; for the painter had grown wild with the ardor of his work, and turned his eyes from canvas merely, even to regard the countenance of his wife. And he would not see that the tints which he spread upon the canvas were drawn from the cheeks of her who sate beside him. And when many weeks bad passed, and but little remained to do, save one brush upon the mouth and one tint upon the eye, the spirit of the lady again flickered up as the flame within the socket of the lamp. And then the brush was given, and then the tint was placed; and, for one moment, the painter stood entranced before the work which he had wrought; but in the next, while he yet gazed, he grew tremulous and very pallid, and aghast, and crying with a loud voice, 'This is indeed Life itself!' turned suddenly to regard his beloved:- She was dead!

Image taken from here

Book Choice: The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1

F Scott Fitzgerald - May Day

There had been a war fought and won and the great city of the
conquering people was crossed with triumphal arches and vivid with
thrown flowers of white, red, and rose. All through the long spring
days the returning soldiers marched up the chief highway behind the
strump of drums and the joyous, resonant wind of the brasses, while
merchants and clerks left their bickerings and figurings and, crowding
to the windows, turned their white-bunched faces gravely upon the
passing battalions.
Never had there been such splendor in the great city, for the
victorious war had brought plenty in its train, and the merchants had
flocked thither from the South and West with their households to taste
of all the luscious feasts and witness the lavish entertainments
prepared--and to buy for their women furs against the next winter and
bags of golden mesh and varicolored slippers of silk and silver and
rose satin and cloth of gold.
So gaily and noisily were the peace and prosperity impending hymned by
the scribes and poets of the conquering people that more and more
spenders had gathered from the provinces to drink the wine of
excitement, and faster and faster did the merchants dispose of their
trinkets and slippers until they sent up a mighty cry for more
trinkets and more slippers in order that they might give in barter
what was demanded of them. Some even of them flung up their hands
helplessly, shouting:
"Alas! I have no more slippers! and alas! I have no more trinkets! May
heaven help me for I know not what I shall do!"
But no one listened to their great outcry, for the throngs were far
too busy--day by day, the foot-soldiers trod jauntily the highway and
all exulted because the young men returning were pure and brave, sound
of tooth and pink of cheek, and the young women of the land were
virgins and comely both of face and of figure.
So during all this time there were many adventures that happened in
the great city, and, of these, several--or perhaps one--are here set
down.

Continue at the source


Book Choice: The Beautiful and Damned

Jorge Luis Borges - The Zahir

My friend Borges once described a Zahir, which in Buenos Aires in 1939 was a coin, a ten-centavo piece, with the letters `N' and `T' and the numeral `2' scratched crudely in the obverse. Whomsoever saw this coin was consumed by it, in a manner of speaking, and could think of nothing else, until at last their personality ceased to exist, and they were reduced to a babbling corpse with nothing to talk about but the coin, the coin, always the coin. To have one's mind devoured by coins, that is a terrible fate, although one which is common enough in these mercenary times. But to have one's mind devoured by the thought of a coin, that is strange and far more terrible. With such stories as these Borges kept me awake at night, to keep him company when he could not sleep.

I had arrived in Uruguay on a tramp steamer from Cuba and had tried to work my way down the country to the Argentina, where I would stay with Borges. But my money was nearly exhausted when I reached the Fray Bentos and I used the last of it to send a message to Borges, begging him to come help me. But he was detained by the press of his librarianship, and could not take enough time off at such short notice to come and get me. And so it happened that I lived for two weeks in a small town in Argentina with an insane cripple named Ireneo Funes.

I kept his cottage tidy and cooked for him and assisted him in all things, in return for sleeping in his corner and eating some of what I cooked. The woman who normally took care of him, Maria Fuente, was eager for a vacation, even a brief one. Funes was an irritating roommate. He spoke little, and when he did it did not make any sense. He would spend hours staring at a single object: his hand, a crack in the plaster, the tobacco in the end of his cigarette. I learned, as the days passed with no word from my friends, that he had become crippled in a riding accident some time before and that he was dying of tuberculosis, a frequent affliction of the bedridden.

Eventually I realized the cause of Funes' peculiar abstraction. His accident had left him physically helpless, but endowed with a memory perfect in its accuracy and perfect in its detail. He could remember everything he had ever seen, or heard, or thought. He remembered in detail not only every experience he had ever had, but all the times that he had remembered each experience, and the memories were as distinct and different to him as the beads of a rosary. The leaves of a tree were not leaves to him; he could remember each leaf in detail and compare it in his mind with each other, or with a leaf on another tree, a leaf of the same tree on another day, with a spray of water from the river that wetted him as a child. I heard him mention those leaves once. He said that a certain leaf was curled like the curve of Pedro Althazar's horse's rump on the twenty-third day of March, only more graceful. ``At the moment it shook off that fly,'' he added, seeing my perplexity. ``Which fly?'' I asked. ``It was the eleventh one I saw,'' he elucidated, ``but perhaps you saw some that I did not, since I did not rise from my bed to look out the window.''

After a week of living with Funes, I feared that a malady of the mind had begun to overtake me also, and at first I ascribed it to the stress of having to live with this superhuman cripple. It was a simple thing, and yet it disturbed me, for I could find no explanation for it, and it seemed so small, so arbitrary, as to be completely removed from all rhyme or reason. The nature of the malady was this: On one wall of the cottage was a shelf on which I stored the containers of spices and seasonings with which I flavored Funes' food, and one of these jars of seasoning was a pepper-mill. Even after all these years I remember it: it was about six inches tall, cylindrical, made of a dark brown-stained wood with six longitudinal burnt scars. The handle was too small and was made of dull steel. At the time I was completely unable to remember it.

Meal after meal I cooked and would want to add mustard, and immediately my mind would fix on the mustard-pot and I would know where the mustard-pot was. I would look for the cilantro, and reach out my hand without even thinking, and there it would be. But when I wanted the pepper-mill, I could not remember whether we even had one. I would feel sure that we did, that we must, although I could not remember for certain, and would be unable to call its image or its location to my mind. Finally I would search the cabinet and the shelves, and come across the pepper-mill by chance. I would look at it stupidly, feeling sure that this was indeed a pepper-mill (for it looked just like a pepper-mill) but being unable to recollect it. Finally I would use the pepper and put the mill back on the shelf, resolving to remember it the next time.

After this had happened three times, I was distraught. I knew that the last three times I had wanted the pepper I had been unable to remember the pepper-mill and had had to search for it. And even though I remembered doing this, I could not be sure that we really had one and try as I might I simply could not remember what it looked like or where it was. I had nightmares that somehow Funes was devouring my mnemonic capability to feed his own. I went to speak to Maria Fuente, but she only said that he was the spawn of the devil, and that was no help.

Finally one day I burnt Funes' dinner by tarrying too long in searching for the pepper-mill. This brought sharp words from Funes, who, as you may imagine, had no patience with the memory lapses of others. I did not want to tell him of my fears and my persistently failing memory; I had a half-formed idea that Funes was deliberately causing my weird forgetfulness, and I was afraid of what I might find out. I would have told him that it was the first time I had forgotten the pepper-mill, only I could not remember what it was I had been looking for. But for some reason, he demanded to know what it was, and I bleakly wandered around the cottage, opened the cabinet and searched the shelves, until I found the pepper-mill, and then I remembered. ``Ah,'' said I, ``it was the pepper-mill.''

At this, he almost sat up. ``Pepper-mill?'' he said. ``What pepper-mill?''

``The brown wooden one,'' said I. ``So long,'' holding my hands about six inches apart, ``and about this big around.''

``I have never seen this pepper-mill,'' he said. ``Is it Maria's? Did she bring it while I was asleep?''

I said that as far as I knew it had been in the cottage longer than I had.

``Let me see it,'' he commanded, and I brought the pepper-mill. Funes examined it closely, even minutely. ``I have never seen it before. Indeed, I did not even know I possessed such a thing. Speak to me no more of it,'' and he sank back onto the bed, quiet.

He seemed profoundly disturbed for the rest of the evening, and he did not speak again before I went to sleep. But I was awakened in the middle of the night. Funes was standing over me, in itself a cause for alarm, as he never arose from his bed except in the direst of emergencies. ``Dominus,'' he said, shaking me and almost losing his unsteady footing, ``Dominus! That... thing you showed me this evening. What was it? I have forgotten it.'' I could not remember, but I was able to get him to go back to bed while I hunted it up. He was trembling, and there was a wild light in his eyes. Finally I found the pepper-mill. ``Here,'' I said at last, tossing it to him. ``Here it is.''

He caught it, and as he examined it, he grew more and more perplexed and even wilder than before. ``I thought that I would know it when I saw it again,'' he cried. ``But I am sure I have never seen this before in my life!''

``So you said this afternoon,'' I reminded him.

``I know I said it this afternoon!'' he screamed. ``I remember saying it this afternoon. But of the pepper-mill I have no recollection whatsoever. Where was it?''

``It was on the little shelf,'' I said.

He made me hold him up as he came to examine the shelf. ``Where?'' he asked. ``Here?'' I assented. He leaned against me and studied the shelf, and then, satisfied at last, hobbled painfully back to bed. But He did not sleep. Of that I am sure. He lay awake, smoking and biting his nails, until morning.

When I awoke he looked haggard and there was cigarette ash on the floor beside his cot. He never spilt his cigarette ash; he found the details of the random patterns of the ash on the floor distracting and irritating, and they disturbed and excited him so that he could not rest. He was mumbling to himself. ``Salt shaker,'' he said. ``Garlic press. Large head of garlic. Fourteen dead flies. Small head of garlic. Jug of oil.'' He saw that I was awake. ``There were seven hundred and fourteen distinct entities on that shelf last night,'' he said instantly. ``Counting small chili peppers, spilled grains of rice, fragments of garlic and onion skin, and flecks of soil. I can remember all but one of them. What is the missing object?'' I could not remember. I went to the shelf and enumerated the large objects aloud. When I came to that abominable pepper-mill we were both surprised. ``A pepper-mill,'' mused Funes, gazing at it. ``I thought perhaps it might have been a pepper-mill, but I then thought it might have been many things.'' And he turned over and went to sleep with the pepper-mill under his pillow. I went out walking on the pampas, leaving a lunch by Funes' bed..

That evening when I returned Funes was in a state again. He could not remember the whatever-it-was, and this time we could not find it. Half an our of searching finally turned it up under his pillow, and again Funes and I examined it interestedly, wondering how we could forget such a commonplace object. I was careful to put the pepper-mill back on the shelf, in view of Funes' bed, to prevent this sort of farce from happening again. I had a limited success with this effort, since Funes forgot the pepper-mill whenever he averted his eyes from it. I eventually suspended it from the ceiling over his bed, so that it would be obvious to him as much of the time as possible, although this availed him nothing when he had his eyes shut, or when he slept on his belly.

Later I went to Maria Fuentes to ask for a less troublesome pepper-mill. She forwned, and said ``I was so sure that there was one there already,'', but could not recollect it, and so lent me another. As I left, I heard her wonder to herself about how she could have cooked so long for Funes without having a pepper-mill. This stopped me from worrying so much about my own sanity, since I realized that nobody, not even Funes, could remember the accursed pepper-mill, and as long as Funes was quiet I was able to forget about it (forget about the mysterious forgetting, I mean---forgetting the pepper-mill itself was easy) and pass the time calmly.

Funes occasionally awoke in the middle of the night, and, being unable to see the pepper-mill hanging suspended in front of his face in the dark, would rustle and talk to himself and finally strike a light, before he caught sight of the pepper-mill and was able to get back to sleep. Thus I did not sleep too well at night, but my days were idle and peaceful and so I got enough rest. I eventually received a letter from Borges saying that he would come for me in a few days, and I passed those days pleasantly. I took in fresh air and wrestled with the young men of the village. The days were carefree and happy, and I dreaded returning to the cottage to cook for Funes, who would stare at the pepper-mill, looking quite deranged, and mutter to himself in different languages, describing it over and over again, for hours on end, and then suddenly shut his eyes and try to remember it. He never succeeded.

Borges arrived a few days later to take me away, and I left that madhouse gratefully and went with him to Buenos Aires. I have ever since been struck by the irony of the situation in Fray Bentos. Funes alone would have been immune to the Zahir, for the quantity and detail of his memory alone would have been beyond the coin's power to compass. But an Anti-Zahir, a thing which nobody could remember at all, no matter how often they saw it, was, for a man with an otherwise perfect memory, the thing that most stuck in his mind.

Source: The Garden of Jorge Louis Borges
Image taken from here

Book Choice: Collected Fictions

William Butler Yeats - The Stolen Child

WHERE dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water rats;
There we've hid our faery vats,
Full of berrys
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim gray sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scarce could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Away with us he's going,
The solemn-eyed:
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than he can understand.

Image taken from here 
Book Choice: The Celtic Twilight: Faerie and Folklore