Twelveeleven’s Comments (group member since Feb 14, 2012)

Twelveeleven’s comments from the KC /int/ Book Club group.

Reflections are monstrous if they are imperfect (the relationship between the Encyclopedia of Tlön and the real world), and even more monstrous if they are perfect (see "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote"). Perfect reflections risk supplanting reality directly, imperfect reflections have a corrupting, transformative effect.

Infinity is monstrous because it is beyond comprehension and therefore threatening our mental world.

Both reflections and the concept of infinity undermine conventional reality, and that seems to be the meaning of the word 'monstrous' in Borges' vocabulary. His stories themselves aspire to the monstrous quality of the artifacts he describes. tldr Borges was a monster.

Bellis wrote: "must be some kind of byeffect"

Perhaps due to the fact that so many of his stories are set in studies and libraries.

I haven't got my hands on the whole Book of Sand collection, but I happened to read the title story (written 1975) alongside the earlier story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940).

In The Book of Sand the writer comes to see the infinate book as "monstrous"/"monstruoso". In Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius the writer and his friend decide that mirrors have something monstrous ("monstruoso") about them. Later in Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, the Encyclopedia of Tlön acts as a sinisterly enticing mirror of the real world.

In Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, from the beginning the task of dealing with the monstrous idea is shared, it's about ideology and society. In The Book of Sand the book's religious monstrosity is dealt with personally.

Both stories include conventions of detective novels. In Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius the writer stumbles upon a mystery, and the first half of the story is about the alleys he goes down to solve it. The The Book of Sand starts with a stranger walking into the writer's apartment, like a new client into a private investigator's office. The writer tries to guess the visitor's story by looking at his clothes, and the visitor takes a while to get to the point before handing the writer a mystery to solve.

It's interesting to wonder what Borges means by "monstrous" in his stories. In this documentary ( http://ubu.com/film/borges.html ) it says Borges' fear of mirrors started when he would browse the books in his father's study alone. He was always afraid that when he looked into the mirrors there a different face would look back.
Of the Book of Sand the narrator says: "I felt the book to be a nightmarish object, something obscene that slanders and corrupts reality."("Sentí que era un objeto de pesadilla, una cosa obscena que infamaba y corrompía la realidad.")

Here's another use of the word monstrous i found in a tab I have open. From the story The Zahir (1949):

"...a cell on whose floor, walls and vaulted ceiling a Moslem fakir had designed (in fantastic colors, which time, rather than erasing, refined) of an infinite tiger. It was a tiger composed of many tigers, in the most dizzying of ways; it was crisscrossed with tigers, striped with tigers and included seas and Himalayas and armies that resembled other tigers. The painter had died many years before, in that same cell; he had come from Sind or perhaps Gujarat and his initial purpose had been to draw a mapamundi. Of that purpose there remained some vestiges within the monstrous image. " ("la monstruosa imagen")

So it seems the ultimate monstrous concept is infinity and the ultimate monstrous image is a reflection. I wonder if there's a single linking reason why in Borges' universe these two things are described as so disturbing.

I know Oblomov is about a young, rich guy who never leaves his bed. But I've never read it. Malone in Samuel Beckett's Malone Dies also never leaves his bed, but that's because he's a dying old man.
Uncle Toby in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is the ultimate portrait of a loveable autist. He also has a very Bernd-like courtship with Widow Wadman.

Hmmm, what's this folder for?

Anyway, are we reading the whole collection or just the tiny story of the same name?