A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain

Metadata

  • Media: #shortstory

Summary

A survey of fictional works describing their various ingenious [[!Literary device]]s.

Thoughts

Another of Borges' fictional commentaries. This is closer to Pierre Menard Author of the Quixote in terms of its focus on the fictional author and more of a brief survey of his works rather than deeply exploring the contents like Tlon Uqbar Orbis Tertius. However, it is much closer to the latter in terms of richness (and overload) of ideas.

Some highlight literary devices from the fictional books:

  • Mystery where detective's final solution is wrong and reader must solve by looking back over the previous chapters. --> "The reader reader of this remarkable book, then, is more perspicacious than the detective."
  • A book which details events backwards, exploring all the different possibilities of each choice working backwards.
  • A book where the plot of the two acts run in parallel. In the second, everything is slightly menacing and 'off'.

Highlights

  • "[The author] would often argue that readers were an extinct species. "There is no European man or woman [...] that's not a writer, potentially or in fact.""

Scrapbook Concepts

  • An inversion of time: a condition in which you remember the future and know nothing of the past. #magic