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🦋 A different stylistic perspective
"It is said that repentance and atonement erase the past."
"I have heard that too, but I have not found it to be true."
In the thread below, Randolph recommends Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life and Others. I am reading "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" right now, which is available free online (it is not in that collection), and digging it. Very nice -- and Randolph's observation that Chiang mines "some of the same kinds of ideas [as Borges], from a very different stylistic perspective" seems quite perceptive to me -- the story seems like something that would take place in Borges' fictional universe, but the narrative voice and the construction of the story are nothing like Borges. (Bits of the story remind me of The White Castle, but I think only because of the setting -- the similarity is not particularly close.) Making time travel a form of alchemy is just a fantastic idea.
The story is beautifully conceived -- maybe the most satisfying and wisest story dealing with time travel that I've ever read. Chiang really brings out Fuwaad's soul and lets you identify with his longings and his loss, and with his acceptance. Indeed, Chiang is so careful in his characterizations that Hassan and Ajib and Raniya are fully human, though they are two levels of meta-narrative beneath Fuwaad's story. Thanks for hipping me to Chiang's name, Randolph! One quibble: the archaisms in the dialogue and narration sound pretty strained and inconsistent to my ear, particularly in the beginning of the story.
posted afternoon of Wednesday, August 6th, 2008
➳ More posts about Jorge Luis Borges
➳ More posts about Readings
Thank you for pointing the story out; I don't read fiction
magazines regularly any more—I missed it. “The Merchant
and the Alchemist's Gate” was awarded a Hugo last
Saturday, along with Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's
Union—it seems to be genre breakout year.
posted afternoon of August 12th, 2008 by Randolph
Neat, so I anticipated the WSFS by a coupla days. I also read one
of Chiang's early stories ("Understand",
from 1991) over the weekend, did not like it nearly as
much but I could sort of see the germ of a great storyteller in
it. (Way, way too much space given over to exposition of stuff that
did not need to be exposed. The story had been done already many
times, not least by Borges in "Funes
the Memorious", and this iteration did not add anything.)
posted afternoon of August 12th, 2008 by Jeremy
BTW what genre are you referring to here? Speculative fiction? I
don't know anything about TYPU -- all I've read by Chabon is The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and
Clay, of which I have no memory other than that I liked it.
posted afternoon of August 12th, 2008 by Jeremy
Science fiction. What's interesting is that Chabon is getting
attention from places like the NYT Book Review & so
forth--usually those people treat sf like poison. And also winning
a Hugo (for best related work) was the Oxford Dictionary of
Science Fiction. Chiang hasn't broken out, but I think it's
only a matter of time; the main reason seems to be that he's
strongest, so far, in the short forms and he has not written that
much. And, yeah, Understand is from 1991--in fact it's
Chiang's third published story.
BTW, it turns out that the high style of at least Spanish magic
realism derives from contact with American cultures; in period
documents, the Spaniards are as blunt as Englishmen, and the
natives are the ones using the flowery language.
posted morning of August 13th, 2008 by Randolph
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