A review by megapolisomancy
The Book of Fantasy by Adolfo Bioy Casares, Silvina Ocampo, Jorge Luis Borges
3.0
81 stories in 384 pages. That averages out to 4.74 pages per story, but in fact half of the pieces here are roughly a page or less - fragments, folk tales, myths, very brief allegories, and so on. I can’t fully articulate why this was so disappointing to me, but it made the book feel rather empty and ephemeral. Of the remaining, fuller stories, many just fell flat for me, and several others I read relatively recently in Alberto Manguel’s [b:Black Water: The Book of Fantastic Literature|53080|Black Water The Book of Fantastic Literature|Alberto Manguel|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327905055l/53080._SY75_.jpg|51764] (a collection about which I had similar reservations, and which appears to have been inspired by this one). It also bears noting that the 1988 English edition published by Carroll & Graf, with an introduction by Ursula K. Le Guin, has a truly astounding number of typos, climaxing with the transposition of a number of pages at the end of the Oscar Wilde story.
The first edition of this book came out in Argentina in 1940 (Antología de la Literatura Fantástica), and I’ve seen it claimed that this is the first anthology to use the word “fantasy” to describe a collection of “genre” works, but I don’t know how accurate that is. I also don’t know if it was Le Guin or the original editors who selected the newer materials added to this edition - it appears that updated versions were published in 1965 and 1976.
Because I love quantifying things, I will also tell you that of these 81 pieces, 15 are by Latin American authors, 57 are by European/North Americans, 9 are by Asians, and 0 are by Africans, Australians, or Native Americans. Note that several of the European-written works are actually derived from Asian folklore, though.
Maybe “slight” is the word I’m looking for to describe many of these. Borges once said that there is “a kind of lazy pleasure in useless and out-of-the-way erudition," and while I’m not sure that this is a sentiment with which I agree, I can see how it would lead to a collection of this sort. For example, the following selection from James Frazer’s study of mythology, The Golden Bough, does not, in my view, add anything to the collection, or impart much of anything to the reader, it just proves how wide-ranging and useless the wisps collected here can be:
A fourth story, taken down near Oldenburg in Holstein, tells of a jolly dame that ate and drank and lived right merrily and had all that heart could desire, and she wished to live always. For the first hundred years all went well, but after that she began to shrink and shrivel up, till at last she could neither walk nor stand nor eat nor drink. But die she could not. At first they fed her as if she were a little child, but when she grew smaller and smaller they put her in a glass bottle and hung her up in the church. And there she still hangs, in the church of St Mary, at Lübeck. She is as small as a mouse, but once a year she stirs.
If you find reading something like that without any kind of context enjoyable, this book is for you - “People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like,” and so on. This quote, often attributed to Abraham Lincoln for some reason, actually originates with Max Beerbohm, which brings me to the part of the review where I actually talk about the stories that resonated with me enough to bother writing about.
The stories are presented alphabetically by author, so just to give you a better idea of what we’re dealing with here, here’s what we start with:
We open with “Sennin,” (1952) by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, which is a 3-page reworked koan about a wanderer who wishes to become a sennin (a kind of wise, mystical hermit). A doctor and his wife lie and say they will teach him to do so if he acts as their slave for 20 years - after this period is over the wife tells him to leap from the top of a tree, but instead of killing him his belief transforms him into a sennin. Next is Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s “A Woman Alone with Her Soul” (1912), about which you should read Maureen’s review. This is followed by Leonid Andreyev’s “Ben-Tobith” (1916, text available here as “On The Day of the Crucifixion”), which is the story of a man in Jerusalem who has a crippling toothache on the day of the Crucifixion. John Aubrey’s “The Phantom Basket” (1696) is another entry that I can just reproduce in its entirety:
Mr Trahern B.D. (Chaplain to Sir Orlando Bridgman Lord Keeper) a Learn’d and sober Person, was the Son of a Shoe-maker in Hereford: One night as he lay in Bed, the Moon shining very bright, he saw the Phantome of one of the Apprentices sitting in a Chair in his red Wastcoat, and Headband about his Head, and Strap upon his Knee; which Apprentice was really abed and asleep with another Fellow-apprentice in the same Chamber, and saw him. The Fellow was Living 1671. Another time, as he was in Bed he saw a Basket come Sailing in the Air along by the Valence of his Bed; I think he said there was Fruit in the Basket: It was a Phantome. From himself.
J. G. Ballard’s “The Drowned Giant” (1964) examines, in a quintessentially Ballardian clinically-detached manner, the decay of a giant human corpse that washes up on the beach following a storm. Initially an object of great spectacle, it soon becomes just another part of the landscape, vandalized by teenagers, treated as a playground by children, dismantled by profiteers, then taken for granted and eventually forgotten altogether by everyone except for the narrator.
Which brings us back around to Max Beerbohm. His “Enoch Soames” (1916), also collected in Black Water, is a fantastic examination of a desperately untalented author who sells his soul to the devil in order to have a glimpse of his place in posterity by transporting him briefly to the reading room of the British Museum 100 years hence: June 3rd, 1997. It’s also a delightfully Borgesian approach to metafiction: the narrator of the story is Max Beerbohm of 1916 (a real person), looking back on his association with Enoch Soames (fiction) around the turn of the century. The artist William Rothenstein (real) also figures in the story, in which he draws a portrait of the fictional Soames, which the real Rothenstein actually did create in 1916, backdated to the 1890s. In the future, the one reference Soames can find to himself is as the fictional centerpiece of the story “Enoch Soames,” by Max Beerbohm.
From the vantage point of 2013 I can also report that on June 3rd, 1997, the magician Teller (of Penn and fame), waiting with a crowd of fellow Beerbohm fans in the Reading Room at the appointed time, saw a man matching the description of Soames looking desperately through the bookstacks (later reported in the article “Being a faithful account of the events of the designated day, when the man who had disappeared was expected briefly to return” - some have claimed this man was an actor hired by Teller, but Teller is keeping his mouth shut).
If only this collection had had more of this kind of labyrinthine metafiction, but I think it’s just this one, Aldrich’s story, and one other presented with a fictional author, which name is presumably a pseudonym for one of the editors.
I’ll write up some things about the other stories that stuck with me enough to invite comment later.
The first edition of this book came out in Argentina in 1940 (Antología de la Literatura Fantástica), and I’ve seen it claimed that this is the first anthology to use the word “fantasy” to describe a collection of “genre” works, but I don’t know how accurate that is. I also don’t know if it was Le Guin or the original editors who selected the newer materials added to this edition - it appears that updated versions were published in 1965 and 1976.
Because I love quantifying things, I will also tell you that of these 81 pieces, 15 are by Latin American authors, 57 are by European/North Americans, 9 are by Asians, and 0 are by Africans, Australians, or Native Americans. Note that several of the European-written works are actually derived from Asian folklore, though.
Maybe “slight” is the word I’m looking for to describe many of these. Borges once said that there is “a kind of lazy pleasure in useless and out-of-the-way erudition," and while I’m not sure that this is a sentiment with which I agree, I can see how it would lead to a collection of this sort. For example, the following selection from James Frazer’s study of mythology, The Golden Bough, does not, in my view, add anything to the collection, or impart much of anything to the reader, it just proves how wide-ranging and useless the wisps collected here can be:
A fourth story, taken down near Oldenburg in Holstein, tells of a jolly dame that ate and drank and lived right merrily and had all that heart could desire, and she wished to live always. For the first hundred years all went well, but after that she began to shrink and shrivel up, till at last she could neither walk nor stand nor eat nor drink. But die she could not. At first they fed her as if she were a little child, but when she grew smaller and smaller they put her in a glass bottle and hung her up in the church. And there she still hangs, in the church of St Mary, at Lübeck. She is as small as a mouse, but once a year she stirs.
If you find reading something like that without any kind of context enjoyable, this book is for you - “People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like,” and so on. This quote, often attributed to Abraham Lincoln for some reason, actually originates with Max Beerbohm, which brings me to the part of the review where I actually talk about the stories that resonated with me enough to bother writing about.
The stories are presented alphabetically by author, so just to give you a better idea of what we’re dealing with here, here’s what we start with:
We open with “Sennin,” (1952) by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, which is a 3-page reworked koan about a wanderer who wishes to become a sennin (a kind of wise, mystical hermit). A doctor and his wife lie and say they will teach him to do so if he acts as their slave for 20 years - after this period is over the wife tells him to leap from the top of a tree, but instead of killing him his belief transforms him into a sennin. Next is Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s “A Woman Alone with Her Soul” (1912), about which you should read Maureen’s review. This is followed by Leonid Andreyev’s “Ben-Tobith” (1916, text available here as “On The Day of the Crucifixion”), which is the story of a man in Jerusalem who has a crippling toothache on the day of the Crucifixion. John Aubrey’s “The Phantom Basket” (1696) is another entry that I can just reproduce in its entirety:
Mr Trahern B.D. (Chaplain to Sir Orlando Bridgman Lord Keeper) a Learn’d and sober Person, was the Son of a Shoe-maker in Hereford: One night as he lay in Bed, the Moon shining very bright, he saw the Phantome of one of the Apprentices sitting in a Chair in his red Wastcoat, and Headband about his Head, and Strap upon his Knee; which Apprentice was really abed and asleep with another Fellow-apprentice in the same Chamber, and saw him. The Fellow was Living 1671. Another time, as he was in Bed he saw a Basket come Sailing in the Air along by the Valence of his Bed; I think he said there was Fruit in the Basket: It was a Phantome. From himself.
J. G. Ballard’s “The Drowned Giant” (1964) examines, in a quintessentially Ballardian clinically-detached manner, the decay of a giant human corpse that washes up on the beach following a storm. Initially an object of great spectacle, it soon becomes just another part of the landscape, vandalized by teenagers, treated as a playground by children, dismantled by profiteers, then taken for granted and eventually forgotten altogether by everyone except for the narrator.
Which brings us back around to Max Beerbohm. His “Enoch Soames” (1916), also collected in Black Water, is a fantastic examination of a desperately untalented author who sells his soul to the devil in order to have a glimpse of his place in posterity by transporting him briefly to the reading room of the British Museum 100 years hence: June 3rd, 1997. It’s also a delightfully Borgesian approach to metafiction: the narrator of the story is Max Beerbohm of 1916 (a real person), looking back on his association with Enoch Soames (fiction) around the turn of the century. The artist William Rothenstein (real) also figures in the story, in which he draws a portrait of the fictional Soames, which the real Rothenstein actually did create in 1916, backdated to the 1890s. In the future, the one reference Soames can find to himself is as the fictional centerpiece of the story “Enoch Soames,” by Max Beerbohm.
From the vantage point of 2013 I can also report that on June 3rd, 1997, the magician Teller (of Penn and fame), waiting with a crowd of fellow Beerbohm fans in the Reading Room at the appointed time, saw a man matching the description of Soames looking desperately through the bookstacks (later reported in the article “Being a faithful account of the events of the designated day, when the man who had disappeared was expected briefly to return” - some have claimed this man was an actor hired by Teller, but Teller is keeping his mouth shut).
If only this collection had had more of this kind of labyrinthine metafiction, but I think it’s just this one, Aldrich’s story, and one other presented with a fictional author, which name is presumably a pseudonym for one of the editors.
I’ll write up some things about the other stories that stuck with me enough to invite comment later.