"Bizarre. Baffling. Brilliant. When I can think of more to add to this confounding literary form and structure, I'll be back...

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The story is bizarre, the main character baffling, and the structure brilliant. I’m reading Matthew Ward’s translation of The Stranger and in his Translator’s Note, Ward states that Camus acknowledged employing an “American method” when writing this novel: “short, precise sentences; the depiction of a character ostensibly without consciousness…” Ward argues that unlike what Stuart Gilbert did in his translation of this book (where Gilbert rendered a “Britannic” version), he (Ward) has decided to give this text a more “American quality” by capturing what Camus said and how he said it, and not what he meant. Touché. I peruse translator notes frequently for this sort of back and forth quibble.

All else aside, this book has a lot of movement and depth. It is a page-turning, mind-boggling, first person narrative: “when the emptiness of a man’s heart becomes, as we find it has in this man, an abyss threatening to swallow up society.” Do as I did, read this book without reading the blurb (which, now that I’ve said it I know you won’t), then get to the end of Part I and wait for the old famous exclamation: Whaaaat? To try and understand Monsieur Meursault is to try and uncover hidden meaning—which you could if you want to, of course—though I should warn you, you’d enter Meirsault’s body, see that it lacks depth, so you'd choose instead to stay in his thoughts, only to exit unfulfilled, once it is time for Meursault to leave the world.

Why does Meursault make the decisions he makes, I asked myself this numerous times; this is why I won’t discuss the plot here and perhaps you shouldn't dwell on it either, for though it seems to be a simple enough story line, it has complicated thematic layers and symbolism.

Why, Meursault?

She said, “If you go slowly, you risk getting sunstroke. But if you go too fast, you work up a sweat and then catch a chill inside the church. She was right. There was no way out” (17).

Meursault, why?

The sun was starting to burn my cheeks (58).

Seriously. Why, Meursault?

Once again I could feel the red sand and feel the burning of the sun on my forehead (67).

(Notice the page numbers and take from it what you may).

Perhaps this book is beautiful because Camus could have written it in one sitting, with a bottle of gin in his hand, and still have readers everywhere discussing its perplexity. This microscopic look at alienation and detachment is haunting, from the first sentence to the last, each character baffling. It is a book partly about the indifference of the world, one that I imagined teaching to an incoming college freshman class of creative writers; imagine what we could cover: story, pace, structure, texture, technique. For now, I’ll bask in the simple wonderment of it that leaves me still slightly befuddled. I love my “short shorts” and this one certainly moves to the top of my list.

Throughout the whole absurd life I’d lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future, across years that were still to come, and as it passed, this wind leveled whatever was offered to me at the time, in years no more real than the ones I was living.

"

" Then I discovered words: I discovered their receptive and even memorable readability, and harbored many printed in prose and verse. Some—still—accompany my solitude; the pleasure they inspired has become a second nature to me.

My guess is that many of us on Goodreads have a visceral appreciation for the aforementioned quote from Borges. We sense words as companions through solitude and even through the simple or difficult movements of life. Sometimes I am in the middle of a crowd of people I know and feel an urgency to open a book, but I sense it would seem rude. This is why good prose is a necessity, for if we devour words at least let them appear nicely ordered on the page so that we "reread with the pleasure of remembering," as Borges writes in "Literary Pleasure." Perhaps this is the advice I will heed from this collection: to "reread with the pleasure of remembering."

"When Fiction Lives in Fiction, " is one of my favorite essays, as it elucidates the literary mind of Borges. It encourages the art of reading. It is brief, a capsule of literary intelligence, yet also so complex with personal probing, textual analysis, and comparative literature; it is the portrayal of a student in conversation with books:

Arthur Schopenhauer wrote that dreaming and wakefulness are the pages of a single book, and that to read them in order is to live, and to leaf through them at random, to dream.

This collection is erudite. It is a compilation of his compact writings: essays, book reviews, film criticism, lectures, and prologues. It is separated into seven parts and ranges from 1922-1986. Those interested in Dante may appreciate the esoteric NINE DANTESQUE ESSAYS in Part V more than I did. This collection is an ambitious reading feat that I completed in small doses, an hour or two here and there.

It's intriguing, sometimes even comical, when your favorite authors talk about your other favorite authors. Borges finds Eliot's poetry to be like Valéry's, "gloomy and inadequate" but thinks Eliot is an "exemplary prose stylist." In "Capsule Biographies" he writes about authors, some I have never heard about, but my favorite capsule biography is Virginia Woolf's. I admire how he writes about her, how he writes about her books, and about her prowess as a writer: "hers is indisputably among the most sensitive of the minds and imaginations now felicitously experimenting with the English novel." And in his "Book Reviews and Notes" he is as equally intrigued with Faulkner's vivid details and time play in "The Unvanquished" as he is with Lady Murasaki's visual details and "miraculous naturalness" in The Tale of Genji.

Not surprisingly, I was drawn to the essays on books. Borges describes James Joyce's writing as "delicate and intense," a description I would ascribe to Borges' writing and critique in this collection. Of Henry James he writes, "I have visited some literature of the East and West; I have compiled an encyclopedic anthology of fantastic literature; I have translated Kafka, Melville, and Bloy; I know of no stranger work than that of Henry James."

"On Oscar Wilde," he finds his syntax "always very simple," his "meter spontaneous, or seeks to appear spontaneous" and he states that "of the many British writers, none is so accessible to foreigners." Borges, as an editor of a literary magazine, was also the first to publish one of Julio Cortázar's stories, "House Taken Over." I smiled when I read this because although I've never read Cortázar's stories, his Save Twilight: Selected Poems is one of my favorite poetry collections.

I said my takeaway would be to "reread with the pleasure of remembering." Come to think of it, the more I read this book, the more I was inspired by the art of the personal library built as a way to learn the world. What will the personal library I've been building over the past few years say about me? Hopefully that I'm a student of the world. Borges was astoundingly well-read, and I find that awe-inspiring. He knew how to analyze a text, delve into an oeuvre, and uncover books that showcased parts of the world in unique ways. "I don't know if I'm a good writer," he writes," but I think I'm an excellent reader, or in any case, a sensitive and grateful one." His "Prologues to a Personal Library," is also one of my favorite in this collection because of the affecting way in which he writes about books:

A book is a thing among things, a volume lost among the volumes that populate the indifferent universe, until it meets its reader, the person destined for its symbols. What then occurs is that singular emotion called beauty, that lovely mystery which neither psychology nor criticism can describe. 'The rose has no why,' said Angelus Silesius; centuries later, Whistler declared, 'Art happens.'

"

"I recall from my youth wondering what the Apostle Paul was doing in Arabia for three years. I must have been reading, or was being read to, from a Bible story book intended for children because I’m pretty sure I was not reading Paul’s New Testament letters. Since then I have learned that the time between Paul’s Damascus road experience and the beginning of his first missionary journey with Barnabas was fourteen years. These missing years are ignored in the account of Paul’s life given in the book of Acts.

This book, Paul of Arabia, is half fictional novel and half nonfiction history account of those missing years. The nonfiction half is intermingled with the novel providing footnoted history and archeological information to explain political and sociological surroundings referenced in the novel portions of the book’s narrative. The book also contains a number of maps, photographs, and illustrations.

Paul’s movements during those fourteen years as described by this book consists of (1) Damascus road experience, (2) short time in Damascus, (3) two years in the Nabataean Kingdom (a.k.a. Arabia), (4) return to Damascus, (5) trip to Jerusalem to meet with Peter and James the brother of Jesus, (6) about ten years in Tarsus, (7) return to Jerusalem to meet with the Apostles, and (8) beginning of first missionary journey to Cyprus and Asia Minor.

The scriptural bases for these missing years are in this (view spoiler)[

"I did not go up to Jerusalem to see those who were apostles before I was, but I went into Arabia. Later I re-turned to Damascus. Then after three years, I went up to Jerusalem to get acquainted with Cephas and stayed with him fifteen days. I saw none of the other apostles—only James, the Lord's brother" (Gal 1:17-19).

Gal 2:1-2—"Then after fourteen years, I went up again to Jerusalem, this time with Barnabas. I took Titus along also. I went in response to a revelation.”

(hide spoiler)]

This book’s speculation about Paul’s time in Nabataea has him spending most of his time in Petra working as a tent maker. While there he makes a pilgrimage to Mount Sinai. He also gets married but later his wife dies. He gets run out of Petra because King Aretas IV believed he was the cause of a plague. Aretas’ agents pursue Paul to Damascus so he goes to Tarsus after his first trip back to Jerusalem. Then after ten years in Tarsus he returns to Jerusalem again for his second visit with the other Apostles.

The story in the novel’s portion of the book is filled with sufficient detail to make it more interesting than the summary in the previous paragraph, but this novel’s narrative isn’t going to win any prizes. It reads as if it was a novel written by a Bible scholar writing his first fiction, which it is."