Home

JLB Books

Interestingly, all that volatility in the world of text we inhabit is sometimes overtly brought to our attention in the texts themselves. Some, in particular, of Borges’s texts are a case in point. In his short fiction ‘The Book of Sand’, the book he describes assumes monstrous proportions, and is one that its owner surreptitiously transports to the Argentine National Library, and evading its staff ‘loses’ on a shelf in the basement – a book engulfed by a good many others. Here already a fictive Borges is cast in the same blur as his biographical senior, writing as narrator of ‘The Book of Sand’. In a dream of himself, in a dreamed apartment in a dream of Buenos Aires, ‘volumes’, or books that the wraith called Borges is accustomed to handle, include encyclopaedias, maps, sacred tomes, the world’s fantasies concerning itself. Someone very like him, whose domicile is Belgrano Street, in Buenos Aires, receives a caller who initially introduces himself as someone selling bibles. But bibles aren’t of interest, so the salesman, who is a Presbyterian from the Orkneys, instead sells him an octavo volume, bound in cloth, on whose spine are the words ‘Holy Writ’, and ‘Bombay’. On opening the book, the pages appear – just as in a bible – in double columns and ordered in versicles. The bookseller advises a close look at the page, since it will never be found or seen again. He goes on to say that he acquired it in exchange for a handful of rupees and a bible, from an owner who didn’t know how to read. It is impossible to find its first and last page, and is called The Book of Sand because it has no beginning or end – its very pages are terms in an infinite series. As to the bookseller’s conscience, it is clear. He is sure of not having cheated the native in exchanging the Word of God for this, a diabolic trinket.

I have long admired Terry Eagleton’s elucidations, his article on Derrida not excepted (‘The anti-Philosopher King’, The Liberal, December / January 2005).

Download AI
sheet
here

Learn more
about
the author

See other books you can buy from Amolibros