The story concerns Pedro Damián, whose recent death the narrator hears about in a postscript to a letter. The narrator decides to write a story about him, but he only met him once and can’t remember his face or find the one photo he has of him. So he goes to meet a man who did know him: an army colonel who was Damián’s commander in the Battle of Masoller about 40 years earlier. He is disappointed to discover that Damián was a coward.

Absurdly, Col. Tabares’ version of the events embarrassed me. I’d have preferred that they not have taken place quite that way. Out of the aged Damián, a man I’d had a glimpse of on a single afternoon, and that, many years ago, I had unwittingly constructed a sort of idol; Tabares’ version shattered it. Suddenly I understood Damián’s reserve and stubborn solitude; they had been dictated not by modesty, but by shame.

However, the next time he visits the colonel, he has a guest with him who remembers Damián as a young man dying a heroic death at the Battle of Masoller, not a coward who lived quietly and died 40 years later. And on this visit, the colonel has no memory of Damián at all.

Later, the man who wrote that letter bringing news of Damián’s death has also forgotten Damián’s existence. The colonel, meanwhile, now remembers him as a hero.

I think that earlier mention of preferring events not to have taken place quite that way is important because soon things get much more complicated, and it’s not clear which way they happened at all. Is the narrator of “The Other Death” perhaps changing events to take place the way he would have wanted? Is he giving Damián the heroic narrative he prefers?

The references in the story suggest, however, that it’s not the writer but God who is changing the course of history. The original postscript in which he learned of Damián’s death was part of a letter about the poem “The Past” by Ralph Waldo Emerson. In this poem, Emerson says the past is fixed and can’t be changed even by God:

All is now secure and fast;
Not the gods can shake the Past.

Borges, however (or the narrator, if they’re different) tells us of a different theory posited by the medieval theologian Pier Damiani, who wrote in De Omnipotentia that God can change the past. Pier Damiani, of course, is a very similar name to Pedro Damián, and Borges adds a further note of uncertainty:

I suspect that Pedro Damián (if he ever existed) was not called Pedro Damián, and that I remember him under that name in order to be able to believe, someday in the future, that his story was suggested to me by the arguments of Pier Damiani.

It seems, then, that the story is an exploration of what would happen if God did change the past. Perhaps, Borges says, Pedro Damián behaved like a coward and always regretted it; on his death, God granted him the request he’d always prayed for—he changed the past so that Damián died a hero in his youth.

But what of all the people who saw him behave like a coward and remembered him as an old man? The confusion and forgetfulness are part of the process of adjustment to the new reality. The writer himself is part of this process, as Borges hints at in that passage in which he doubts that Damián existed and admits to “false recollections.”

Overall, I loved “The Other Death”. At first, there were a lot of details of battles and wars with references to the footnotes, and I thought it was going to be a historical story. But as the multiple conflicting memories of Pedro Damián’s life and death began to appear, I found myself drawn into the story. In some ways, it’s a fictional version of a thought experiment, in the same vein as “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius“, “The Secret Miracle” and other Borges stories. But it’s also a satisfying story to read, as you want to find out what on earth is going on and how all the contradictions can be resolved.

This post is part of my Borges Marathon, a slow and perhaps never to be completed journey through the collected fictions of Jorge Luis Borges.

The post The Other Death: Borges Marathon, Part 34 appeared first on Andrew Blackman.

The reason is that these days, they’re far more likely to be AI-generated spam than genuine human connections. They often impersonate authors or film directors (I had one the other day from James Patterson) or claim to be from respectable real-life book clubs or literary festivals.

What they all have in common is that they work very hard to convince me that I’m a great and woefully underappreciated writer whose books should be getting much more attention than they are. They pile on the flattery, saying how much the book in question stayed with them and how genuinely shocked they are that it’s not higher up the bestseller lists. I delete them on sight, so I don’t have a lot of examples, but here’s an extract from one that came in the other day:

“Your sharp look at online identities, the tension between image and reality, and the way love presses against a web of lies stayed with me. One small word I learned from the book is truth.”

Most of the emails pull off the unique AI trick of including masses of specific detail and yet still seeming weirdly generic. They muse on the motivations of my characters, praise my innovative narrative techniques, and bring up highly specific plot details to show how closely they read my book and how much they loved it. Yet the fakery is still easy to spot, not because of the widely publicised ‘AI tells’ like em-dashes and “it’s not X, it’s Y” constructions, but because of an uncanny emptiness. Writing exists to help one human communicate with another, and at no point does AI writing, no matter how grammatical or polished, how folksy or humorous, ever quite manage to convince you that there’s a real person on the other end of the line.

Often, the emails strive to sound genuine by using words like “genuinely” a lot. Today’s arrival had four instances:

“I want to start by saying something I genuinely mean: A Virtual Love is not just another novel about the Internet. It is a compelling and very entertaining look at the complexities of our hyperreal age, and it is an insightful and witty exploration of the disconnect between image and reality, truth and appearance, and whether love and sincere sentiment can overcome the short term thrills of social media.”

“That is not a plot convenience. It is a genuinely accurate depiction of how sustained deception works, and it gives the novel real psychological weight.”

“My work sits at the intersection of storytelling, audience psychology, and digital visibility, helping authors ensure their books do not simply get published, but genuinely get discovered.”

“Over the past several years I have worked with authors across literary fiction, contemporary romance, and culturally engaged fiction, helping position their books in ways that build credibility, expand reach, and connect with the readers who are actively searching for exactly the kind of witty, insightful, and genuinely entertaining work this novel provides.”

They never ask for money upfront. “James Patterson”, for example, just wrote to say how much he loved my book and to ask an innocent question: “As an author, I am curious how “On the Holloway Road” came together. Did the characters come first, with the road built to give them somewhere to go, or did the journey arrive first, and the characters became the people who could walk it?”

However, I assume that a money grab is where it’s going at some point down the line. The flattery is the setup, and people who respond get hit with the pitch: presumably some kind of expensive book-marketing scheme. Both the Society of Authors in the UK and the Author’s Guild in the USA have warned of a rise in this kind of email scams targeting authors.

As entertaining as it can be to watch large language models genuinely trying to sound genuine, I find it sad that reader letters, once a source of joy, are now something I presume to be spam. I’m pretty sure I could tell a real human email from this AI slop, but what about an email from a real reader who doesn’t feel confidence in their writing and uses ChatGPT to help them compose the message? I might well mark it as spam these days.

More importantly, as the volume increases, will authors simply stop reading fan letters, and will readers stop writing them? History is full of famous fan letters, whether it’s Charles Dickens writing out of the blue to George Eliot or an 18-year-old James Joyce sending a gushing letter to Henrik Ibsen. It would be a shame if that long history ended.

Spam, of course, has been around for a long time—I wrote an article about it way back in 2003—and we’ve found ways to deal with it and sort the real from the fake. Probably the same will happen with this new wave, which I’m sure is not just hitting authors. What makes this type tricky is how dramatically AI has reduced the cost and time needed to create something believable (or at least almost-believable). But with new EU rules forcing the major AI models to introduce watermarking, perhaps it will be easier for email providers to identify AI-generated messages and divert them automatically to the Spam folder.

In the meantime, I’ll keep deleting the fawning AI-generated emails. The good thing is that writing this post has prompted me to look back through my old emails for some real, human-written messages, and they warmed my heart. Here’s one from 2 July 2012:

Dear Andrew, I just finished reading your book and felt compelled to email you – I don’t twitter or tweet hence the old fashioned correspondence.

I’ve lived in Islington all my life and love reading about the local area and places that I’ve walked along or can relate to. There is something quite comforting about the Holloway Road even though most of it could be considered quite grotty but it’s also probably true to say that most of life exists there and I loved the way this was reflected in the book. I also loved that I could go from completely despising Neil to wanting to give him a hug in a matter of seconds. I feel that it’s going to be one of those books that will stay with me for a long time and keep me reflecting on why we crave adventure but that often the idea is far more exciting than the reality.

On another level, it has, as often happens, reinforced my love of London with all its faults, beauty, colourful characters and life.

The post AI spambots think I’m a genius appeared first on Andrew Blackman.

The differences, I think, are illustrative of our societal direction of travel. In both novels, artists live through times when the world seems to be falling apart. For Ishiguro, it’s the rise of militarism in 1930s Japan that would lead to the disaster of World War II, and for Eastham, it’s the disintegration of Europe in a near-future dystopia riddled by pandemics and out-of-control climate change.

The “floating world” of Ishiguro’s novel is the nightlife of Tokyo, a transient and ephemeral world that the artist tries to fix on the canvas. Ben Eastham’s Floating World is very different: a vast dome being constructed on a Greek island by an evil billionaire as a refuge for him and a super-rich minority against the ravages of climate change. This Floating World is intended to be permanent, while the civilisation around it comes to look increasingly fleeting. It’s a kind of Noah’s Ark designed to preserve a libertarian-tech-bro version of human society from the floods to come.

Ishiguro’s narrator, Masuji Ono, made a conscious choice to side with fascism and devote his artistic skills to patriotic propaganda. Looking back on those times, Ono has this to say about his culpability (or lack thereof):

“There’s no need to blame ourselves unduly. We at least acted on what we believed and did our utmost. It’s just that in the end, we turned out to be ordinary men. Ordinary men with no special gifts of insight. It was simply our misfortune to have been ordinary men during such times.”

Eastham’s narrator is also an ordinary man with no special gifts of insight. He accepts a job on the Floating World, helping with the research and preparations for a major exhibition being staged by a famous artist to give the doomsday bunker some good PR. He needs the money, and he’s been depressed and stuck in his life since the death of his wife several years earlier.

After that, the plot happens to him despite his valiant attempts to remain oblivious to it. The plot is quite intricate, involving a secret smuggling ring to help refugees cross the Mediterranean, a conspiracy against the Floating World itself, and even some surprising connections to his dead wife, but he plays no role in any of it except to stumble around, get the wrong end of the stick and occasionally balls things up.

I found his passivity and lack of agency quite frustrating, but it’s probably a fair reflection of the times. Back in 1930s Japan, Ishiguro’s antihero enthusiastically waved the flag and deliberately used art to support a cause he genuinely believed in, no matter how disastrous it turned out to be. Today, many of us are sleepwalking into fascism and climate catastrophe while doing little to drive the plot. Many activists are fighting and risking everything, but too many of the rest of us are letting climate change happen to us, letting art and creativity be co-opted. I include myself in this: here I am reviewing literary novels, when a far more appropriate response to the times we are living in would be to glue myself to an airport runway.

The Floating World‘s author, Ben Eastham, is an art critic for The Guardian and other publications, and he is very good at satirising the art world’s unique combination of hypocrisy, pretentiousness and cynicism. For example:

“Next to me was a painter whose market value had for years been inflated by the assumption that he would imminently overdose, creating a demand that would be advantageous to his collectors.”

“I followed him up a winding marble staircase to a third-floor corridor lined with people wearing black jeans and black boots or vintage sportswear. By virtue of their determination to look different, artists look much the same everywhere.”

“Knowing better than to be cornered by a performance artist, I hurried out of the room. In the kitchen a topless man was striking a brass gong with the heel of his hand. His movement through the room created a press that pushed me into a young woman with small ears and a young man with a tattoo of a fish on his wrist who was saying that the work described a profundity which must be outside of words. She responded by telling him to shut the fuck up, Michael.”

“The gallerist went over to engage the women in conversation about the colonisation of time by late capitalism and the competitively priced drawings that illustrated this phenomenon, which could be purchased individually or as a series.”

There are also some interesting uses of artistic terms in descriptions. I still can’t quite visualise the first one, but overall I found them a nice touch:

“The police on the street below me appeared foreshortened against their shields, like inverted putti.”

“a mahogany motorboat like a Venetian water taxi bobbed on the grisaille sea.”

“a cosmatesque pattern in sound.”

“I was looking out over the town like some self-consciously melancholy Rückenfigur.”

Beyond the art world, though, The Floating World is also a book about connection. Events are connected, even when we don’t see the connections ourselves. The billionaire’s island refuge is an attempt to sever those connections and create a world in which he and his friends are safe as the rest of us burn. Meanwhile, our narrator searches for connections everywhere from Renaissance art to the patterns in a motorboat’s wake, while spectacularly failing to see the ones in front of his eyes.

“If I could only read what was written into the world, I thought, then I might better understand how to move through it.”

His friends in London don’t seem to have the same difficulties—they join strikes and protests against the system that is bringing about their downfall. But he is looking for something different, something deeper. Would it make a difference if he found it? Probably not. Despite his moral qualms about the Floating World, he stays in it, doesn’t fight against it in any meaningful way, and at one point pitches the billionaire with an idea of how he could stay in it full-time after his contract ends. As Roland Barthes says in the book’s epigraph, “I look for signs, but of what?”

Thanks to Fitzcarraldo Editions for the review copy of The Floating World by Ben Eastham, which will be published in the UK on 8 October. Unusually, although Eastham is a British writer, it looks as if the US edition was launched slightly earlier, by Astra Publishing House.

The post The Floating World by Ben Eastham appeared first on Andrew Blackman.

It shares several features of other Borges fictions. Like “The Cult of the Phoenix“, it’s a kind of literary puzzle or riddle. In this case, the main point is to guess the identity of the main character, who is a famous mythological character. Borges drops a few hints along the way, like a thread helping us to navigate the literary labyrinth, but it’s not until the final line that he reveals the answer.

Note: I’m going to reveal the answer to the riddle in the next paragraph, so if you’re about to read the story and don’t want to spoil it, look away now!

It’s also a retelling of a famous story from a very unusual point of view, much like “A Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz“, which we read a couple of months ago. In this case, the famous story is the killing of the Minotaur by the Greek hero Theseus. Even for those of us not well versed in Greek mythology, it’s a familiar tale, and it has obvious parallels in other monster-slaying fables from a variety of cultures.

In “The House of Asterion”, Borges chooses to tell the story from the point of view of the monster. The effect is to make us feel sorry for the Minotaur, who bears no ill will to the people around him. When he leaves his labyrinth and is spotted by the inhabitants of the town, he misinterprets the reason for their terror:

“Not for nothing was my mother a queen; I cannot mix with commoners, even if my modesty should wish it.”

The Minotaur doesn’t see himself as a monster, of course—no monsters do. When we inhabit another person’s reality (or another creature’s reality in this case), it becomes impossible to see them as a monster. That is only possible when you view the story only from one side, as we always do with monster-slaying fables. But Borges delights in blurring the lines between heroes and villains (see “The Shape of the Sword“, for example). He helps us to see the world through the Minotaur’s eyes, and we can no longer view the monster’s killing as a simple act of heroism.

Borges writes in his Afterword: “I owe to a canvas painted by Watts in 1896 the story called ‘The House of Asterion’ and the character of its poor protagonist.” When I found the painting online, I could see why.

There’s nothing monstrous about this Minotaur. Yes, he does have some kind of dead animal in his grip, but his gaze is fixed longingly on the horizon. The face reminds me of a faithful dog awaiting its owner’s return. We can’t hate or fear this Minotaur. We can’t see him as a monster or feel good about plunging our sword into his defenceless body. I can picture Borges viewing this painting in a gallery or book and feeling the germ of a story begin to take shape in his mind.

Many of the familiar symbols and themes of Borges fiction are present and correct. In addition to the switching perspectives and the blurring of the line between hero and villain, we have the presence of a labyrinth and frequent references to infinity. The Minotaur tells us that the labyrinth has 14 doors, but Borges adds a note from an imagined editor telling us that the number fourteen means “infinite”. (Who this editor is and how this person knows anything about the Minotaur’s language or number system is a mystery that the reader is left to ponder.)

There’s also a religious dimension to the story. The Minotaur views his killings of the young men who enter the labyrinth as freeing them from evil, and he eagerly awaits the arrival of his own “redeemer” who will free him from the solitude of his existence. In a poignant moment just before his death, he ponders the nature of the redeemer, as humans over the centuries have speculated about the form of God:

“What will my redeemer be like, I wonder. Will he be bull or man? Could he possibly be a bull with the face of a man? Or will he be like me?”

When Theseus finally arrives to “redeem” this poor, lonely creature, casually remarking that the creature barely defended itself, we see the killing in an entirely different light.

“The House of Asterion” contains a timeless lesson with strong contemporary resonance. We live in an age when politicians are routinely trying to dehumanise whole groups of people, aiming to make us accept their imprisonment/deportation/slaughter. After all, who wouldn’t want to slay monsters, and who wouldn’t want to celebrate the hero with the bloodied sword? But compassion and empathy for our fellow beings demand of us that we reject simplistic binaries and embrace the more complex truth that Borges shows us: there are no heroes, and there are no monsters. We must make the effort to see the world through the eyes of those we hate and fear. We might be surprised what we discover.

The post The House of Asterion: Borges Marathon, Part 33 appeared first on Andrew Blackman.

The first was how successfully Marie Darrieussecq evokes a time and a place: primarily southwestern France in the 1980s, although later we move into the 90s and early 2000s in Paris, London and Los Angeles. This is one of those novels that leaves you feeling as if you’ve lived for a time as a teenager in that small village.

Interestingly, Darrieussecq doesn’t achieve that feeling through meticulous physical description—there’s actually very little description of buildings or landscapes that I can remember. Instead, she evokes the atmosphere of the place, the claustrophobic feeling of growing up in a place where everybody knows you, where every false step will be remembered and recounted, where you’re a teenager bursting with questions about sex and your body and a million other things, but you can’t ask anyone because they’ll judge you and your secret questions, and the anonymity of the Web doesn’t exist yet.

The second thing that stood out from How to Make a Woman was the characterisation. The novel revolves around two teenage girls, Rose and Solange, who were best friends as small children but gradually drift apart as the novel progresses and they take different paths into adulthood. As with the setting, I really felt as if I knew these two girls/women.

This part, I think, is due to the narrative style. The whole novel is narrated in third person, but the first section focuses tightly on Rose’s perspective, the second retells the same events from Solange’s point of view, and the short final section brings the two strands together. In the Rose section, we are deep inside Rose’s head, and the same applies in Solange’s. That kind of deep immersion doesn’t always work in novels, but in this one it does. It gives us a strong sense of the inner lives of both characters.

This was my first time reading Darrieussecq, so I read How to Make a Woman as a standalone novel, but I later discovered from Wikipedia that she has written several novels that are set in the same fictional village of Clèves in the Basque country of southwestern France, with the same cast of recurring characters shown at different stages of life. It sounds a bit like the work of Elizabeth Strout, where I enjoy tracing characters through different situations, so I think if you’ve read other Darrieussecq novels, you’ll probably get more out of How to Make a Woman than I did.

However, it does work as a standalone novel too. As the title suggests, Darrieussecq is exploring different ways of becoming an adult woman. Rose takes a more conventional path, studying hard and marrying her childhood sweetheart and having names picked out for her children before she’s even graduated from high school. She stays with her boyfriend Christian despite having frequent doubts about whether she really loves him, mostly because she’s scared of a life without the certainties to which she has learned to cling:

“Leave Christian, and fall into what dizzying depths?”

Damage avoidance is hardly the most romantic reason for staying with your future husband, but it’s Rose’s way of navigating life and becoming a woman. Here’s her reaction to seeing a child across the street:

“Rose would like to erect a magic shield around him. It’s such an effort going through life avoiding life, doing your best not to suffer too much, rubbing up against reality as little as possible. She understands that.”

That protective instinct reminded me of The Catcher in the Rye, a book that How to Make a Woman doesn’t resemble in any other way. It also tells us a lot about how Rose views life and explains her choices and her way of becoming a woman.

Solange, on the other hand, rubs up against reality quite a lot. She has a baby at 15, then leaves the boy with her mother so that she can escape the village and free herself from the feeling that her life is over before it’s begun. She goes to Bordeaux, then London, then Paris, then LA, staying in squats and partying in gay bars that at the time were illicit and countercultural and then, when the AIDS epidemic hit, became places of sorrow. She gets a part in a sitcom, then a movie later, and gradually builds a career and a life in America.

The two sections, Rose’s and Solange’s, give quite different views of the same events, and it’s up to us to decide which is correct, or perhaps the correct answer is both and neither. Rose seems at times to resent Solange’s freedom, even though she would never have wanted to make those choices herself. And Solange also resents Rose at times:

“Rose, her best friend Rose, is trying to be kind. But it’s too hard to accept it, that kindness. They’re so perfect, mother, daughter, with their real tea, not in bags, their ceramic teapot, their eyes full of tenderness and understanding. Solange could hit them.”

From Rose’s description, Solange seems to have an easy life of wealth and fame, but Solange’s perspective is quite different, with her life much more of a struggle and her success much more limited and precarious. There are plenty of inconsistencies like that, which it’s up to us as readers to resolve (or to leave hanging if we prefer).

In reality, of course, there are as many ways to become a woman as there are women. Darrieussecq gives us two contrasting approaches, but despite the self-help-style book title, I’m sure she’s not suggesting these are the only two. What is, perhaps, essential to becoming a woman is what lies beneath the story: not so much the safety/freedom dichotomy but the slow and sometimes painful process of pulling a life together through a combination of decisions made with limited information, responses to emotional pulls, the intervention of random chance, coincidences and happenstance, fear and uncertainty. Nobody really “makes a woman”—it’s not a conscious effort but a chaotic process that nobody, least of all the person at the centre of it, really understands until they look back on it later.

In that sense, coming of age as a girl in 1980s Clèves is not so different from coming of age as a boy in 1990s London or [insert your decade and place here]. Those are the good literary experiences, I think: when you get taken into a completely different world that nevertheless reflects something of your own experience and makes you feel less alone.

Thanks to Fitzcarraldo Editions for the review copy of How to Make a Woman by Marie Darrieussecq, which will be published tomorrow in the UK. Looks as if the North American edition will be published next month by Transit Books.

Let me know in the comments if you’ve read any other books by Marie Darrieussecq and can recommend (or recommend avoiding) any of them. I might dive further into the Clèves literary world after this.

The post How to Make a Woman by Marie Darrieussecq appeared first on Andrew Blackman.

Paris in Turmoil by Eric Hazan

A lifelong Parisian examines the changes the city has witnessed over decades and centuries. I read this one for Emma’s “Paris in July” event and wrote a full review here.

Across the River and Into the Trees by Ernest Hemingway

I read this late Hemingway novel after Meredith of Dolce Bellezza recommended it in a comment on my May roundup. I enjoyed the melancholy, death-tinged mood and the Venice setting, but I found the relationship between the retired American colonel and the teenage Italian countess tedious. So quite a mixed bag for me, but overall I’m glad I read it. More detailed thoughts to follow if I have time.

The Three-Cornered Hat by Pedro Antonio de Alarcón

Another book that I reviewed this month—this time a new translation of a 19th-century Spanish novel about corruption and social hierarchies. Also, a comic novel that I actually found funny, which is a rarity.

Running Down a Dream by Tim Grahl

I was expecting a fairly typical you-can-do-it creative-self-help adrenaline shot, but this book is a little different. Running Down a Dream kind of delivers the “road map to winning creative battles” that it promises in the subtitle, but it also undercuts that message by showing that the best techniques don’t necessarily provide satisfaction, and that even when you do run down that dream, it doesn’t always make you happy. So more of an adrenaline shot with a side of Xanax.

The West by Naoíse Mac Sweeney

In The West, historian Naoíse Mac Sweeney shows in great detail how “the grand narrative of Western Civilisation is factually wrong,” and the myth of an unbroken line of descent from ancient Greece through Rome to modern Europe and North America is perpetuated not because it’s true but because it’s ideologically useful.

I want to write more about this book, but in the meantime, please read it. We could save a lot of time on tedious culture wars if more people understood when and why the West was invented.

Beauty Is a Wound by Eka Kurniawan

I bought this Indonesian novel in a bookshop in Jakarta and recently discovered it in a storage box. I’m glad I read it. It’s a very creative fictional journey through Indonesia’s painful history with heavy doses of magical realism (ghosts, curses, people returning from the dead, men who are impervious to bullets, etc.).

However, there were also some parts that left a very bad taste in my mouth, primarily around this male writer’s repeated depictions of rape, incest, bestiality, grown men falling in love with children, etc. I was bothered not so much by their frequency in the book (which could perhaps be justified based on allegories to the country’s violent history both during and after colonisation) but by the language with which they’re described and the way characters react to them, which seems at times to normalise or even approve of them. So, although it has some wonderful elements, I wouldn’t recommend this one.

What did you read this month?

Let me know your favourite books of the month in the comments, and tell me if you’ve read or think you’d like to read any of mine.

The post Books I read in July 2026 appeared first on Andrew Blackman.

The second thing that makes it stand out is the plot: Emma Zunz fakes her own rape to give herself a justification for killing a man she believes cheated her father and caused his suicide. Sexual violence and revenge killings don’t make much of an appearance in the work of Jorge Luis Borges outside of this story.

The reason becomes clear in the Afterword to The Aleph (1949), the collection in which this story appeared. Borges says that the “wonderful plot—much superior to its timid execution—was given me by Cecilia Ingenieros.”

The name didn’t mean anything to me, and most online sources just refer to her as a friend, but this Spanish-language newspaper article claims that Borges and Ingenieros were in love and planning to marry, and Borges wrote this story while they were together. But then Ingenieros abruptly broke things off and went to Europe without him.

This explains, perhaps, why the story is a bit of an outlier in subject matter. But in its construction, it is very typical of Borges. He returns to the theme of a life consisting of a single moment, from the previous story, “A Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz“, when Emma Zunz receives the letter telling of her father’s death:

“Her father’s death was the only thing that had happened in the world, and it would go on happening, endlessly, forever after.”

The revenge plot is then related in meticulous detail, with Emma Zunz completing a series of apparently unrelated acts, all of which will come together at the very end to explain how she set things up to make it appear as if Loewenthal had raped her and she had killed him in self-defence. Borges as usual blurs the lines between real and unreal, honour and deceit. Although Emma Zunz commits murder and lies about being raped, she is still clearly the hero of the story, with a strong moral justification for everything she does:

“Emma Zunz’s tone of voice was real, her shame was real, her hatred was real. The outrage that had been done to her was real, as well; all that was false were the circumstances, the time, and one or two proper names.”

What makes the story successful, I think, is the combination of suspense and revelation that marks so many Borges stories. He tells us a lot of what is going to happen, but withholds just enough to keep our interest. We know from the start that Emma Zunz blames Loewenthal for her father’s death and means to take revenge, probably by killing him. But then she goes about all those apparently unrelated tasks, like calling Loewenthal to snitch on her striking colleagues, reading about a Scandinavian ship arriving from Malmo, going down to the docks and picking up a sailor from the ship to have sex and then tearing up the money he gives her, etc. It all seems to be part of a clear plan, but it’s not at all clear what that plan is until the last few lines of the story, and that revelation at the end is very satisfying.

So although it’s a departure from the usual content of Borges stories, “Emma Zunz” works very well and is one of the best stories in The Aleph collection. And despite his self-deprecating afterword, the execution is not timid at all.

For more reviews of Borges fictions, check out my years-long Borges Marathon. And do join in, either by commenting below or by writing your own thoughts about these stories on your blog or social media.

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What does all this have to do with a nineteenth-century Spanish comic novella? Well, at the heart of The Three-Cornered Hat is the Corregidor, a corrupt authority figure who tries to use his power to seduce another man’s wife, among other vile acts. He writes a letter to grant the woman’s nephew a plum job and then issues orders for her husband to be arrested so that he’s out of the way.

But it’s not just the Corregidor: everyone in authority in the novel is corrupt, dishonest or hypocritical in some way. The Corregidor’s assistant, Garduña, is named after a small Spanish mammal known for its cunning and speed. The village mayor happily goes along with the Corregidor’s plan, after he has drunk a jug of wine and administered his wife’s daily beating. The village constable is also a drunkard, and the clergymen, lawyer and other notables are all flawed in some way.

The Three-Cornered Hat, then, is a novel that has a lot to say about the times we are living in, when a convicted felon can launch a war to divert attention from the fact that his name comes up more than a million times in the Epstein files. The Corregidor is a small, petty man who uses the power embodied in his three-cornered hat to make himself feel bigger. No matter where we live, I think we’ve all probably encountered someone like that.

Thankfully, the novel doesn’t centre on the Corregidor. The main characters are the miller, Lucas, and his wife, Frasquita. They live just outside the city and regularly entertain the most powerful men on their afternoon strolls, plying them with food and wine in exchange for favours. Although they are not rich, it is worth it to them to give these men free food and hospitality.

“In times when more than fifty different levies were owed to Church and State, a rustic of such clear intelligence had little to lose by keeping the goodwill of aldermen, canons, friars, notaries, and other persons of consequence … Tio Lucas saved himself a fortune each year through his policy of entertaining everyone.”

The Corregidor’s attempt to seduce Frasquita by presenting himself honestly as a man in love with her is a disaster: she contemptuously rebuffs him (the chapter is cleverly called “The Bombardment of Pamplona” in reference to the city’s renowned fortifications). So he comes up with a new plan that depends not on his person but on his power alone.

As the plot advances, the book becomes reminiscent of a classic opera buffa, with much changing of clothes and misunderstandings that are resolved in the end to the benefit of the virtuous and the detriment of the evil. The drama shows people in their true colours, and it’s those without power who are revealed as superior in virtue to those who in daily life are superior in status.

If that sounds like the ending of a folk tale, that’s because this novel is indeed based on a traditional Spanish folk tale—the novel begins with an account, which may or may not be true, of how Alarcón (or his narrator) first heard it.

However, The Three-Cornered Hat is also more than a folk tale. Alarcón brings in carefully observed details of the period to make subtle points about social classes and their values, and the translation faithfully either renders those details into English or leaves them in Spanish with a note to explain their significance. In a few places, these notes veered too far into explanation for my liking, spelling out details of the plot or of Alarcón’s jokes that were either obvious or that I would have preferred to work out by myself. Mostly, however, they were helpful in detailing the meaning of particular subtleties of dress and behaviour that would have been obvious to a nineteenth-century Spanish audience but meant nothing to me.

I’m always a bit suspicious of comic novels because I never seem to laugh out loud while reading a book in the same way as I do when watching a movie or a stand-up comic. However, I did find this book funny—not in a “laugh out loud” way but in appreciation of the satire, the absurd situations, the ridiculous pomposity of the minor officials who act as if they are the King of Spain.

It’s also a folk tale told in a sophisticated literary style, with symbols and foreshadowing scattered throughout. One great use of foreshadowing is when Lucas and Frasquita jokingly talk about what would happen if the Corregidor succeeded in seducing Frasquita, and Lucas says he doesn’t know what he would do because he would be a different person then—his whole life is built around his faith in her.

“I am now a man who believes in you as in himself, and has no more life in him than this faith. If I stopped believing in you, I should die, or become a new man; I should live in a different way; it would seem to me that I had just been born…”

This is a light-hearted conversation at the time, but it takes on a new light later on, when in all the confusion and misunderstandings, Lucas does stop believing in his wife for a time, and he does start behaving like an entirely different person.

Overall, I’d recommend this short novella as a quick, light-hearted story that also has plenty of depth for those who want to look for it. The Three-Cornered Hat is published by Espresso Publishing House, a new publisher based in Calgary that’s dedicated to “beautiful new editions of overlooked European fiction.” That sounds like a great premise to me, so I was happy to accept a review copy of this, their second published book.

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What Eric Hazan writes about instead is the long-term changes that happen in vibrant cities like Paris. Neighbourhoods evolve, ethnic groups come and go, old-style buses and taxis disappear, traditional buildings are replaced with both architectural marvels and eyesores.

I suppose that if you step back and look at Paris over the longue durée, all these changes could indeed look like turmoil, even though it’s not what we usually understand by the term. I’d be interested to hear from Emma or other French readers if the French title Le Tumulte de Paris has different connotations.

Although Hazan has a clear nostalgia for some of the forgotten elements of Parisian life—like newspaper delivery bicycles with smaller front wheels to accommodate an enormous metal rack of papers hot off the press—he mostly takes an even-handed approach to the changes he documents in this book.

“‘Paris is no longer what it used to be’—yes, and fortunately it changes and constantly evolves like a living organism, some parts atrophying while others proliferate.”

As far as I can tell, Paris in Turmoil was the last book Hazan wrote before his death in 2024 at the age of 87. He lived most of his life in Paris, and it’s clear from this book that he knew its streets and neighbourhoods intimately. While reading it, I felt as if Hazan wanted to document all the details he had spent a lifetime observing, to pass them on to whoever picked up the book before they fade into the past and are forgotten.

I could stroll down Rue des Rosiers today, for example, and have no idea that where the Japanese fashion store now stands, the Goldenberg charcuterie used to serve up legendary pastrami and gefilte fish to residents of the now-disappeared Jewish quarter. I wouldn’t know that tobacconists were often run by natives of Auvergne. I also wouldn’t know that many of the taxi drivers used to be White Russians, and I wouldn’t have this clear image of them:

“beret pulled down to the ears, grey overcoat, dead Gitane, and a very particular way of mistreating their old black and red G7 taxi.”

If the book consisted only of laments for a bygone Paris, it would be an interesting curiosity but perhaps a little boring. What makes it vibrant is Hazan’s clear interest in contemporary Paris. He explains the evolution of tabacs from Auvergnat to mostly Chinese ownership and why so many Indians from Madagascar want to own a droguiste.

Paris in Turmoil is structured as a series of vignettes on different themes. We have “Boulevard Périphérique”, for example, examining various options for destroying, burying or otherwise dealing with the city’s traffic-clogged ringroad. One chapter is on Jean-Paul Sartre, another is about studded crossings, and one called “Left Bank” examines how a vibrant, creative neighbourhood became a “dreary shop-window”.

Readers of this blog will probably appreciate the chapter on “Bookshops”, which thankfully is not an elegy to a lost past but a celebration of the fact that independent bookshops have not been wiped out in Paris to the same extent that they have in London or New York. Hazan charts the geographical shifts as sky-high rents in traditional bookshop strongholds like Montparnasse and the Left Bank price out the artists and writers in favour of “classy foreigners, managers with pointed shoes or directors of PR, not great book buyers on the whole.” But the bookshops have simply shifted to the north-eastern quarter of the city instead.

I also enjoyed Hazan’s views on what makes a good bookshop, which intersect somewhat with my own thoughts but also go further. He says it has nothing to do with size or range and everything to do with the bookseller’s point of view and how they connect books and display them in a coherent way.

The section on “Parisian Writers”, meanwhile, sets strict boundaries around the definition.

“I would suggest confining the title of ‘Parisian writer’ to those for whom Paris was an essential source of inspiration. Being born in Paris or having lived there all your life does not do the trick.”

So Valéry, Gide and Malraux are out, and Proust is also excluded because of a new condition introduced later: Parisian writers must enjoy walking the city alone and collecting memories and details, just as Hazan himself clearly loves to do from the details he shares in this book. By his idiosyncratic criteria, he names Balzac, Baudelaire and Hugo as the great Parisian writers, and gives wonderful examples of the details they observed and included in their books.

This eclectic selection of short, themed snippets of Parisian life reminded me somewhat of the feuilletons of Joseph Roth in The Hotel Years. It’s not for you if you want a deep, logical examination of Parisian history, but I loved its broad sweep and vivid collection of details. Despite the apparently random, disconnected series of vignettes, I felt by the end as if I had accumulated an image of Paris more accurate and true than the one I had before, assembled on various short visits as a tourist. Hazan is an insider with a deep knowledge of and a clear love for the city, and in Paris in Turmoil he piles detail upon detail to eventually communicate something of its essence.

I wrote this post for Emma’s Paris in July event, celebrating all things French. It’s running for the rest of the month, so do check out the other posts, and maybe even join in and post your own thoughts on French books, movies, art or anything else.

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