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In Tell Borges If You See Him, author Peter LaSalle takes on the linear narrative. Each of his 11 short stories is composed of fragments—a character recounts a scene, an image, a snatch of dialogue. Throughout the collection LaSalle zeroes in on the connection between emotion and memory, with each moment being suspect and subject to later revision. A man remembers a light-hearted dinner with his college sweetheart. Her subsequent death serving in the Peace Corps casts a shadow on his memory. In another story, LaSalle describes an assault on a bus. Either a young boxer, a middle-aged executive, or an aging mother dies. LaSalle finishes the story without identifying the victim, creating a world in which emotions are definite and facts are not.
I am reminded of a recent spate of memory bending films that employ similar narrative tricks: Memento, The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Bad Education, Fight Club and even The Usual Suspects qualify. But, as he indicates in his title, LaSalle’s particular flavor of narrative maneuvering is inspired by the prolific Argentine writer, Jorge Luis Borges.
For a series of stories illustrating the whimsy of conscious perception, Tell Borges, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, is noticeably self-conscious of the process of storytelling. Characters frequently mention other authors and literary styles. Before finishing the collection, I jotted down the writers discussed in the first half-dozen stories: Yeats, Borges, Hemingway, Faulkner, Melville, Fitzgerald, Kafka, Cervantes, McCarthy, Joyce, and Proust. Many of these authors, whose literary celebrity confers single name status—just as Madonna, DeNiro and Jordan merit single name treatment in music, film, and sports—are referenced in multiple stories.
Is this long list the sign of an erudite or an insecure author? Is LaSalle eager to turn the reader on to hot talent (Melville! Faulkner! Proust…)? Or is he exhibiting his own impeccable taste for top-shelf literary talent? The characters answer the question.
As much as they discuss the substance of the literature, the focus is on their reaction to the literature. A student, after reading Yeats, feels “…woozy, definitely and somehow tangibly high, the binoculars in dazzling and too-clear focus.” A father works out his relationship with his son against the backdrop of Buenos Aires and the fiction of Borges. A college professor with fraught sexual relationships longs to lounge in Proust’s own reclining chaise, believing that French furniture must underpin successful psychoanalysis (an admittedly hilarious premise). To top it off, a bookseller and self-proclaimed failed writer says that being a good reader is rarer than being a good writer.
Unfortunately for LaSalle, good writers are still somewhat rare. A reader interested only in good writing could be forgiven for skipping LaSalle. Paging ahead after reading a first sentence, “It was tough to stay dead like that,” seems like a reasonable cost-benefit analysis. Encountering characters in “The Actor’s Face” and “Texas Football Dead” who are one-dimensional and flat doesn’t help matters. And with these 11 non-linear narratives feeling plain old lazy when the author cuts off story after story—————before an end, it only makes you want to put down the book and walk away. |
