Jorge Luis Borges’ A Personal Anthology

Published first in Spanish in 1961 and in English in 1967, Jorge Luis Borges’ A Personal Anthology was released after Borges had achieved world-wide fame as the author of the short story compilations The Garden of Forking Paths, A Universal History of Infamy, and The Aleph, as well as numerous books of poetry and essays.

A Personal Anthology can be read as a sort of broad summation of the major themes and metaphors of Borges’s literary life, or as a mere introduction into his expansive oeuvre. As an avid reader of Borges, to me his anthology is an exciting glimpse into the intellectual heart of the writer. As a truly “personal anthology”, edited by Borges himself, the work is, in essence, Borges’ own idea of his contribution to literature, philosophy, and criticism. It is, to a great extent, what Borges would choose to leave to that infinite library that he often invokes.

The literary styles within the text span the extent of Borges’ work, from short story, to literary meditation, to essay and philosophical argument. The themes of Borges’ works are primarily existential. His questions surround the nature of identity, time, and consciousness, and his narratives usually lead back to the questions of myth and history, creator and creation, philosophical idealism, and the line between the waking mind and the dreaming mind. Summarizing Borges’ works proves difficult, as he draws heavily from history, philosophy, religion, and references to real and imaginary books. Meaning is meant to be layered; the sacred and the profane, the everyday and the fantastic weave together to create his strange literary vignettes.

In the the book we find some of Borges’ most well-known short stories, including The Aleph, Death and the Compass, Funes the Memorious, The South, and The Zahir. He also includes pseudo histories like The Warrior and the Captive, the essay A New Refutation of Time, and his brief meditation Borges and I. Borges is attracted to paradox, to unanswered questions, and his anthology reflects that propensity. While A Personal Anthology portrays Borges’ at the heights of his intellectual powers, which span numerous languages, histories and literary styles, the collection also gives us Borges in his most vulnerable state, a scholar going blind, asking questions he knows are beyond his grasp to answer.

For Borges fans, A Personal Anthology is an ideal compendium to have in the library, and for those new to Borges, the edition provides a perfect introduction into the fascinating world of the writer.

Maxim Gorky’s My Childhood

After reading My Apprenticeship, I was compelled to read the first part of the Russian writer Maxim Gorky’s (1868-1936) three-part autobiographical series, titled My Childhood. My Childhood begins with the young Gorky staring at the face of his dead father, and ends with his mother’s death before his eyes. After his mother’s death, Gorky’s grandfather says to him “You aren’t a medal, but you are always around my neck” and sends him out into the world to fend for himself. Still a young boy at the end of the book, in the time between these harrowing events Gorky witnesses a lifetime of suffering, and lives through the slow disintegration of his once stable and respected family.

The history of Russia in the last decades of the 19th century provides some context to the events of the book. After the end of serfdom in 1861, Russia was still reeling with economic and social realities that the fragile structure of the country could not absorb. The transformation of Gorky’s grandfather, a once successful small business man, into a pauper, traces the pressures and fault lines present within the Russian working class and middle class of the era. In that sense, the revolutionary events of 1905 and 1917 are made more clear by the familial narrative Gorky writes.

My Childhood is an intimate portrait of Gorky’s early family life. After the death of her husband to cholera, Gorky and his widowed mother moved into the house of her father, a once prominent cloth dyer. However, economic pressures, greed, drunkenness and violence had already fissured the family irreparably. By the time of his mother’s death, only Gorky’s relationship with beloved grandmother remained intact. The narrative of the book portrays Gorky immersed within these times, submerged in his experience, as opposed to the analytical, introspective boy we grow to know in My Apprenticeship. While My Apprenticeship is filled with character analysis and a highly precocious observer, My Childhood is filled with the raw actions, impressions and emotions of a child in a violent, changing world. In this way, the reader senses in the two books the development of Gorky’s mind. Perhaps is was temporal circumstances that lead the adult Gorky to write the memoirs of his youth in such varying style, or perhaps it was his great talents as an author that conveys his maturing point of view so deftly within these two separate autobiographies.

In the book, Gorky writes about his early fascination with language and poetry, much of it inspired by this grandmother’s stories. Gorky’s incredible command of language is present even in the English translation of the text. The rhythm of the story and the poetry within Gorky’s lyrical narrative is profound. In My Childhood, the reader is truly a part of Gorky’s world; we see what he sees, and we feel the his joys and suffering. We also grow to know the people within his world, those that persecuted him and those that he loved. The book reads like any life; always changing and swooning, yet Gorky’s world is filled with death, heartache, and the grey colors of the times.

Maxim Gorky’s My Apprenticeship

I just finished reading Maxim Gorky’s My Apprenticeship, the second part of his three part autobiography which includes My Childhood and My Universities. For those who haven’t been introduced to Gorky, Maxim Gorky is the pen name of Aleksey Maksimovich Peshkov, born in 1868 in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia. After a difficult childhood marked by his mother and father’s death, being forced out of his impoverished grandfather’s house at the age of eleven, and an attempted suicide at nineteen, Gorky went on to achieve fame writing about the destitution, wretchedness, faint joy and torpor of Russia’s peasant and working classes in the late 19th and 20th century. Forced to exile by both the czarist regime and later the Bolsheviks, Gorky returned to Russia in 1929 a literary and cultural hero. I have read Fragments from My Diary and now My Apprenticeship, both autobiographical, but Gorky is also remembered for his plays and novels.

My Apprenticeship begins with Gorky leaving the home of his grandfather and working as a servant and apprentice in “a fashionable shoe shop” in his home town of Nizhny Novgorod. The narrative proceeds through stints at the bourgeois home of a contractor and drafter, as a dishwasher on board a steamship on the Volga, at an ikon painter’s shop, and other adventures and misadventures. The breadth of Gorky’s adolescent memory and the vivid clarity of these impressions is staggering, especially so in his characterizations of the people that inhabit his past. In Fragments from My Diary as well as My Apprenticeship, Gorky’s overall focus is the literary portrait; the appearance, idiosyncrasies, elaborate whims and simple gestures of his subjects. Gorky narrates his story primarily through his impressions of others, which can lead readers at times feeling as if he or she has read not one, but many biographies in the pages of My Apprenticeship. Through this approach Gorky makes sincere attempts at illuminating the life and soul of the Russian peasant and working class; what sustained or destroyed them amongst the squalor and morose of their everyday life.

Reading Gorky write about himself as a child from the vantage of an adult is at times disorienting, and perhaps the adult Gorky’s Social Realism literary philosophy is too present within this book filled with the impressions of his youth. My Apprenticeship is rich with description into personal suffering and struggles balanced against a portrayal of the working class, petty bourgeois and peasant culture of the time. In the pages of the autobiography we find an extremely sensitive, aware and awakened child, who, even amongst the squalor and chaos of his life, manages to keep some grounded sense of self. Gorky as a child is portrayed as a sort of spiritual novitiate on a mission to find hope and redemption within his surroundings and the people that populate his world. However, My Apprenticeship is not given over to the creation of Gorky as a hero, and therefore he does not fill his narrative with the requisite villains and a sustained narrative arc to salvation. Though certain characters such as Smury, a cook on board a steamship Gorky works with, Gorky’s grandmother, and “Queen Margot”, a young upper class widow that lives next door to the Gorky, are treated with reverence, many of the rough hewn characters in My Apprenticeship are instead a focus of Gorky’s disappointed vitriol or humanistic compassion. Throughout the text, Gorky relates how the general pressures of his society bend and at times break his counterparts into lives of chronic malaise, petty crime, drunkenness and prostitution.

Much of the narrative within My Apprenticeship is given over to Gorky’s love of literature and those people who helped or dissuaded him from the lives, insights, and realities that can be found in books. As a matter of fact, My Apprenticeship could be used a sort of bibliography discussing the great Russian and European writers of the time. Many times in the text, the people who engage Gorky find him “different”, give him books, and express that he should be in school. As a young boy, Gorky hungered for a reality that was better than the life in which he inhabited. Perhaps it was that dissatisfied hunger which later gave Gorky such vivid impressions of the Russian culture of his childhood, and of our common humanity.

Olina on i tunes

The Portland, Oregon, based band Olina has just released their first record ! It is available on i tunes

Check out their upcoming schedule, with a cd release show April 17th at the Laurelthirst in Portland, Oregon at :

www.myspace.com/olinatheband

FoodClothingShelter.net profiles Live Olina music

Listen in to a live lo-fi rehearsal session of Olina – recorded September 20, 2009, at the Rex Drive house in Portland, Oregon.

Food Clothing Shelter under the music heading – download if you are interested – Enjoy !

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FoodClothingShelter Updates

Automobile Fires, Heists, and now a blog, check out FoodClothingShelter.net for new media from Aaron Cord Siemers and cohorts.