The New Lifetime Reading Plan

In my view, however, Kawabata's stance is less likely to have to do with the hardships of his childhood than with the tension he seemed to feel throughout his life between beauty and sadness, or more precisely between sexuality and a sense of loss. Although his work, like that of other Japanese writers of his generation, shows strong European influence (particularly, in Kawabatas case, from the French Symbolists), he is in many ways a traditionalist, closer in mentalitй to Murasaki [28] than to Tanizaki [114].

When Kawabata was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, the novel most often mentioned as his great work was Snow Country (1948), a tale of sexual obsession set in the snowy mountain fastness of northwestern Japan. I com- mend that book to your attention, but to my own taste Beauty and Sadness (1961) is a more subtle, and a more moving, work. It tells of the reunion of an elderly man and a woman artist whom he loved long ago, of the jealous rage the artist's young protйgйe conceives on her behalf for having been jilted in that affair, and of the terrible revenge she wreaks on the old mans family. Love, regret, obsession, eroticism, and evil blend in Kawabata's slight, almost ephemeral prose, where more is implied than is ever made explicit, and where throat-catching beauty goes hand in hand with thefrisson of danger. Kawabata is said to have been greatly influenced by Bashх [50] and other renga (linked verse) poets of the seventeenth century, and something of this can be seen in the leaps of imagination and the mental filling-in of plot development that he requires of his readers. His prose is a sort of gossamer that seems to shimmer in ones consciousness, engaging the imagination but never revealing itself fully.

If you find yourself becoming a fan of Kawabata's work, I would suggest reading also one of his less-well-known novйis, The Master of Go, about an old champion and a young chal- lenger in Japan's chesslike national game of strategy. It is par­ticularly interesting to read this novel alongside Nabokovs great tale of chess obsession, The Defense [122].

JORGE LUIS BORGES

In 1972 Kawabata became despondent over the grotesque public suicide of his friend and protйgй Mishima Yukio [131] and, far more quietly and decorously, committed suicide him­self. Given the obsessive qualities of Kawabatas work, it is somehow difficult to imagine his life ending otherwise.

J.S.M.

121

JORGE LUIS BORGES

1899-1986

Labyrinths, Dreamtigers

Since this book's first appearance, Latin American writers have been looming larger on our literary horizon (see also Gabriel Garcia Marquez [132]).

Borges, scion of an intellectual middle-class family, was born in Buenos Aires, where most of his life was lived. His ancestry was Spanish and English, with a small infusion of Portuguese-Jewish blood. Like Nabokov [122], he learned English prior to his native tongue. He was strongly influenced by English writers from Caedmon to Chesterton and H.G. Wells.

Following his partially European education Borges began his career as a poet. His fathers death and a near-fatal illness made 1938 a year of crisis for him. From this year dates the finest of his "fictions," a form peculiarly his own in which his genius is most clearly reflected. Slow in growth, his reputation became international with the publication in 1944 of his collec- tion Ficciones. It was more formally recognized in 1961 when Borges shared with Samuel Beckett [125] the coveted interna­tional Formentor Prize.

Although hardly a political man, Borges opposed the Perуn dictatorship and as a result was demoted from his post of librarian to that of poultry and rabbits inspector. After Perуn's fali in 1955 he was named director of the National Library of

JORGE LU IS BORGES

Argentina. By that time his always defective eyesight had wors- ened; from the age of fifty-six he was totally blind, this man who described himself as one "who imagined Paradise in the shape of a library."

Borges's vast and esoteric learning, which pervades his sto­ries, makes his range of allusion somewhat forbidding to many readers and on occasion imparts to his work a bookish flavor. But these seeming hindrances are little more than a faзade of irony. Behind it works a mind of almost dismaying subtlety in which a metaphysician, a logician, and a visionary (but not a mystic) occupy continually shifting positions. His constant theme, whether he offers us science fiction, detective stories, tales of violence, or logical nightmares, is the "hallucinatory nature of the world." For him the universe is not something made. Rather it is dreamt. Or perhaps it is a great Book, whose tone is that of "irreality, one of aifs requisites."