Cecily's Reviews > The Book of Sand and Shakespeare's Memory

“It’s not the reading that matters, but the rereading.”
So true of all JLB’s works

I have the Collected Fictions, but am splitting my review of that into its components, listed in publication order: Collected Fictions - all reviews. The Book of Sand is the eighth, published in 1975.

After the generally quite straightforward stories of Brodie's Report, this is a (welcome) return to more mystical, metaphysical tales.

This review does NOT include the four stories published as Shakespeare’s Memory.

The Other 6*

“The encounter was real, but the other man spoke to me in a dream.”

How often have you wondered what you would tell your younger self, if you had the chance? Would your younger self take any notice? What else would you talk about? More importantly, would you give them a glimpse of “my past, which is now the future that awaits you”, and if you did, would you be constraining that future by doing so?

So many of JLB’s stories have semi-fictionalised aspects of himself, or a person meeting another version of themselves; this has both. (See also “August 25, 1983”, below, and “Borges and I” in Dreamtigers.) But although it is described in pleasant terms, JLB says it was “almost horrific while it lasted” and mentions “elemental fear” and the “sleepless nights that followed”.

(view spoiler)[They talk about literature, of course (and family). Young JLB has recently read Dostoyevsky’s The Double, which is apt. It’s awkward, though: “We were too different, yet too alike. We could not deceive each other and that made conversation hard. Each of us was almost a caricature of the other.”

JLB realises “There was no point in giving advice,,, because the young man’s fate was to be the man that I am now.” He concludes that the meeting was real for him, but merely a dream for his younger self. (hide spoiler)]

This story is also an opportunity for JLB, by then in his mid-seventies, to appraise his life, work and influence. He’s quite harsh, saying he “wrote too many” books, including “poetry that will give you a pleasure that others will not fully share, and stories of a fantastical turn”.

Ulrikke

A rarity in JLB’s writings: this features a woman – and as the subject of intense and sudden love and desire.

Ulrikke is a Norwegian with an air of “calm mystery”, staying in York, where she meets the narrator, “a celibate middle-aged man” who is a professor visiting from Columbia.

(view spoiler)[The tender one-night stand that ensues is idealised and ethereal but with signs of looming death. The bedroom is dark, with “a vague glass” and then “no more furniture, no more mirrors… Like sand, time sifted away. Ancient in the dimness flowed love, and for the first and last time, I possessed the image of Ulrikke”. As so often with JLB, the reader is left unsure how much of this is real, and if not, what it means: is Ulrikke the perfect woman or the yin to JLB’s yang, or something else altogether? (hide spoiler)]

The Congress 5*

This has a separate review because I ran out of words here: The Congress.

There are More Things 6*

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." – Hamlet.

One of the homilies drummed into us at school was “Send postcards to people when they’re alive, not flowers when they’re dead”. In this, a man visits the former house of the dead uncle who taught him philosophy and “felt what we always feel when someone dies – the sad awareness, now futile, of how little it would have cost us to be more loving”. But this isn’t straightforward remembrance.

The house was auctioned and bought by a secretive foreigner for twice as much as anyone else offered. The purchaser dumped all the books and furniture, and tried (and failed) to get the original architect to remodel it. Others were brought in to do the work, which was completed in two weeks, overnight, and the owner was never seen again. It’s having dark fairytale qualities now.

The nephew is curious. In fact his curiosity has previously led him to “marriage to a woman utterly unlike myself… trying laudanum… into an exploration of transfinite numbers” and now this “terrifying adventure”.

“In order to truly see a thing, one must first understand it. An armchair implies the human body… scissors the act of cutting… The passenger does not see the same ship’s rigging as the crew. If we truly saw the universe, perhaps we would understand it.”

(view spoiler)[He visits the architect, who was a personal friend of his uncle, but he learns little, other than that the new owner is Jewish and wanted a “monstrosity” built in place of the original house. That night, he dreams of a labyrinth, and next day he visits the carpenter who did some of the refurbishments. He’s evasive: he says that the customer is always right, but that Preetorious was “not quite right”.

Over the next few days, the nephew walks around the boarded up house until, sheltering from a storm, he discovers the gate is unlocked and the door ajar. The floor is bare earth and the furniture is scattered – and strange.

“None of the insensate forms… corresponded to the human figure or any conceivable use. They inspired horror and revulsion.” It’s pertinent that this story is dedicated to H P Lovecraft.

Then he hears “something heavy and slow and plural. Curiosity got the better of fear, and I did not close my eyes.” Then it stops! Who, what, why did he see? (hide spoiler)]

The Sect of Thirty

“There is no man that does not carry out, wittingly or not, the plan traced by the All-Wise.”

I wish I believed in pre-destination: I could do whatever I liked, without fear of any more damnation that I would have had anyway – though I suppose the fact I think that condemns me in itself.

This is another story based on the discovery of a partial manuscript, in this case, a Christian sect of the name in the title. Their views, though varied (especially about death) and actions would be considered heretical by most Christians, and one aspect repulsive (and illegal) to all. But there is a Biblical logic, however twisted. I take it as a warning against fundamentalism, and especially looking so much at the details that you lose the broader context of right and wrong.

(view spoiler)[Their generosity to the poor means they do not even have clothes for themselves. Because looking at a woman lustfully is as sinful as having sex with her, and the former is impossible to suppress, they are promiscuous (what about lustful women, consent etc?). The sect’s name comes from Judas’ payment for betraying Jesus (thirty pieces of silver), and because all the participants in the crucifixion are unknown except for Judas and Jesus, “the sect venerates the two equally and absolves the others”. Crucifixion is key: in breach of the fifth commandment, members are crucified when they reach the age at which it happened to Jesus (thirty three). (hide spoiler)]

The Night of the Gifts

This revisits the Platonic idea that knowing is really just recognising because we’ve seen all things in some former world (see also The Congress, above).

When the narrator was nearly thirteen, he went to town on a Saturday night with an older labourer. Bars, dancing, drink, women… You can guess the gist, but it has a slightly unreal quality, especially towards the end, when you wonder how much of it was real, and how much embroidery. The narrator asks that question himself, drawing parallels with “the Captive” Indian girl and the story she told of the Indian raid that led her to her current situation.

(view spoiler)[”Within the space of a few hours I’d learned how to make love and I’d seen death at first hand. (hide spoiler)]

The Mirror and The Mask 5*

Like “Undr” below and The Library of Babel (in The Garden of Forking Paths), this explores the paradox of infinity coupled with minimalism. More than that, it’s about the sacred danger of true beauty.

A king wants to be immortalised in song. He gives a poet a year to compose such a piece. The song is a triumph and the poet is given a silver mirror. He is also given another year to write an even better song.

(view spoiler)[In the second song, “the verses were strange… They were not a description of the battle, they were the battle.” But the king liked the obscurity of the verses and gave the poet a golden mask (is this like The Emperor’s New Clothes?). The third year, the poet returns with a single line. “The poet and the king mouthed the poem as though it were a secret supplication, or a blasphemy.” The kind is amazed that all wonders are encompassed so succinctly, but he and the poet now share “the sin of having known Beauty, which is a gift forbidden mankind”. The final gift is a dagger, which the poet dutifully uses as expected. The king “is a beggar who wanders the roads of Ireland, which once was his kingdom, and…has never spoken the poem again.” (hide spoiler)]

”Undr”

I’ve written so many words about JLB, and yet this story is all about encompassing a whole life, a whole word, in a single sound. How is that possible? How close can we get? Why would we try?

Like The Mirror and the Mask above and The Library of Babel (in The Garden of Forking Paths), this explores the paradox of infinity coupled with minimalism – and the peril of such perfection.

A man travels to a remote northern country where they have “true faith in Christ”. They carve runes of Odin (not very Christian), rather than writing on paper or parchment. Perhaps that is why “the poetry of the Urns is a poetry of a single word”. Carvings around the town are of different symbols, but all are, apparently, the Word (with a capital W – very Biblical).

(view spoiler)[The Urns are also prone to crucifying strangers (again, not very Christian). To avoid that fate, the traveller composes a laudatory poem. It seems to be well received: the king gives him a silver ring (but he glimpses a dagger under the king’s cushion). The next man presents a poem of a single word, and everyone is deeply moved by it. The traveller doesn’t catch the word, but another poet warns him he’ll die for hearing it, and helps him escape. He can’t tell the traveller the word because it is a sworn secret, “no one can teach another anything” and “You must seek it on your own”.

He travels for many years, eventually returning to find the poet and old man. On his deathbed, he tells the traveller a single Word, and in it, he sees everything: the poet’s life and his own. Then he picks up the harp and composes his own single word, demonstrating he has understood. (hide spoiler)]

A Weary Man’s Utopia 6*

A glimpse of a possible, simpler, future, but I’m not sure it’s one I’d want to live in, even if there were no poverty or war. I’m reminded of Le Guin’s short story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. The ending has an unexpected punch.

A traveller meets a very tall man with “peculiar eyes” who realises, by the clothing that the traveller has come from another time. The only common language they can find is Latin: “The diversity of languages encouraged the diversity of nations… the earth has returned to Latin.” Esperanto has no place in this vision (it was rejected in The Congress, above, as well).

For a utopia, envisaged by a writer, there are some surprising features, especially regarding books. On the other hand, is does presage some of the downsides of the internet – despite being published in 1975.

“No one cares about facts anymore. They are mere points of departure for speculation and exercises in creativity. In school, we are taught Doubt, and the Art of Forgetting.” There are no libraries or museums because “we want to forget the past” and “Each person must produce on his own the arts and sciences that he has need for… Every man must be his own Bernard Shaw, his own Jesus Christ, and his own Archimedes”. That sounds inefficient and solitary. “We live in time, which is successive, but we try to live sub aeternitatis” [under eternity].

“It’s not the reading that matters, but the rereading”: the old man has not read more than half a dozen books in his four hundred year life. Similarly, printing has been banned “for it tended to multiply unnecessary tests to a dizzying degree”. A brief trawl of the internet shows the truth of that, and the potential for information overload: “All this was no sooner read than forgotten… blotted out by new trivialities.” “People believed only what they could read on the printed page” – and boy do they believe: it was on a website or in an email that said it was reported on CNN, so it must be true. “esse est percipi - to be is to be portrayed”: selfies and general online validation, yep JLB saw that too.

In this utopia, there is of course, no poverty – and therefore no “vulgar wealth”, and indeed, no money. Governments “gradually fell into disuse (some former politicians found success as comedians and witch doctors!). Space travel ceased when “we found we could never escape the here and now… every journey is a journey through space”.

It sounds lonely, though: each person has only one child, and the old man lives alone; “When an individual has reached a hundred years of age, he is able to do without love and friendship” – but why would he? Being the master of your own life also means being the master of your own death, but this is no Soylent Green scenario; each chooses their own time.

After the leisured description of this time/place, there is a neat but shocking ending to the story. (view spoiler)[The traveller sees strange art that is “almost blank… painted with colours that your ancient eyes cannot see”. He is given one as “a souvenir of a future friend”. Then others arrive, help the old man strip the house and they all walk off to the crematory: “The death chamber… was invented by a philanthropist whose name, I believe, was Adolf Hitler.” Such a subtle way to make the point that Martin Amis was perhaps trying to make in the crass Time’s Arrow and Vonnegut did rather better in Slaughterhouse Five. “In my study… still hangs the canvas that someone will paint, thousands of years from now, with substances that are now scattered across the planet.” (hide spoiler)]

The Bribe

In the afterword, JLB says this is an exploration of “Americans’ obsession with ethics”; he reckons “it couldn’t have happened anywhere else”. I’m not sure about that, but nevertheless, it’s a straightforward short story of university politics – no mystical allusions in this one. Dr Winthrop has to pick one of two candidates to chair a conference. The characters and relative merits of the two candidates were rather dull – until I realised the twist of the tale.

(view spoiler)[One of the candidates realises Dr Winthrop will strive to be impartial – and to be seen as such. So he publishes a paper criticising Dr Winthrop’s work, on the assumption that will get him the job. “Written in the correct English of the non-native speaker, never stooped to incivility, yet it did have a certain belligerence… Not once was Winthrop’s name mentioned, but Winthrop felt persistently attacked.” It worked, and the winner then goes to Winthrop to tell him! They conclude they share the sin of vanity: one boasting of his strategy, and the other proud of his integrity. (hide spoiler)]

Avelino Arredondo

This is based on a historical event, outlined in the notes. However, it works quite well as a story, even without that knowledge.

Arredondo says farewell to his friends and sweetheart, saying he’s going away. However, he’s really hiding in his back room, reading the Bible (having sold all his other books), but without trying to understand it. There is an unexplained deadline of August 25 (which is the title of a story in Shakespeare’s Memory), though we’re told he won’t finish reading the Bible, and there are chaotic games of chess, with missing pieces, that won’t end. “He missed his friends terribly, though he knew without bitterness that they didn’t miss him.”

(view spoiler)[It was all preparation for assassinating the president – though he had to ask who he was, to be sure he shot the right man! He cut himself off from friends and newspapers so they could not be blamed. (hide spoiler)]

The Disk

Greed, futility, loneliness, magic. An old woodcutter lets a traveller into his hut. The traveller has the disk of Odin, which is unique because it has only one side. It also makes him king. The woodcutter can’t see it when the king opens his palm, but he can feel it, and he thinks he catches a glint.

(view spoiler)[The woodcutter kills the king so he can get an sell the disk – but he never finds it. Ever. (hide spoiler)]

The Book of Sand

A travelling Bible salesman sells a holy book from India, The Book of Sand, so called because “neither sand nor this book has a beginning or an end”. It is like The Library of Babel (in The Garden of Forking Paths) in miniature. It is written in an unknown script, with occasionally illustrations, and page numbers that are non-sequential and change every time.

“If space is infinite, we are anywhere, at any point in space. If time is infinite, we are at any point in time.”

(view spoiler)[They buyer/narrator/JLB cipher tells no one what he has bought. He fears theft, but also the possible discovery that the book is not actually infinite. He becomes an obsessive recluse: the book is monstrous, and so is he - like Gollum and his “precious”, and of course JLB’s own story of The Zahir, in The Aleph.

“It defiled and corrupted reality”. What to do? “I considered fire, but I feared that the burning of an infinite book might be similarly infinite.” He eventually hides it in a shady corner of the national library. (hide spoiler)]

Quotes

• “America, hobbled by the superstition of democracy, can’t make up its mind whether to be a democracy.”

• “The miraculous inspires fear.”

• On blindness, he is “able to see the colour yellow, and light and shadow. But don’t worry. Gradual blindness is not tragic. It’s like the slowly growing darkness of a summer evening.”

• “Indecisiveness or oversight, or perhaps other reasons, let to my never marrying.”
•
• “Love that flows in shadow, like a secret river.”

• “Time – that infinite web of yesterday, today, the future, forever, never – is the only true enigma.”

• “In time, one inevitable comes to resemble one’s enemies.”

• “His face would have been anonymous had it not been rescued by his eyes, which were both sleepy and full of energy.”

• Newspapers are “museums of ephemera”.