Grant Munroe

I wrote an article on my recent search to find the contents of Jorge Luis Borges’ 33-volume anthology of fantastic literature, The Library of Babel.  It was just posted over at The Rumpus.  At the end of the article I attached Borges’ full selection of stories, including hyperlinks to all the works I found in translation online.

It’s a pretty hefty catalogue.  While I recommend almost everything, there were a few stories that stood out.  Here’s a brief reduction.

“Lazarus”, Leonid Andreyev
This story follows the second life of the resurrected Lazarus.  Though newly risen, his body is bloated and cracked, his extremities blue and cold; though once spirited and full of life, he’s now taciturn, gloomy, profoundly indifferent.  His rising is heralded as a miracle — until his cursed gaze begins effecting family, friends, and all those who come from around the Roman Empire to see the only man who truly knows Death.

“The Eye of Apollo”, G.K. Chesterton
Father Brown, a canny Roman Catholic priest, comes upon Kazon, a “blond beast” of a man who leads a cult of neo-sun worshipers.  When a woman falls down an elevator shaft shortly after signing her will over to Kazon, Father Brown begins treating the purported accident as a murder.

“Where the Tides Ebb and Flow”, Lord Dunsany
A member of an illicit secret society is sentenced to death and executed by his peers for committing an unnamed crime. They bury his corpse in the ever-shifting mud flats of the lower Thames.  The story, told in first-person from the perspective of the victim’s half-buried corpse, concerns his soul’s desire to find rest — either through burial on land or burial at sea.

“The Great Wall of China”, Franz Kafka
A Chinese engineer recounts his work on the unfathomably large Great Wall, and tries to explain both the need for the Empire to continue with its eternal construction and the necessary inability for any one man to understand the entire scope or extent of the project — which has been in progress from a time before any man can remember, and will continue to a point in time that seems impossibly distant.

“The Private Life”, Henry James
On vacation in the Swiss Alps, the narrator meets two very different men: a decorous member of the British aristocracy who has the uncanny habit of disappearing whenever anyone leaves his company; and an obnoxious author who has the equally uncanny habit of being seen in two places at the same time: in one place he’s engaging in offensive conversation, in the other he’s quietly at work on a novel of breathtaking genius.

“The Eye of Allah”, Rudyard Kipling
An abbot, a manuscript illuminator and philosopher Roger Bacon dine together at a medieval English monastery.  The illuminator, just back from travels to Moorish Spain, sets down an optical device, called the Eye of Allah, that he’d purchased in a bazaar. Taking a drop of stagnant water from the roof of the monastery, he demonstrates its powers of magnification: the three men gape in wonder at the teeming life they see swimming in the tiny globule. But the abbot begins feeling dreaded misgivings.

“The Minions of Midas”, Jack London
Impelled by a quasi-Nietzschian doctrine on the will to power, an association of shadowy, disenfranchised, yet highly educated (and highly capable) anarchists begin a campaign of terror against a Carnegie-like robber baron.  Until the baron parts with the greater half of his fortune, they’ll continue to silently murder random innocents around America.  The longer he holds out, the closer the murders come to his palatial mansion.

“The Novel of the White Powder”, Arthur Machen
A young law student in late Victorian London falls ill after a long, sleepless stretch of studying.  His doctor prescribes a white powder that’s mixed by an old chemist at a nearby pharmacy.  At first the student’s energy is improved and his mood is excited.  Soon, however, he begins acting strangely and locking himself away inside his garret for days — while, at the same time, his need for the drug steadily intensifies.  As the weeks pass, his family grows increasingly worried — until he stops speaking with them, and drops of black ichor begin falling from cracks in the attic floorboards.

“Sredni Vashtar”, Saki
On an isolated English country manor, a lonely and sickly ten year-old boy begins worshiping his caged pet polecat as a god.  He creates an entire cult around the vicious beast, whom he names Sredni Vashtar.  When his despised cousin and guardian deprives the boy of his other prized pet (a hen), the boy begins praying to his new god, in earnest, for divine vengeance.  With impressive results.

“Markheim”, Robert Louis Stevenson
Markheim, a man of fallen repute, steps in on a pawn broker with whom he has a long and bitter history.  When the pawn broker turns away, Markheim stabs him in the back.  While upstairs, in panic, stealing money the broker hid away in a chest, Markheim hears the door behind him open.  In steps the Devil, to politely outline the irrevocable events that led to Markheim’s fated perdition.

“The Country of the Blind”, H.G. Wells
A mountaineer, on expedition in the Peruvian Andes, falls down a deep crevasse. He wakes to find himself in a lost world, tucked away from civilization, inhabited by natives and livestock.  Due to a genetic mutation, everyone in the community is blind  – and has been since a time before anyone can remember.  As hard as the wayfarer tries to describe his fifth sense, none of the others believe him. His obstinacy to their insistence that their world is the only possible world frustrates the tribe — until they discover the two sources of illness that are causing his willfulness, and demand that they be gouged from his skull.