From Borges to Barnes


Perhaps, by chance, there's a bit of alphabet logic in my choice? I've finished with Borges anthology on Borges (supposedly) -- good, but missing a lot of Borges "greats," and perhaps a bit too weighted with poems (and not always his best poems). I'm sure more Borges will eventually hit the Kindle menu (if it's not already there).

*

Just starting another Barnes: essays on all things French: Something to Declare.

A "clip":

La France profonde has disappeared within our century; or at least is now graspable only in tainted form. Edith Wharton saw this about to happen as she roared through France with Henry James at her side. “The trivial motorist,” as she described herself, was to prove the forerunner of other destructive agents: war, peace, communications technology, mass tourism, the industrialization of agriculture, the unfettered free market, Americanization, Eurification, greed, short-termism, complacent ahistoricism.



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