Boston Baroques (English Edition) [Kindle-editie] beoordelingen het boek quotes

In the preface to the 1954 edition of A Universal History of Iniquity, Jorge Luis Borges defines the baroque as “that style that deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) its own possibilities, and that borders on self-caricature.” The baroque, Borges wrote, “is the final stage in all art, when art flaunts and squanders its resources.” Borges called the pieces collected in that work “the irresponsible sport of a shy sort of man who could not bring himself to write short stories,” and the tales collected here are of that kind; more elaborate than a spoof (a form whose tradition began, according to one source, with British comedian Arthur Roberts in the 19th century), less substantial than a short story. They do not require that the reader suspend disbelief; to do so would result in a misunderstanding, as the characters insist that we treat them with skepticism. I write such tales, like Borges, when I am unable, too lazy, or feel my skills inadequate to write a short story. As these feelings are a common experience for me, I have written a lot of them. These baroques (derived from the Spanish “baroco”) are set in Boston, the city where, as Mark Twain recounted in What Paul Bourget Thinks of Us, they ask not how much you are worth (that is New York), or who your parents were (Philadelphia), but how much you know. The baroque is intellectual, Borges asserted, and this may account for the number of baroque types who may be found in Boston, or that I have created as beings who should, by rights, exist there.