Sunday with Books: The Lottery in Babylon
We’ve covered decent ground with this column thus far. Gritty realism with Raymond Carver, pulp crime with Elmore Leonard, drug lore with Denis Johnson, suburban surrealism with John Cheever… noticing a pattern.
It’s been fun paying homage to our all-time literary idols. It truly has. It’s just that we’d hate to pigeonhole those actually following along into one era, one location, one style: postwar + America + minimalism, that is. It’s time we moved out of the states for a bit, or at least south of the border. Spin the globe, drop a pin…
…and we land on Argentina. Borges it is.
In a way, Jorge Luis Borges is the literary equivalent of a Salvador Dali; his stories are steeped in mystery and strange, uncanny geometries, spaces where the windmills of your mind spin in two directions at once. And in that regard, reading them can be a genuinely unnerving experience. Think Kafka. Edgar Allen Poe. Chekhov. Writers whose prose carefully threads the line between reality and unreality.
Labyrinth by Salvador Dali
self portrait by Jorge Luis Borges, drawn after going blind in 1955
Below you’ll find a link to a complete transcript of “The Lottery in Babylon,” taken from Labyrinths. Not only is it arguably the story most indicative of Borges’ style, but it’s also a quick read, told in first person by a Babylonian prisoner lamenting the supernatural lottery system that landed him behind bars. Que surrealista. —Jackson Todd
