Ficciones

Jorge Luis Borges Ficciones (1956)
Fuck me - this one took some doing, having been punctuated by the autobiography of a Sex Pistol, a Longshot collection, and a couple of issues of Marshall Law, all read for light relief because after a number of days which had been shite to varying degrees, I felt as though I deserved to enjoy my bedtime reading. I'm a little surprised at my having had this reaction. The last two Borges I tackled were great, and I was told this was the one I really needed to read, the solid gold hit single, so to speak.

Borges writes short pieces of surrealist fiction, often in the form of reviews of imaginary books, texts, or authors, which blur the lines between imagination and reality, prompting all sorts of peculiar questions about whether we're reading the story or it's reading us. I'm sure you get the idea. While Ficciones is patently at least as atmospheric as whatever I read in Labyrinths and The Book of Sand, at least as rich in imagery, and as wild in terms of existential questions, it nevertheless felt like homework. The stories seem, generally speaking, to inhabit more cerebral narratives than those in Labyrinths, which at least wrapped their ideas around a sense of space or something physical, thus giving my poor brain something more to work with; or at least that's the impression I had, and I could be wrong, and it may simply be that I simply should have saved this one for evenings in a more receptive frame of mind.

I still enjoyed this, and particularly Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote and Three Versions of Judas, but I have a feeling I should have enjoyed it a lot more than I did.

Longshot

Ann Nocenti & Arthur Adams Longshot (1986)
Here I am again with the reading equivalent of comfort food, or even the reading and looking at pictures equivalent of comfort food. Shitty occurrences temporarily brought me down and I just couldn't cope with Borges. This was originally purchased during my time as a Marvel zombie, then sold, then bought again once a mid-life crisis expressed itself as nostalgia for the Marvel zombie days, the innocence, the excitement of some new character showing up, all that good shit…

Longshot isn't the worst, but it hasn't aged quite so well as others of its vintage. Actually, it's far from the worst and is mostly readable, a decent story ever so slightly handicapped by its own telling. Longshot is a relentlessy chipper superguy, a character whose creation alludes to more innocent, wholesome times. He's a former slave escaped from a cruel media-fixated dimension, blessed with good luck powers, and the six issues collected here are about his escape and subsequent attempts to get along in our world, or at least the Marvel version of our world. Buckles are swashed with some frequency, and it feels as though Ann Nocenti was probably a fan of The Never Ending Story and its like. We have mullets aplenty, and we live in a world of leg warmers and pizza as a guilty pleasure, so yeah - this one was never aimed at fifty-four-year old men with Sleaford Mods albums such as myself. However, the most unexpected element is that it feels like a fanzine, or at least an eighties indie comic, the work of people who were still very much learning as they went along. There's way too much dialogue cluttering up each page, suggesting overcompensation, and Arthur Adams artwork was still surprisingly clunky and uneven at this point, some hints of what was to come, but quite a few figures suggestive of Ian Gibson characters as drawn by Rob Liefeld. Of course, given those responsible, it's not without redeeming features. You just have to keep your eye open for them.