José Manuel Prieto: Rex

It is not by chance, either, that Petya is the listener and sole recipient of the story; the whole tone of the book derives from that fact. Rex returns to the free fabulations of childhood, and the tales of Psellus, the tutor, are an amalgamation of all the books he read as a youth or a child, out of which he improvises for Petya a highly adorned story of his parents’ life, a story that otherwise, told in some other way, might have been sordid and terrible.

The primary human theme of this novel is the strategies used to overcome the terrible experience of totalitarianism. Like me, my characters are survivors of the totalitarian catastrophe. Therefore, Rex can be considered a post-totalitarian novel, whose characters are all profoundly disturbed. This explains their obsession with money, as well as their decision to embark upon the impossible adventure of imposture, their embrace of the surprising and implausible idea of relaunching thc Imperial House of Russia.

As many readers will inevitably have noticed, the Writer so frequently alluded to after the Fifth Commentary is not, in fact, Marcel Proust, but an amalgamated figure, much like the one described by Ralph Waldo Emerson when he very rightly says: “I am very much struck in literature by the appearance, that one person wrote all the books; as if the editor of a journal planted his body of reporters in different parts of the field of action, and relieved some by others from time to time; but there is such equality and identity both of judgment and point of view in the narrative, that it is plainly the work of one all-seeing, all-hearing gentleman.”

I believe it important to mention as well that the idea of using manufactured diamonds in a swindle alludes to a little-known work by Marcel Proust, which has only recently been translated into English by Charlotte Mandell in 2008. In a collection of his early writings, gathered under the title Pastiches et mélanges , the future author of the Recherche tells the story of Lemoine, a late-nineteenth-century adventurer who swindled the owner of De Beers and other leading figures in the diamond industry. They paid Lemoine considerable sums to keep him from causing the diamond market to collapse by revealing a secret method of manufacturing diamonds he claimed to have invented. When the swindle was discovered and the whole affair brought to light, a highly publicized trial took place that all Paris followed with utmost interest. Marcel Proust, whose family had a great deal of money invested in De Beers, was particularly caught up by the story and derived from it his idea for the “Pastiches,” which tell the story of Lemoine’s trial as a delectable series of stylistic exercises, composed in the manner of notable French writers such as Flaubert, the Gon-courts, Saint-Simon, etcetera.

Finally, I think it may perhaps be useful to the reader if I include an (incomplete) list of the works cited in Rex , either explicitly (in boldface) or implicitly:

First Commentary: Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past; William Shakespeare, Macbeth; Herodotus, The Histories . Second Commentary:Jorge Luis Borges, “The Approach to Almotasin,” “The Mirror of Ink,” “The Secret Miracle”; Fyodor Dostoyevski, The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment . Third Commentary: Molière, The Imaginary Invalid; Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa; Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way and Within a Budding Grove; Stockton, Frank R., “The Lady or the Tiger.” Fourth Commentary: H. G. Wells, The Time Machine; Lewis Carrol, Alice in Wonderland; Ivan Efremov, Andromeda Nebula; Chutan Tse, The Thief of the Peaches of Longevity; Marcel Proust, Swann in Love; Michael Psellus, Chronographia . Fifth Commentary: Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451; Washington Irving, Tales from the Alhambra; Alexander Pushkin, Ruslan and Ludmilla; Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude; Robert I. Friedman, Red Mafiya: How the Russian Mob Has Invaded America; Victor Hugo, Les Miserables; George Lucas, Star Wars; Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough . Sixth Commentary: Voltaire, The Age of Louis XIV; Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany ’s; H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds; Homer, the Iliad; Charles Baudelaire, Mon coeur mis à nu; Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors; Appian, Roman History; Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita; Avicenna, The Canon of Medicine; Racine, Mithridates . Seventh Commentary: Anonymous, The Song of the Nibelungs; Erasmus, The Education of the Christian Prince; Anonymous, the Epic of Gilgamesh . Eighth Commentary: 1 Kings 9:26–28, 10:11, 22; 2 Chronicles 8:17–18, 9:10; Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology; Aristophanes, The Clouds; Maurice Maeterlinck, The Treasure of the Humble; Hammurabi, Codex Hammurabi . N inth Commentary: Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita; John Milton, Aeropagitica; Fyodor Dostoyevski, The Brothers Karamazov; Heinrich Heine, The Baths of Lucca; Thomas Mann, Time Magic Mountain; Isaac Asimov, “I’m in Marsport without Hilda .” Tenth Commentary: Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym; Prosper Mérimée, Demetrius the Impostor: an Episode in Russian History; Anton Chekhov, “The Death of a Goverment Clerk”; Bishop Berkeley, Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge; Jules Vernes, The Vanished Diamond; William Shakespeare Romeo and Juliet; Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island . Eleventh Commentary: Thomas De Quincey, “The Sphinx’s Riddle”; Fyodor Dostoyevski, The Brothers Karamazov; Saint Augustine, Contra mendacium; Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim (Paracelsus), Three Treatises; Alfred Einstein, Relativity: The Special and General Theory; Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo, Amadis de Gaula; Henry James, Daisy Miller; Confucius, The Analects , John Amos Comenius, Didactica Magna; Jules Verne, Dick Sand: A Captain at Fifteen; Bishop Liutprand of Cremona, Relatio de legatione Constantinopolitana ad Nicephoruni Phocam; Saint John the Divine, Revelations 22:18–19; Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”; William Morris, The Water of the Wondrous Isles; Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo; Gabriel Garcia Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude; Farid al-Din al-’Attar, The Conference of the Birds; Homer, the Iliad . Twelfth Commentary: Aeschylus, The Persians; Ortega y Gasset, “Time, Distance and Form in the Work of Marcel Proust”; Anonymous, the epic of Gilgamesh; Julio Cortázar, “Instructions on How to Climb a Staircase”; James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans; Vladimir Ilych Lenin, Materialism and empirocriticism; the Brothers Grimm, Thumbelina; Antonio Vivaldi, Juditha Triumphans , George D. Painter, Marcel Proust, a Biography; Saint Augustine, The Confessions; Thomas Mann, Death in Venice; John Cheever, Stories; Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim; Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels; Saint John the Divine, Revelations 22:18–19; Marco Polo, Il Millone .