Luis Chitarroni - The No Variations - Diary of an Unfinished Novel

Temporal convergence of “Early” narrator / “Replicas” narrator [“The House on calle Piedras”?]. Stop. Stet . We’re still in the “The Old Bachelor.”

He knew the bookstore he established there — Columbo, Pallemberg, Palermo — would, on many occasions, provide him with surprises [ Ethics of the Dust, Galleries of Whispers, Black Lamb and Gray Falcon, And the Name of the Star is Wormwood, The Goshawk … ]

The Finnish biography of Maturin: Charles Robert Maturin, His Life and Works , Niilo Idman (Helsinki, 1923).

On the near empty shelves of the bookstore on Montevideo street, there were copies of books that he purchased at a surprisingly low cost: the first volume of Rabelais’ Gargantua , translated by Thomas Urquhart [ 7 Types of Ambiguity , first edition with dedication], a first edition of Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros , two books by Meredith ( The Shaving of Shagpat, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel ), and almost every volume of I. A. Richard’s Modern English . The Milton is in the dead aunt’s house

Meredith’s monograph on Siegfried Sassoon.

He was about to leave with a bizarre and [little known] treasure, a book of Armenian grammar that was signed by one T. Anlunle in Mexico City in 1965, when from a distance, he noticed [the soft glint of stealth in motion? Try thinking of a concrete comparison] the slow descent of a spider on a book inside a tray he’d already explored. He was well known for his fear of spiders — even amongst those who barely knew him. The creature swayed back and forth pendulously, dexterously, before finally alighting. The book on which it stood seemed to glow under the overhead lighting.

Then he saw the spider stretch out its forelimbs, as if it were the girl, the Donceles’s daughter, inviting an embrace …

He approached the tray into which the miserable creature dropped, and warily examined the book it seemed to select for him: William Morris’s edition of the works of Geoffrey Chaucer. With the spider nowhere to be seen, he quickly stowed the book in his sleeve. He was looking forward to thumbing through it, as he did when he was young.

The next row of books was so disappointing — for example, three volumes of the works of that impossible poet they tried persuading GD to translate into English, the novelettes of Herman Wouk, Vicki Baum, Hans Fallada — he felt he had to check if the “treasure” he had under his sleeve was really the book he thought it was. He looked at the timeworn, almost non-existent binding, the near-extinguished glow [like the liminal glow around a flame: his reason for taking it]. It was old, but at least it was the right book. Then Gabriel Donovan suddenly thought he was too hasty in judging the row of books disappointing, for while flashing his eyes along the upper shelves, past some old gazettes and anthologies of English poetry compiled by Patrick Gannon, he happened upon the very paperback copy of Henry Williamson he needed to complete his collection. Then he found a copy of And the Name of the Star by Oliver Stonor, and that hard-to-find French bibelot — which French booksellers gloated was actually impossible-to-find, a claim he not only disputed but which he vowed to confute— La muse demi mondaine et les antibiotiques , the first and last work of Luc Crespin — a kind of Radiguet figure to Lucien Rebatet’s Cocteau; that’s to say, a last intimate acquaintance [but we must specify what we mean by “intimate” lest it be understood with the same unscrupulous literality the French scandal-mongers derived from perusing their Littré].

And in another tray he found [the works of Swindon listed before and …] Then he suddenly got the impression he was in his own library and was afraid he was no longer in the place he thought he was …

Because whoever arranged or mixed up the books would never have thought to do so in the following order: [unrealistic books, Sebastian Knight, Herbert Quain …]

An ordering that inexplicably corresponded with his own — with Donovan’s — personal, interior, library

Time, air, and substance, aspects of the real we take for granted, but which seemed unreal in that single volume initialed [prepared by] HQ [Herbert Quain] containing both April March and The God of the Labyrinth . When his fingers found the well-worn edge of a copy of The Prismatic Bezel , he lost his breath, and his heart skipped a beat … with a sense of foreboding aptness, there was a copy of The Tragedy of S. K ., by John Goodman, lacking a jacket and balanced precariously on a shelf’s edge.

And then, slowly, with a characteristic swaying back and forth, which his best friends had detected when they accompanied him on his bookish excursions, [on their way to Esmé’s] Gabriel Donovan was fading away from, crumbling out of the dream he’d been dreaming. When he found himself again …, he realized he’d arrived, as if by magic, in his own house …

He hadn’t regained his calm after the return journey, which he made believing himself laden with treasure, a journey that felt like a swift descent; nor had he lost sight of those images of private devotion from which he was so rudely awakened …

#??? He was found dead: a happy suppression of consciousness and all conjecture, passively accepted in every tribal dialect [the following day]. [Circumstantial data] No one believed, etc.

No one wanted to believe.

While others — puffed with bombast — appear

To lash the sea’s shoulders, skirt the poles

Though blustering of all things tropical;

They lantern the moon, lend Apollo a taper

Worse than the lady of my mind, my Earth ,

Who, once baptized, foreswore her place of birth .

These you will see depicting battle scenes

Full of gorgons, griffins, and centipedes

Invoking Scylla, their runaway harlot .

Lope, “Epistle to Barrionuevo”

With a grammar book signed by T. Anlunle in which were copied the following lines [from the second sestina]:

Because it was the touch of a distant stream

That made his visible [palpable], broke its surface

As a body falling in the concave glass of night ,

As dreams mirror the last day’s wayward steps

Leading to a false awakening [dawning] ,

To the icy sting of awakening without him

A kind of parody or burlesque of Elizabethan writing

Inquiry about the Progresse of Sickness[e] and the Behavior of Death . Elizabeth, [Jean-Marie] Maurice Schérer, Gallimard, 1946.

Lord Swindon: Early Fiction (André Deutsch, 1964).

Lady Centipede, Religious Matters, The Game and the Solitude, Before & After Firbank , Auday & Ainchil,

Dreams that money can buy

“Disney contra the metaphysicians …” Perri

The Referent

By Nicasio Urlihrt

Followed by notes and commentary

By Oliverio Lester and Ema Teodelina Wuhl

Epilogue by Luis Chitarroni

Ema Wuhl

Magritte

Apple: western communism

After visiting the pathologist

Inscribe Miss Gee’s verses in a Gideon Bible. See original draft of “The Old Bachelor”

In February 1971, the French journal, Alusif / Imposture , launched a short-story competition. Instead of using a panel of judges to arbitrate on their suspiciously nepotistic, allegedly venal, and indisputably subjective standards of taste, winners were chosen for their ability to fulfill two very special criteria. The first was quantitative: whoever managed to adulterate their story with the most references and allusions would win. A key to these allusions should be sent as well, in a separate envelope and signed with a pseudonym (or, if the story was submitted under a pseudonym, a different pseudonym), specifying for each allusion or reference the title of the work in question, its author, and, where possible, the appropriate page number, chapter, publisher, and year of publication.