East, West

Next week there is another auction. Family trees, coats of arms, royal lineages will be up for sale, and into any of these one may insert any name one chooses, one's own, or one's beloved's. Canine and feline pedigrees will be on offer, too: Alsatian, Burmese, saluki, Siamese, cairn terrier.

Thanks to the infinite bounty of the Auctioneers, any of us, cat, dog, man, woman, child, can be a blue-blood; can be - as we long to be; and as, cowering in our shelters, we fear we are not - somebody.

Salman Rushdie. East, West (1994). Coincidencia notable, el estilo del relato citado arriba ("At the auction of the ruby slippers") tiene mucho en común con el de "Naked Lunch", que leí la semana pasada. La coincidencia de estilo es, pienso yo, una influencia. La coincidencia está en que yo haya leído ambos libros con tan poco tiempo de diferencia. Además, no había notado que Naked Lunch tuviese estilo ni ningún valor literario. Tal vez fue un juicio prematuro.

Naked Lunch Snuff

Leí también, y registro aquí, Naked Lunch (the restored text) de William S. Burroughs, 1959, y Snuff, de Chuck Palahniuk, 2008. En ninguno de los dos casos la experiencia fue agradable. El primero de ellos tiene un cierto atractivo histórico, pero me dejó sintiendo que es puro cholulismo. El segundo parece hecho para ganar dinero, por lo que deberían leerlo apenas los que son pagos por ello.

Haruki

Women are all born with a special, independent organ that allows them to lie. This was Dr. Tokai's personal opinion. It depends on the person, he said, about the kind of lies they tell, what situation they tell them in, and how the lies are told. But at a certain point in their lives, all women tell lies, and they lie about important things. They lie about unimportant things, too, but they also don't hesitate to lie about the most important things. And when they do, most women's expressions and voices don't change at all, since it's not them lying, but this independent organ they're equipped with that's acting on its own. That's why - except in a few special cases - they can still have a clear conscience and never lose sleep over anything they say.

Haruki Murakami, Men without women (2017).