Alan Pauls Deciphers Borges's Literary DNA in New Book

Argentine novelist Alan Pauls has published 'Le facteur Borges Wasabi', a dual work comprising a reading manual on Jorge Luis Borges and a hybrid narrative pursuing writer Klossowski. The Borges section decrypts the Argentine writer's literary DNA through the unstable zone of intimate secrets contaminated by public certainties and the frivolous foam of the social sphere where literary writing's nature plays out. Pauls argues that Borges wrote from another space and time, in a language pure as diamond, remaining the most enduringly contemporary writer while being a survivor of another era. The book also explores Borges's polemical, combative side, making power relations a driving principle of his literature. Pauls notes that for Argentine literature, Borges is less a writer than a language—an institution. The work includes a discussion of Borges's 1963 statement about moving toward simplicity and using the most worn-out metaphors. Pauls defines his own political style as iconic transparency and a docile relationship of immediate exchange with the audiovisual world. The book was published by Éditions Bourgois.