here & now

Even though the upcoming weeks are going to be all about that soccer mayhem, it’s time for Thursday’s recommended read: Macedonio Fernández – The Museum of Eterna’s Novel (The First Good Novel) (Open Letter Books)
“Macedonio is metaphysics, is literature. Whoever preceded him might shine in history, but they were all rough drafts of Macedonio,” a certain J. L. Borges once said about his mentor, the author of this marvelous book, who worked on The First Good Novel (which really is “The Best Ever Anti-Novel”) for almost 30 years. Originally published in 1967, 15 years after his death, it’s now available in English via Open Letter Books, and let me just say this (as a prologue to your reading experience): This is outrageous proto-metafiction at its incredible best. Half made up of prologues (there’s more than 50 of them; e.g. “To Readers Who Will Perish If They Don’t Know What The Novel Is About” or “To The Window-Shopping Reader”), and written for the “skip-around reader,” The First Good Novel is so hilarious, so addictive, so inspiring, and so much ahead of its time, it makes you want to become “That Lover” and move to that estancia called “La Novela” (which is where the “action” is eventually “going down”) right away. Being perfectly aware of what it is, here’s one of many things this novel has to say about itself: “An irritating read, this book will annoy the reader like no other, with its false promises and inconclusive and incompatible methodology; nevertheless it’s a novel that will not cause reader evasion, since it will produce an interest in the soul of the reader that will leave him allied to its destiny – it’s a novel that needs a lot of friends.” Want some more? Try this. Or this.