Volume 24, Number 6 · April 14, 1977
A Fine Romance
By Michael Wood
The Secular Scripture
by Northrop Frye
Harvard University Press, 199 pp., $8.95
Spiritus Mundi
by Northrop Frye
Indiana University Press, 296 pp., $11.50
The Uses of Division
by John Bayley
Viking, 248 pp., $10.95
The Sovereign Ghost
by Denis Donoghue
University of California Press, 229 pp., $10.00
'This book,' Michel Foucault says at the beginning of The Order of Things, 'has its origin in a text by Borges'; and indeed Borges, the author of delicate, lucid, disturbed visions of what used to be an ordered world, has become something like the patron saint of much recent French writing. A character in Borges's story 'Death and the Compass' seems even to anticipate a French connection. An amateur detective in the tradition of Holmes and Dupin, confronted with the flat-footed police inspector so familiar in such fiction, Erik Lönnrot dismisses the inspector's simple view of a murder as 'possible, but not interesting.'
Review, 3651 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |