Richard Marshall, “Borges’s ‘Funes the Memorious’,” 3:AM Magazine 9 March 2014

A writer is in hell when her reader forgets her. This is the problem of Beatrice. Beatrice existed infinitely for Dante but he hardly if at all for her. Here’s the nub for Borges and his prodigious minimalism: we should stop thinking a ten minute conversation with Roberto Bolano would reveal to us the true meaning of 2666. And never doubt that our greatest love hardly acknowledges us. Andrew Gallix’s strange and Roman miniature is probably a Florentine exile; his ‘Fifty Shades of Grey Matter’ engulfs this type of inutterable despair. Yet still, whatever is imagined is there. If this is likened to a journey then it ends in a catastrophe which is not destiny but its secret instruction.