Tyrants Tremble
Please forgive me, dear sir, but I'm tough and honest temperament, so that from the beginning you will make this clarification: Do not be fooled, this text is far from a mere plagiarism. By contrast (and will soon warn you), it is an epistle brief, somewhat strange, that perhaps it might be a lesson for not only myself but many mighty souls. First of all, I hasten to introduce myself, to have you in mind, while reading, my visual image, as if it were a picture watermark, which is far more honest than foster, through silence, often erroneous conclusions removed inadvertently type of writing that has in the eyes. No, despite my bold pen and arbitrariness of my commas, I am a mature and strong, clear that there is a strong stout, is tasteless, cunning and temper. Is very far, sir, the bulk of Gertrude Stein, writer so hated by the Knights. But enough. You, as a writer, and together with the data sufficient to complete, on your own, my portrait. Bonjour, Monsieur. And go on with it.
bought few days ago in a used bookstore (which an illiterate target reduced to a dreary street in Montevideo) three or four old books, including his short story collection "The tyrannicide." Cute title at least, if for no other reason, because its original title in English ("Tyrants Destroyed") very similar to a famous verse of the anthem of my country which is worth serving. So cute title was precisely what sparked my interest. On the other hand, I keep generally, certain prejudices against collections of stories are collected in the peace of a golden exile in places such as Montreux and Vienna. But I bought it, as I said, your book.
Ah, my dear sir, ah, Mr. Vladimir Vladimirovich, how easy it is to guess that the author is hiding under a pseudonym, the author is not an ordinary man, but the time-space traveler Tichy Ijon ! Every sentence you write is buttoned at infinity. The preference that you demonstrate by words such as "time spent" or "when the gods used to take earthly forms," \u200b\u200breplacement the restrictions introduced to sex education in school curricula for the teaching of "Gypsy fight," the aversion to snuff by the leader, who cleverly subverts a disproportionate taste the cucumber in his time waiters and the recommendation of the laughter as a remedy to overcome their unique thought, fair enough as a sign of his fondness for human and literary satire, and its anachronistic nature. But that is only the beginning.
Is it necessary to clarify the above? Will you need to tell you, when reading his work, so agile, so atrocious, I suffered a sense of déjà vu ? Tore my index, to open the old pages but not cut, and my eyes just could manage, to travel, to blink, victims of disbelief and amazement.
Will you know what happened? With great pleasure. While you, lying in his hammock with the full weight of his body, let the pages sprout from his pen like a fountain (almost a pun), you wrote, sir, the story of the first months of the current administration of my country (*). Allow me to transcribe, to the astonishment of the readers of this letter, the accurate portrayal diabolically you date, written in France in 1938.
"The point is that as his power grew, I began to realize that the obligations of citizens, the admonitions, restrictions, ordinances, and all forms of pressure that we inflicted, they acquired a close resemblance to the man, revealed a relationship unequivocal traits of character and details of their past, to the point that on the basis of these decrees and injunctions could rebuild his personality, as rebuilt from an octopus-tentacles, that personality that I was one of the few who knew thoroughly. In other words, everything around him gradually took its own look. The law began to show a likeness farcical with his walk and gestures. The deposits of the grocers began storing an excessive amount of cucumbers, vegetable he avidly consumed in their youth. School programs today include gypsy fight that, in rare moments of excitement cold, he used to play with my brother on the floor, twenty-five years. The newspaper articles and novels of writers sycophants have adopted this dry style, this quality lapidary supposedly meaningless, basically because each coin phrase repeated in different key, one and the same truism officer, effective language cum thought infirm, and many other stylistic affectations you are very typical. Soon I felt that he, as I remember, all pervading, infesting their presence mode of thinking, the daily life of each person, so that their mediocrity, their gray habits and tedious, and were the very life of the country. And finally, the law that he imposed, the relentless power of the majority, endless sacrifice to the idol of most sociological-lost all meaning, for most it is . "
Oh, well, I think all this deserves explanation. The first piece is a shame that I made, mutatis mutandis, about the beginning of the excellent story "The tower Admiralty "by Vladimir Nabokov. This story is a letter a reader wrote to the author (or author) of a novel, believing that it is based on the story of his first love." The Tower (or "the spire. .. ") of the Admiralty" is what you have written funnier Nabokov and blame the author of the epistle prefixed to the story full of literary cliches and aristocratic affectations with which the author "distorted" history "real" move in the field of non-reliable narrators and characters somewhat pathetic Nabokov popped in "Pnin".
The second, quoting and without bold intervention on my part, is a fragment of the story "tyrannicide", which name to the collection.
Yesterday I read two stories and one way or another mixed more or less like trying to do here. The emergence of the pastiche Ijon Tichy is just another disgrace useful to my purposes. Bored with my previous post, I decided to write what I thought yesterday while reading, but not before saying yes, it is a shame, a dare and a joke, inspired by the discovery of tyrannicide that laughter is the only response to the power of governments.
(*) I should clarify (oh, sensitive souls) that the comparison is, of course, a tremendous exaggeration. The tyrant of Nabokov's story molding is a dictator halfway between Hitler, Stalin and Lenin, but I could not resist the temptation to play the paragraph above, for indeed my thoughts were hilariously over here and now while reading this paragraph and at the end of the story when tyrannicide discovers that the secret is in the joke.
