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From: "Jack and Melissa Holcomb" <jackandmel@socket.net> Subject: Re: (urth) Haunted Boardinghouse Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2000 22:09:22 >Maybe someone made this point already, but I'm pretty slow these days. > At any rate, in this story we have a labyrinthine building, a library, a >murder mystery, and lots of latin phrases. Sound a famous novel by another >Roman Catholic writer? Anybody find any roses in "The Haunted Boardinghouse"? > >Nutria Hi. I'm new here, and I haven't yet read the story in question, so this is an impertinent response from the get-go--but those elements (labyrinth, library, murder mystery) are bits that Eco borrowed (intertextualized?) from Borges for _The Name of the Rose_. The labyrinthine building/library thing is a very big deal for Borges-- see "The Library of Babel," "The Garden of Forking Paths," "Death and the Compass," all in _Labyrinths_. (Also, the librarian in _Rose_ is George de Burgos, or something like that -- an alter ego for Borges. Blind, too.) I've been thinking about Borges and Wolfe a bit recently -- it's actually one of the reasons I subscribed to this list. I just got hold of the _Lexicon Urthus_ and was kind of surprised to see no mention of "The Circular Ruins" in the discussion of the Theseus story from the brown book. The first few pages seem like a very clear allusion to that Borges story, to me. Plus there's Baldanders, and the _Book of the New Sun_ is set mostly in Argentina, Borges' homeland. Can anyone point me toward a more thorough treatment of Borges and Wolfe, esp. in the Book? Thanks for listening. Jack Holcomb jackandmel@socket.net *More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/