"Before Margaret Thatcher’s era, the Tories were conservators, not wreckers. Cameron has gone much further than Thatcher dared. The survival of the United Kingdom itself is in doubt and it’s an open question who “the British” now are. An election result leaving the Tories at the helm would see more destruction, financial, social and moral. What they offer as a vision of who we are, what we value and where we belong in the world is small and mean."
The Stevenson book Borges revisited most often was “The Wrecker,” a relatively obscure novel that Stevenson wrote with his stepson. Published in 1892, “The Wrecker” is a story of high seas adventure, high stakes speculation and high interest loans; it’s part mystery novel, part adventure novel, part mock Künstlerroman. The title refers to the practice of auctioning off the remains of wrecked ships along with any recoverable cargo, which is, yes, an irresistibly resonant metaphor for neglected books.
On the surface, “The Wrecker” could hardly resemble a Borges story less. At 500 pages, and full of incident, “The Wrecker” has the feel of a 27-course Victorian feast, served on a table crowded with doilies and finger bowls and odd utensils whose functions we can’t even imagine; Borges’s stories are more like truffle oil. Stevenson can barely go a page without mentioning bankruptcy, smuggling or sea captains; Borges, though he writes of bar fights and criminals, more often mentions Zeno’s paradox and the “Annals” of Tacitus. In the false dichotomy of the sword versus the pen, Stevenson is red and Borges black.
Künstlerroman
Künstlerroman (plural ‐mane), the German term (meaning ‘artist‐novel’) for a novel in which the central character is an artist of any kind, e.g. the musical composer Leverkühn in Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus (1947), or the painter Lantier in Zola's L'Oeuvre (1886). Although this category of fiction often overlaps with the Bildungsroman in showing the protagonist's development from childhood or adolescence—most famously in Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)—it also includes studies of artists in middle or old age, and sometimes of historical persons: in David Malouf's An Imaginary Life (1978), for example, the central character and narrator is the Roman poet Ovid (43BCE–17CE).
doi·ly (doi'lē)
n., pl., -lies.
- A small ornamental mat, usually of lace or linen.
- A small table napkin.
[After Doily and or Doyly, 18th-century London draper.]
wrecker
Definition of wrecker in English:
NOUN
n.
- One that wrecks or destroys: a wrecker of dreams.
- One who is in the business of demolishing old buildings.
- One who dismantles cars for salvage.
- A person, vehicle, or piece of equipment employed in recovering or removing wrecks, especially a truck with a hoist and towing apparatus used in towing disabled or wrecked vehicles.
- One that salvages wrecked cargo or parts.
- One who lures a vessel to destruction, as by a display of lights on a rocky coastline, in order to plunder it.
- A plunderer.
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