Golden Hours

Borges invented the review of a book that does not exist. O’Brien invented the apparatus — a philosopher so fully equipped with titles, enemies and gaffes that you forget, for pages at a time, that the man has never been printed.

The narrator of The Third Policeman is not writing a novel. He is trying to publish an index to de Selby, and he will do a murder for the money. What we read instead of that index is a trail of footnotes in which Golden Hours is opened, misquoted, defended and denounced. Night, de Selby says, is not the absence of the sun but a gradual silt of “black air.” Houses are a mistake. Journeys do not occur. The earth is the wrong shape. Each claim is less a theory than a refusal to look at the world the way the rest of us have agreed to.

The commentators are the other half of the joke, and the better half. Hatchjaw smells forgery in the third prosecanto. Du Garbandier is merely unkind. Their own books are lost, which is the correct fate for books about a man who was never here. By the time the narrator has walked into a police barracks that may be hell, de Selby has become the only continuity the story has — a bibliography standing in for a soul.

File it next to Kinbote’s commentary. Both are books that eat their hosts from the notes up. Kinbote wants you to admire him. de Selby does not know you are there.

On the readability rating. Scattered propositions and a few reported sentences, always in a footnote, always already in dispute. There is no Golden Hours to order. There is only the argument about it, which is the book.