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This week, as we wrap up our reading of Three Horses, a little background on the concept of the implied author. (Whiny voice: Are you kidding me?) Wayne Booth was the first to coin this term in The Rhetoric of Fiction, where he defines it as a second self that a writer creates in the construction of a text. He quotes Jessamyn West: “Writing is a way of playing parts, of trying on masks, of assuming roles, not for fun but out of desperate need, not for the self’s sake but for

Besides Laila, the other key character in Three Horses is Selim, a man whom the narrator befriends and helps, acts of kindness which have consequences. Like Laila, Selim is only seen through the narrator’s perspective. He first appears a quarter of the way into the book. The narrator has gone to work at the garden. “A tall man, African, older, calls to me from the gate…I let him in and invite him to the toolshed for a coffee.” The two men sit and talk, and finally the narrato

Usually, in this blog, I don’t want to merely describe the plots of the books I discuss in the manner of a book review. My purpose is to examine structures in fiction, particularly narrational strategies. But the plot in Three Horses really demands some explication before we can proceed. Because of the book’s style, the story is not immediately clear. An unnamed narrator, self-described as a fifty-year old gardener, encounters a younger woman named Laila in a restaurant. She

As mentioned last week, Erri De Luca, the author of Three Horses, states he can only write about things he’s experienced, placing himself more in the camp of writers who admonish everyone to “write what you know.” The issue has become very partisan, with believers and dis-believers regarding each other with steely-eyed hatred over a middle ground of the undecided. It’s always good to mention Ernest Hemingway, so let’s do. “Papa” was a writer who embodied “write what you know,

This week, a new novel, Erri De Luca’s 1999 book Three Horses, translated from Italian to English by Michael Moore in 2005. I first read Three Horses ten years ago. I do not recall what led me to the book; no doubt, it was either because of reading some reference to it or perhaps just seeing the cover in a brick and mortar bookshop. The cover of the 2005 paperback edition shows an evocative image of a color photograph that has been changed in a painterly way by an overlay of