![]() ![]() When the narrator glimpses infinity in a Buenos Aires basement, his challenge is to try to report back on what he’s seen. That is the explicit project of Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Aleph,” a story that attempts to sketch the universe in a single, luminous paragraph. Still, it’s the artist’s job to convince us otherwise, to make us feel as though, within a finite span of pages, we’ve somehow seen the whole damn thing. ![]() Works of fiction, of course, can’t really contain the entire world (or even an entire country, or city, or single human life) any more than the Queens Museum’s 1:1200-scale Manhattan panorama can show us everything about New York. In his introduction to The Wes Anderson Collection, the writer Michael Chabon suggests that novels are like scale models: They’re small, self-contained dioramas that manage to convey something much larger than they are. ![]()
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