Marcel Schwob was a Jewish-French writer that died at 38, but left behind a legacy that influenced arguabyl the greatest short story writer of the twentieth century (perhaps of all time), Jorge Luis Borges. Borges said that A Universal History of Infamy was inspired by Schwob's unique collection Imaginary Lives. What makes both unique is that they are a combination of factual and imagined accounts of real people, written in such a way that it's like reading a history book.

The stories in Imaginary Lives start out harmless enough. Schwob bombards you with description, putting the reader off balance with perfumed tonics and celestial jewelry, etc, etc. But things get weird, as they begin contemplating the uninterrupted sky in a perfectly circular opening in a forest glade parallel a lake. In the case of Lucretius, pondering lust and death and life, all framed by a shaky relationship with a foreign woman. But how the stories end, how these characters spend their days, whether cut short, mired in piquant knavery, or simply left obscure, as the information has run out and we're left to wonder. Left to wonder whether we have heard these names, whether what we're told has been twisted such that these simple matter-of-fact tales seem more true then the histories written about them.

Schwob often foregoes using very well known historical figures, preferring the esoteric and deviant. When he does tackle someone with the pedigree of a Greek philosopher or poet, he boils them down to their base, removing nearly everything one expects from a story. There's no plot to speak of, hardly any dialogue, and the biographies never run for more then a few pages. They're gone before you've had a chance to know them, yet I couldn't shake the feeling that I was being told something general through the eyes of something very specific.

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino has a similar affect on me. It's nothing but an ethereal travelogue, based on a factual relationship between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo but coursed with descriptions of unreal cities. Again, no plot to speak of, the only characters are Kublai and Polo, and their conversations only happen at the beginning and end of most chapters, sparse and without context. It's hard to know what is and isn't happening in this book, and Calvino takes you away as soon as you find your feet in these imagined conversations. Onto another Bavarian, impossible city. It's the book that feels closest like listening to music.

I don't know why we haven't seen more stories in this vein. I think there's a lot you can do with braiding fact and imagination. Furthermore, I don't really know what happened to the experimentation with form in literature. Everything is trying to be something else. A pale imitation of what someone did better instead of trying to do what you can do better then anyone else. I don't think we are simply wholly individual beings just because; instead, I see it as an opportunity to create something wholly individual. To imitate is to do disservice to yourself and all of us who have no idea what's going on in that brain of yours.