The Life and Memoirs of Doctor Pi

I’ve been reading The Life and Memoirs of Doctor Pi recently, and it’s an interesting little book.

Clockroot has made available a translation of the original introduction to the 1983 Spanish-language version of the novel:

The set of episodes that comprise the saga of Dr. Pi hurls us into an atmosphere of bloodless crime fiction, or that of a gothic novel; one without castles or ghosts, but which unravels in winding staircases, hotel rooms, scribes’ desks, underground tunnels, mountain waterfalls, psychoanalysts’ offices, voyages within, etc. Surprise is generated not by mythological marvel, but rather by an everyday one, borne of a kind of clash between levels of logic and reality, a disconnect that provokes a brand of unconscious perturbation, a disquiet that arises from the unanticipated presence of the Chalice of the Borgoñeses, of some imminent and urgent order of Dr. Pi, or of some meaning-laden explanation that appears to make something clear, but that clarifies absolutely nothing. A succession of events and circumstances apparently of the utmost importance, whose transpiring might be a matter of life or death, but that in the end leaves one in suspense, without knowing quite what has happened. They wrap around themselves like a snake eating its tail, only to land the reader in an incessant oscillation between the absurd and the poetic.

And an excerpt was recently published by the journal of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst Creative Writing MFA program.

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