The Wandering Unicorn

"It is very dangerous to know anybody's complete thoughts, and I would never recommend the disillusioning experience... Every one of us is a complicated, ever-shifting blend of good and bad. We allow only what is presentable to appear on the surface and have an instinct for what will show us in a favourable light. This extends to our most appallingly sincere confession of defects, shortcomings, vice, crime, and seems to be uncontrollable…”

Melusine

Title: The Wandering Unicorn (El Unicornio)
Publication: 1982, Taplinger Books, ISBN 0800880412
Author: Manuel Mujica Lainez
Translator: Mary Fitton
Foreword: Jorge Luis Borges
Notes: Short-listed for the World Fantasy Award in 1984 along with novels such as Stephen King’s Pet Sematary and Jack Vance’s Lyonesse; lost out to John M Ford’s The Dragon Waiting

Herodotus of Histories, Father of History (or, perhaps, Father of Lies), may have been the first to understand the curious idea of history being fiction encased by fact, or fact glorified by fiction. Perhaps he did not know, and merely related the stories told to him that seemed to make the greatest sense; in any case, the result is enthralling. In events where miracles happen and gods walk the earth, the reader is left to merely accept such things; to not do so would be unthinkable.

Manuel Mujica Lainez, despite his relative anonymity among those acquainted with only the English language, was an esteemed author in his native Argentina. He was well acquainted with other Spanish authors, and communicated frequently with famous authors and poets: Jorge Luis Borges, Victoria Ocampo, Gabriela Mistral. The largest source of his writings can be found at Princeton University. For those familiar with South American writers, his works would be classified in the set of “magic realism”, sharing space with venerable authors such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jorge Luis Borges, though it is not wholly limited to South Americans; Mikhail Bulgakov (Master and Margarita, Heart of a Dog) also comes to mind. The Wandering Unicorn, true to the genre of magic realism, is ambitious, history and fantasy entwined as one, neither one outpacing the other; one could read these romantic histories as “glowing dream(s) set in the past.” Translators, as anyone who has read the works of Haruki Murakami, or perhaps Fyodor Dostoyevsky, know, are as important to the story as the author; perhaps even more so, and Mary Fitton gives the translation a frank, straightforward interpretation, choosing adjectives with masterly precision.

“It is a fairy’s life, a fairy story. Anyone who doesn’t believe in fairies had better shut these pages here and now and throw them into the wastepaper basket, or cut them up to line his bookshelves, and very expensive that will be. Not only will he be rejecting the evident truth that nothing, absolutely nothing, is explicable in this mysterious world, but, in his antiquated Victorian skepticism (and this without disrespect to a monarch I revere), he will miss some interesting things, and I am sorry for him. Of the many ways of being poor in spirit, and dismissing the earth as a dull sort of place, perhaps the stupidest is to say no to the hidden relish that gives life that touch of magic.”

Conversation between Humphrey of Toron and Melusin of Pleurs

And, as all histories and stories must, things do not end happily or sadly, but just are: “but that is how God willed it.”