It is a common game in literary criticism to trace a writer’s influences. Sometimes the game degenerates into accusations of plagiarism on the part of the critics, and on the other hand many writers are embarrassed to admit that they were influenced at all by any other writer.

But all writers are influenced by other writers. It is impossible for most people to learn to write without learning to read (we recall a notable exception in one Barnstable Bear), and what one has read will invariably shape what one writes. All the great works of literary art have been put together by authors who had read other books and learned from them. Often those authors have deliberately taken another author as a model or inspiration, and that is not plagiarism: it is simply literature at work.

Since an early reader of Fidessa asked about Dr. Boli’s influences, he is happy to mention three writers whose works he had in mind when he was writing it. They are Edmund Spenser, Henry James, and J. M. G. Le Clézio. If you imagine a story written by those three men in collaboration, you should have a very good idea of what kind of reading experience awaits you with Fidessa.

Fidessa is the story of young Adam and the three women in his life: his best friend, his new love interest, and the enigmatic and impossibly attractive artist Fidessa, who may be something more than human. Fidessa is painting Adam’s portrait; but as she grows more and more manipulative, it becomes clear that her real work is not the image on the canvas, but Adam’s life itself.

This is a haunting tale of obsession—funny, harrowing, thought-provoking, and possibly even allegorical, and told with the subtlety and wit Dr. Boli’s readers have come to expect. With The Crimes of Galahad and The Emperor, it is destined to take its place as one of the foremost literary works of our age—both on its own merits and because, honestly, what’s the competition?

We promised this for April, but here it is a day early.

Order Fidessa at Amazon, on paper or in electrical form.

This is from the general preface to a series of books—reprints of important works of Indian history and philosophy—called Bhavan’s Book University. The volume we consulted was published in 1958, and it is comforting to realize that academics have always meant the same thing when they claim to be getting explicit. They mean that they are about to say something so vague that it eludes all attempts at argument in the same way a thick fog slips through a chain-link fence.

The objectives for which the Bhavan stands are the re-integration of the Indian culture in the light of modern knowledge and to suit our present-day needs and the resuscitation of its fundamental values, in their pristine vigour.

Let me make our goal more explicit:

We seek the dignity of man, which necessarily implies the creation of social conditions which would allow him freedom to evolve along the lines of his own temperament and capacities; we seek the harmony of individual efforts and social relations, not in any make-shift way, but within the frame-work of the Moral Order; we seek the creative art of life, by the alchemy of which human limitations are progressively transmuted, so that man may become the instrument of God, and is able to see Him in all and all in Him.

What the general editor really means is “We seek donors who are generous and trusting so that we can keep making a living rummaging in old books,” which is a worthy goal, but not likely to succeed when stated explicitly.

Update: Now available. Order from Amazon.

“The painter works with light, but the shadows give the light its character. Most painters begin with the dark colors, and layer on the lights. But I prefer to work in the opposite direction. When I begin, the canvas is white—the color of pure light. Each stroke of the brush is, in a manner of speaking, a shadow. I make my art by taking away light. When I say that I work with light, therefore, I really ought to say that I work against light.” She gave him one of her enigmatic smiles. “I am an angel of darkness.”