Agreeing with Steve Sailer.

So Freddie's online read-through of The Name of the Rose starts today. Since this week's dedicated to the first day in the narrative, I decided to go ahead and read the preface and prologue last night so that I'd be able to start with the body of the narrative on this morning's train ride.

Steve Sailer -- notorious for stances that his friends would describe as "non-PC," his enemies as "racist" -- left a comment on Freddie's blog, and it turns out that I can agree with this comment, and I can do so without reservation or qualification:

"The fictional preface is a pretty hilarious Nabokov/Borges parody."

True. Sample:

"If something new had not occurred, I would still be wondering where the story of Adso of Melk originated; but then, in 1970, in Buenos Aires, as I was browsing among the shelves of a little antiquarian bookseller on Corrientes, not far from the more illustrious Patio del Tango of that great street, I came upon the Castilian version of a little work by Milo Temesvar, On the Use of Mirrors in the Game of Chess."

-Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose. trans. William Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994. (3)