ANTIPODES

From Mexico’s Padilla (Shadow Without a Name, 2003), a dozen trinkets about far-flung places, exotic times, weird people, weird things.

There is, for example, the slip of a tale “The Antipodes and the Century”: after a Scotsman is saved from death by Khirgiz nomads, he helps them “create” the actual city of Edinburgh right there on the Gobi desert: when he dies and disappears, so does the city. Equally odd, the “second plague,” coming after the ravages of the bubonic variety, is nothing less than the inexplicable oddity of good health (“Chronicle of the Second Plague”). Reversals or conundrums of this sort are a central part of Padilla’s repertoire, as in “Ballistics: Some Notes,” where it’s hypothesized that if two snipers were trying to shoot one another and were equipped with identical rifles and skills, their bullets might “shatter one another in midair.” Weirdly, the trains on the Rhodesian Railway will no longer run on time after a war-scarred British colonel takes charge of them (“Rhodesia Express”), and, in a strange locale in Ceylon, ugly creatures known as “erlings” come to eat garbage and, when they die, to leave behind a “white flour” that “today is so pleasing to the palate.” In another reversal, a British doctor changes the nature of mental illness by transforming a dreaded insane asylum, in Java, into a pleasant and attractive place—so that people try to get into it (“Amends in Halak-Proot”). The only trouble with such pieces is that, like warm-air balloons, they can seem simply to lift up and float away. And yet when Padilla becomes more extended and studious—as in “The Chinaman with the Heads,” about a gifted painter in Shanghai who becomes involved with murderers in the Kuomintang just before WWII—the result tends toward hand-me-down Joseph Conrad.

Pleasant but slight near-nothings that seem the clones, if not of Borges himself, then of the spirit of that writer’s offerings.