THE BORROWER

Only seemingly more straightforward than her earlier novels (there are no perversities of punctuation this time), this is sub-titled an ""alchemical novel"" so that before long you know where you're at, or not at, which might be anybody's intuitive second guess. The story however is told in an itinerant fashion slipping from the present to 33 years ago which may tease your interest along with that occasional remark--""water, women and death overtake us nude."" The recording medium is an American professor who finds the dead body of one Undank in the snow, who translates and borrows the dead man's manuscripts (""Experiments with My Self, or the Anonymous I""), and in his appropriation is also absorbed by the deceased's ideas which are rigorously eclectic and paradoxical. As are the two women he leaves behind--equal reversals--an alluring widow and a dowdy, dumpy, comfortable wife. Throughout there are speculations on reality, causality, selfhood, convergence, transmutation and what have you, surfacing from Undank's manuscript which may prove to be as thankless as his name in terms of what he called ""reaction prodders."" It provides only random access to a rather precious few.