Barnaby Sandwich was recently in San Francisco to see a girl about a thing. In Chinatown he ate roast goose for breakfast at a large communal table and listened to the reminiscences of an eighty-seven year old veteran of the Battle of the Bulge. In North Beach he had his morning coffee while eavesdropping on the complex social hierarchies of three generations of Beat poets. In the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art he saw a wonderful Diego Rivera painting, as well as more iterations of Chuck Close’s face than he had thought possible in a material universe bounded by natural law. All in all it was a wonderful time, with the exception of his visit to City Lights, the famous bookstore and publisher, on the afternoon of February 14th.

After browsing around the bookstore for a while, Barnaby decided to look for a book by Moses Isegawa, one of the writers scheduled to appear at the PEN “Foreign Writers Write English, Too” Festival. He did not see anything in Fiction under “I,” but, never being fully confident in his own mastery of the alphabet, Barnaby decided to ask the woman behind the counter, just to be sure. After he had spelled Mr. Isegawa’s name, and the woman had consulted her computer, he was directed to a room in the back with a black and white floor.

“Not in fiction?” asked Barnaby.

“No,” said the woman, “Third World Fiction.”

Steady, Barnaby, steady. He went to the back room and found three copies of Snakepit on the shelf. Next to it was a book by a writer called Yasushi Inoue. What goes on here? thought Barnaby. Is Japan the Third World? Well, he told himself judiciously, perhaps this fellow grew up in Indonesia. He took a copy of Snakepit and one of Inoue’s The Hunting Gun off the shelf to investigate.

Upon investigation it seemed that Inoue was as Japanese as Japanese can be, and that Isegawa, while Ugandan in origin, lives in the Netherlands and first published Snakepit in Dutch. Reader, you can see where this is going. Steady, Barnaby, steady. He looked for, and found, a number of other Japanese writers: Abe, Mishima, Kawabata. Even Kazuo Ishiguro, who, despite his outlandishly foreign name, and his admittedly poor choice in being born to Japanese parents, is an Englishman writing in English! And it goes on. All the Chinese writers; all the Indian writers; all the Arab writers; all the Latin American writers; and even Jorge Luis Borges, the single man whose work must be most opposed to any such compartmentalizing of writers, the single man whose writing most depended on a sincere belief in the existence and importance of a universal nation of literature, transcending national and cultural divisions and uniting human beings through and against time—even Borges was consigned to the special room in the back with the black and white parquet floor.

Just as Barnaby was suffering his first small heart attack, a man with a bristly mustache came in and briskly began putting books on the shelves. Barnaby asked if he worked there, and he said that he did, and asked what book Barnaby was looking for. Barnaby thrust his trembling hands into his pockets.

“No,” he stuttered, “I found the book I was looking for, but, uh, I was wondering, um—I was surprised to see so many Japanese writers in, uh—the woman behind the counter said that this was the—” steady, Barnaby, steady! “—the Third World Fiction section, and, uh—” What in God’s name is the matter with you people? “—uh, what exactly is the criterion for being ‘third world?’”

The man delivered his reply casually, business-like, without stopping his shelving.

“People of color is the shortest way to say it,” he said. “Yellow people, brown people, black people.”

Here Barnaby suffered his second small heart attack and charged out of the store to run madly down the street for several blocks, lest he do something rash. After he recovered, he returned to the store to investigate a bit further. It turned out that black people were not consigned to the little room if they happened to be American—James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, by virtue of their birth, Barnaby supposed, and disregarding any French intervals, got to be in regular Fiction. So too did Abraham Cahan, who was born in Lithuania and wrote in Yiddish, because, Barnaby supposed, he had the good sense to move to New York and switch to English. Elias Canetti, on the other hand, although he spent much of his life in London and claimed to have learned English earlier than the language he wrote in, German; and although he always superintended the English translations of his work—he was, after all, whatever he was (a Bulgarian?), and he was in European Fiction. Flann O’Brien, on the other hand, whose most famous novels were written in Irish, was in regular Fiction.

So what exactly is the system? Writers from the former British Empire are in Fiction—unless they are South Asian, in which case they’re Third World? And Western Europeans are European? And everyone else is the Third World? (Rack his mind as he might, Barnaby could not imagine any coherent system that included the categorization of Ishiguro, and finally concluded that it must have been a mistake.) And what is the purpose? To give these writers a leg up? To contest the canon of dead white men? To broaden my horizons by bringing my attention to the flavorful ethnic fiction of Kobo Abe and Jorge-Luis Borges? To make it easier for the customer with specific regional tastes, who reads Chinese and Bolivian writers exclusively?

Or is race a red herring? Borges, after all, was not very dark. Is the point simply that Fiction means English and American Fiction (with Ireland belonging to England), and everything else, regardless of the wealth of its country of origin, is, in cultural terms, the Third World? Wouldn’t it be better, dear City Lights, not to mention easier, to leave this sort of facile categorizing to the academy and the bar room cranks? Wouldn’t it be better simply to have a single fiction section organized by last name?

In short, City Lights—what the fuck are you smoking?

Barnaby Sandwich is a Viennese Jew—that is, by sympathy. He likes to read his newspaper in the cafe. He likes whipped cream in his coffee. He likes to believe in truth, humanity, and the ultimate triumph of reason. But everything he knows about this schematic type of the Viennese Jew he learned from Elias Canetti and Joseph Roth—two great writers who were, to be sure, Jewish, and who did write in German, and who both, each in his own way, had something to do with the Habsburg Empire or its passing, but neither of whom, strictly speaking, was Viennese. So it was with great delight that Barnaby recently discovered Stefan Zweig, who was born, in 1881, actually in Vienna. (Zweig went to London in 1934, and then to New York, and then to Brazil, where he and his wife died in an apparent suicide in 1942.)

The first thing Barnaby read was the novella called Chess Story or The Royal Game, in which Dr. B., imprisoned alone for months, manages to steal a chess book during an interrogation and teaches himself to play, with himself as his only opponent. To Barnaby’s understanding, this is a book about the impossible situation of the sensitive person, or of civilization generally. Confronted with the world’s mindless and inexorable cruelty, we have two choices: we can surrender, and be crushed; or we can fight—but only with the world’s methods, which will themselves drive us insane. The only option, therefore, is simply to withdraw. To put it another way, sensitive anger at an insensitive evil can only go backwards, hurting the one who is angry, leaving the evil untouched. (Barnaby thinks that engagement with reality is highly overrated—he has a small private income, and he never wears a belt.)

The very next thing that Barnaby did—after a detour to the toilet and a short walk to buy a coconut bun—was to buy Fantastic Night & Other Stories, in which he read “Letter From an Unknown Woman.” In this long story, or novella, the unknown woman writes to a man whom she has known, and loved, since childhood; to whom she lost her virginity; to whom she bore a child; with whom she spent other nights; whom she encountered across Vienna over years; to whom she sent, every year on his birthday, white roses—but who never on any of these occasions recognized or remembered her. Every time she was new, and insignificant; every time he was unaware of her tremendous love, unaware of his significance to her. Only on her deathbed does she write to him to tell him all this—because however much unhappiness his failure to recognize her caused, she does not want to trouble him. In this story Barnaby—with his wine-besotted and mystical mind—found an almost perfect allegory. Is the woman God? or wealth and privilege? or society? or the very world itself, tremendously complex and full of meaning, deeper and more real than our minds can ever know? And the man—is he love, grace, beauty, success, art, happiness, peace? Self-delusion? They can be any of these, and more, almost everything—but not actually everything; their meaning is just sufficiently limited that it remains meaning. And meanwhile it remains simply an excellent story, regardless of its meaning, which is the way that Barnaby prefers to read. “Let the bowels of my mind worry about the bowels of the story,” he says, “while the surface makes love to the surface.”

Also meanwhile, last night, at the White Horse Tavern, another dowdy English major pointed out to Barnaby his resemblance to Dylan Thomas, and then, after another drink, explained that she meant a “late” Dylan Thomas. Barnaby resolved to get a haircut and do some sit-ups at the first opportunity.

(Chess Story is available in a nice edition from NYRB Classics, translated by Joel Rotenberg, and Fantastic Night & Other Stories from Pushkin Press, various translators. "Letter From an Unknown Woman" is translated by Eden and Cedar Paul. The personal information about Zweig is lifted directly from the author bio in the front of Fantastic Night. Dylan Thomas was Welsh.)

Barnaby Sandwich has left New York three times: once to see fireworks at Grand Army Plaza, once to go to the Transit Museum in Downtown Brooklyn, and once on a school trip to the Bronx Botanic Garden. But despite his limited travel, he is very interested in foreigners—he knows a lot of them, and in fact, his own great-grandfather was one, who came all the way from White Russia. In tribute to this man’s natty ascot—and to the crumbs of hard-boiled egg that clung to the natty ascot—someone at Ellis Island nicknamed him “the Oil of Sandwich,” and Sandwich bequeathed this name to his patrilineal descendants.

Barney is particularly interested in foreign books because, as he understands it, they are not written in English, but in other languages altogether, and then have to be translated. The exact purpose of this complicated procedure remains occult to him; and it is partially in the hope of learning why everyone doesn’t write in English in the first place that Sandwich has decided to attend the PEN American Center’s Foreign Something-Whatever festival. (His other partial hope is of meeting a pretty foreign girl with uncorrected teeth who doesn’t buy into American standards of masculine fitness.)