There's a very interesting short story about the experimental works of a fictional author,
An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain, that really reminded me of R07, and wanted to share it. It's by Borges.
Quain, recently deceased and mostly unsuccessful, first writes a mystery novel:
The God of the Labyrinth, an otherwise regular inquiry into an assassination, save for a sentence at the end:
>‘Everyone thought that the encounter of the two chess players was accidental.’ This phrase allows one to understand that the solution is erroneous. The unquiet reader re-reads the pertinent chapters and discovers another solution, the true one. The reader of this singular book is thus forcibly more discerning than the detective.Supremely relevant to Umineko, the reader figuring it out while the detective fails to do so. But even more relevant is his next work,
April March.
April March (the book itself) is composed like a game:
>In judging this novel, no one would fail to discover that it is a game; it is only fair to remember that the author never considered it anything else. ‘I lay claim in this novel,’ I have heard him say, ‘to the essential features of all games: symmetry, arbitrary rules, tedium.’It's made up of thirteen chapters, in a structure arranged as shown in this diagram:
https://files.catbox.moe/bbs382.pngThis one's a doozy. The important part is that there's a fundamental chapter, Z, that is shared among all the stories told inside the book. It's comparable to the intial state of the gameboard or the outcome of Rokkenjima. Then, Y1, Y2, and Y3 are separate possible scenarios that branch out from there, and each of them branch once more into three more, X from 1 to 9. That's what the brackets represent. So what you have is one book that contains within it nine different stories that share major unavoidable plot elements and are alternate universes of each other, much like what happens with fragments. Furthermore,
>Whoever reads the sections in chronological order (for instance: X3, Y1, Z) will lose the peculiar savour of this strange book. Two narratives —X7, X8— lack individual worth; mere juxtaposition lends them effectiveness...>I do not know if I should mentiPost too long. Click here to view the full text.