Status
Available
Genres
Collection
Publication
New York : Dutton, 1977.
Description
Thirteen new stories by the celebrated writer, including two which he considers his greatest achievements to date, artfully blend elements from many literary geares.
User reviews
LibraryThing member elenchus
Prompted by a Deep Ones discussion of "There are more things", proceeded to read the remaining 10 stories in my large print edition. The collection is rife with books and libraries, nameless strangers, intersections of the past and present and future, bards and skalds, Christianity's pagan roots,
Most (if not all) stories here written separately and previously published, and from Borges' later oeuvre, they share a reflective if not somber tone and resignation in the face of ... what? The disappointment or delight in the inscrutable universe? A common opinion seems to be this isn't his strongest collection, which bodes well for further reading.
Wonder if Spielberg's final resting place of the Ark of the Covenant is indebted to Borges' idea of random re-shelving in "The Book of Sand".
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No poems in this edition, but it includes a black ink headpiece illustration for each story, none of them particularly insightful but decorative enough.
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myopia, architecture and mathematics, and unreliable first-person narrators. Most (if not all) stories here written separately and previously published, and from Borges' later oeuvre, they share a reflective if not somber tone and resignation in the face of ... what? The disappointment or delight in the inscrutable universe? A common opinion seems to be this isn't his strongest collection, which bodes well for further reading.
Wonder if Spielberg's final resting place of the Ark of the Covenant is indebted to Borges' idea of random re-shelving in "The Book of Sand".
//
No poems in this edition, but it includes a black ink headpiece illustration for each story, none of them particularly insightful but decorative enough.
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LibraryThing member thorold
I suppose this has pretty much everything you would expect from a Borges collection: paradoxes, gauchos, world-domination conspiracies, minor academic controversies, ironic fairy tales about skalds and their kings, a magic book with no first or last page, and a supernatural creature we don't get to
The two really well-known pieces are obviously the title story about the frighteningly infinite book (which obviously complements the infinite library we met thirty years earlier) and "El otro", in which the seventy-year-old Jorge Luis Borges, sitting on a bench by the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts, hears someone whistling a familiar old Argentinian tune and discovers that he is sharing the bench with the the twenty-year-old Jorge Luis Borges, who as far as he knows is sitting on a bench in Geneva. Cue a delightfully perplexed exchange about which of them is dreaming this, and how they could tell.
There are two stories that deal in different ways with the idea that it might be possible to concentrate a poem into a single word, there is an account of the beliefs of a heretical Christian sect that didn't exist but probably should have, there is an old man's story of how he witnessed the shooting of the celebrated gaucho Juan Moreira on the same night he had his first sexual experience, there is a Nordic love-story set on the banks of the Ouse, there are hints of a Nordic theme touching all the stories in the book, and altogether there is far more than could possibly fit into a relatively slim little book. Obviously Borges lent his publishers some of his book-deforming magic. Wonderful stuff, however it was done.
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meet.The two really well-known pieces are obviously the title story about the frighteningly infinite book (which obviously complements the infinite library we met thirty years earlier) and "El otro", in which the seventy-year-old Jorge Luis Borges, sitting on a bench by the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts, hears someone whistling a familiar old Argentinian tune and discovers that he is sharing the bench with the the twenty-year-old Jorge Luis Borges, who as far as he knows is sitting on a bench in Geneva. Cue a delightfully perplexed exchange about which of them is dreaming this, and how they could tell.
There are two stories that deal in different ways with the idea that it might be possible to concentrate a poem into a single word, there is an account of the beliefs of a heretical Christian sect that didn't exist but probably should have, there is an old man's story of how he witnessed the shooting of the celebrated gaucho Juan Moreira on the same night he had his first sexual experience, there is a Nordic love-story set on the banks of the Ouse, there are hints of a Nordic theme touching all the stories in the book, and altogether there is far more than could possibly fit into a relatively slim little book. Obviously Borges lent his publishers some of his book-deforming magic. Wonderful stuff, however it was done.
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LibraryThing member P_S_Patrick
I liked this book, but it's quite short, this edition also contains a collection of poems titled "The Gold Of Tigers", each in both Spanish and English. Most of them do not really rhyme in the Spanish, and none do in the English. It always strikes me as being lazy, when people write "poems" that
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don't rhyme, or can't translate them and keep the rhyme, seeing as several people have managed to translate massive works such as the Odyssey from ancient Greek into good rhyming English verse. Despite this, the selection is still worth reading for the few good ones that are among it, such as the one about the white deer. As for the stories, which are what I should be commenting on, they tend to be a bit more obscure in meaning than those in Labyrinths, they are just as surreal, but probably on the whole not quite as good. Fans of Borges will want to read this collection, but first time Borges readers may be put off by his obliqueness. There are flashes of his genius here, with some of the stories containing everything one would expect to see in a piece of Borges, mystery, suspense, profound thoughts, paradox, and beauty. Some of the stories here only contain one or less of these, but the best ones will be worth reading multiple times, with greater understanding of them being realised each time. Borges understood the world, but the world does not understand Borges, he probably wanted it this way, else he wouldn't have been so cryptic. This is how it works though, the mysteries are only revealed to the initiate, this is how it has to be. Show Less
LibraryThing member whilehere
Surreal short stories exploring concept of time and being
LibraryThing member ez_reader
"Utopia of a Tired Man" is worth the price of the whole book, but the whole book itself is priceless! Borges is amazingly amazing!
Language
Original language
Spanish