De verhalen

I, like many, came to Borges through Umberto Eco, namely, The Name of the Rose. That I can be a well-read history Ph.D. student, at age 30, having been in school continuously since age five, and have never even heard of Jorge Luis Borges until age 29 is somehow criminal. Of course, I can chalk it

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up to the fact that I hate the self-important, mushy, pointy-headed elitists that inhabit this nation's English/Literature departments. I love wordplay, I love the Kabbalah, I love intellectual twists - yet nobody has ever told me: "Check out Borges" or even "If you really want to read something that will make you think seriously about this world, you should read some Borges." And believe me, I've read more than the layman (but less than the specialist) about semiotics, reader-response, epistemology, and postmodernism. Still. No Borges.

I could put forward some guesses. Perhaps his surmises are primarily philosophical and metaphysical. Rarely does he knock down the beloved symbols of oppression that Lit-types like to talk about. His stories don't directly attack the Church, God, Europeans, Western civilization, patriarchy, or capitalism. They do in a way, but not directly. You can't point at many of Borges stories and go: "Here's a bold strike for feminism!" or "Take that you capitalist pig-dogs!" In several stories, a sort of Kabbalistic/Deistic God makes an appearance. Could this be the reason? He was never given the Nobel specifically because later in life he was sort of pro-conservative. Hmm.

But, to the stories themselves. The first set of stories, A Universal History of Iniquity (from 1935) were, as author and editor suggested, rather ho-hum. I almost put the book down. Stories like "The Widow Chang--Pirate" I didn't even find interesting, nor that good. "Hakim, the Masked Dyer if Merv" captured me for a bit, and kept me from putting it down; "Man on Pink Corner," supposedly one of Borges most famous, caught me because it was tensely written, and threw in a bit of a twist. Only "The Wizard that was made to Wait" showed the metaphysical meanderings that I've come to enjoy from Borges, and the story that made me keep reading. The first story showing the suppleness of time, allowing one man to experience years in just a few minutes.

1944's Fictions were next. And, on the whole, these are the most important and mind-boggling pieces in the book. "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" gets you to think about how the world is defined by the words we use to define it, and the set-up is amazing. "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim" does something similar, making the act of seeing and doing how we encounter reality, seem as if it is something we repeat. Ah, it's hard to explain. "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" tells the story of a modern Frenchman who tries to immerse himself in a world were he can recreate Don Quixote word for word. Amazing semiotic stuff. "The Circular Ruins" makes one wonder about what makes one "real." Does thinking make it so? "The Lottery in Babylon" makes this theological-minded reviewer wonder how much Borges read on Calvin and Arminius, as the lottery is a metaphor for chance and fate and God. Good stuff. "A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain" again makes one wonder about narrative and words and how reality is created by our description of it. "The Library of Babel," Umberto Eco's model for the library in The Name of the Rose, makes one think about knowledge, and infinity, and Kabbalah, and God. "The Garden of Forking Paths" turns on itself several times.

In 1944 Artifices we come across several similar things. In "Funes, His Memory" we contemplate what it would be like to remember EVERYTHING that we experience. In "The Shape of the Sword" we encounter the thin line between bravery and cowardice. In "Death and the Compass" we wonder about the Kabbalah and man's ability to make patterns were there might not be one. In "The Secret Miracle" Borges plays with time again. In "Three Versions of Judas" we get, and this was decades before the supposed "Gospel of Judas" was found, a story that looks at things from Judas's angle. "The Cult of the Phoenix" is playful, once you figure out the shameful, but ubiquitous "Secret."

In The Aleph from 1949, "The Immortal" is a long story that meanders through many places and centuries, making you think twice about man's lust for immortality. "The Dead Man" is about treachery, "The Theologians" about scholarly hatred, and several others here, like "Emma Zunz" and "The House of Asterion" are about the difference point-of-view makes. "Averroës' Search" talks about how to describe something, even contemplate something, that you have never encountered and don't even have a word for. "The Zahir" is about the scourge of memory; and "The Aleph" about a magnificent spot where you can see everything simultaneously. Again, Borges is playing with mind-space-time.

The Maker of 1960 takes Borges away, sort of, from the metaphysics of the stories just described. Knife fights, an Argentine passion, really begin appearing again and again here. These short little bits fly by, though "Borges and I" begins, it seems, a lifelong obsession with meeting your double, and wondering which is real. I was bored though, for several stories in 1970's Brodie's Report, which discussed knife fights and very few things all that important. "The Gospel According to Mark," though, is absolutely wicked, and spellbinding; and "Brodie's Report" (the story) plays Borges epistemological games again.

The Book of Sand from 1975 finds Borges in old form as in the 1940s. "The Other" finds Borges talking to a temporal slip of himself. In "The Congress" the lines between microcosm and macrocosm is proved to be absurd. "The Sect of the Thirty" plays with points-of-view again. "The Mirror and the Mask" and "'Undr'" both play with words and the meaning we put on them. Rather the word and the meaning we put on them. "The Disk" and "The Book of Sand" finds Borges playing with Alephs and Zahirs and Total Libraries, absurd, fanciful, yet somehow possible, objects. Brilliant.

The stories in Shakespeare's Memory of 1983 are fun in this way too, making you think. In "August 28, 1983" Borges talks to a different self again. "Blue Tigers" about impossible stones. "The Rose of Paracelsus" about faith and reality and faith. "Shakespeare's Memory" about the dividing line between our minds and the impossible minds of others, if the impossible minds of others in fact exist.

All in all, I enjoyed this introduction to Borges immensely, and I have purchased Penguin's volumes of his "Non-Fictions" and poetry. As to the translation, notes, and the like, I found no trouble. The book was smooth, well-written, and well-explained when it needed to be.

If you like the meat of Umberto Eco's fiction, i.e. the epistemological stuff Eco is trying to get you to think about, then there will be many stories here in Borges you will absolutely love. If you like some of the classic "makes you think" endings of the old Twilight Zone or the endings of Asimov's "The Dead Past" or "The Last Question," then you'll like many Borges stories. If you like to think about why you know what you know, or how you know what you know, if you prefer to think when you read, instead of being "thrilled" by simple action and "titillated" by turgid descriptions of acrobatic sex, then start here with Jorge Luis Borges. If you liked Coelho's The Alchemist, Borges might blow your simple, little mind.

Hopefully this isn't too long and hopefully I've made some sense, and hopefully I haven't given too much away.

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magical. no one has any business writing short stories without having read these.

"Hey guys, what's going on?"
"The party's over. That, Justin, is how late to the party you are. It is over."

I have no idea why it took me so long to get to Borges. Perhaps because I mostly read second hand books, and nobody trades in his books? Perhaps because I spent a solid portion of my youth

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believing that only tremendously depressing books could be interesting? Perhaps because, had I read him before now, I would have been enraged at his disinterest in politics and then his proud 'liberalism'?

In any case, I found a copy at a thrift store, have realized that funny/joyous books can be important and fascinating, and, luckily, the fiction isn't as open to self-congratulatory critics saying things like "Borges knew all along that trying to help poor people results in evil, see?"

He wrote three kinds of story: metaphysical tales, which take place in an imaginary world or in which someone has a super-power or Arabian Nights style trinket (special bonus: Borges convinced me to start on the 1001 Nights, and it is *fabulous*); literary critical tales in which the same kinds of things happen, but in a book that somebody's reading; and stories about gauchos.

In his non-fiction, Borges states, repeatedly, the obvious but often ignored fact that all literature relies on context for its power; he goes so far as to imply that great works are read as great works only because that's how they've previously been read--and that that's okay. The point is: I have *no* context whatsoever for the gaucho stories. I know nothing about the revolutions in South America, or the civil wars, or, indeed, any of the history there until the twentieth century. Nor have I read Martin Fierro. So it has to be taken with a grain of salt, but, I don't think the gaucho tales are worth reading, and I certainly won't be re-reading them.

The metaphysical and literary critical tales, particularly those in 'Fictions,' 'The Aleph,' 'The Book of Sand,' and 'Shakespeare's Memory,' on the other hand, have made me think I should read more short stories. I'll be disappointed, because I'll read some Cheever knock-off that will bore me silly, and then I'll return to these books.

They're a fabulous example of why everything people say about literature in high school is wrong. You don't need developing characters; you don't need deep psychological insights; you don't need wondrous epiphanies. You can do without all of that if you have a story worth telling, and the story can come in any form.

In Borges' case, that means you can write the most Alexandrine, hermetic kinds of things possible--but if you do it with joy and a good tale, people will fall over themselves to shower you with praise and awards, and your books will pass down from parents to children for generations.

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Excellent book of collected stories of borges. Opens a window to the world of South America during the times of knight fighting, revolutions and tango

I don't know if I'll ever fully finish this monstrosity. The stories may be short, but every one of them takes some time, and makes you feel accomplished after finishing their two or ten pages.

i loaned away my copy recently and NEVER got it back, so, yeah, it's on my wishlist now.

Not "vague surrealism," Borges has penetrating metaphorical insight into human nature. The Writing of the God is one of the most scalp-crinkling mystical stories ever ~ next to which the epiphanies of Joyce or

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redemptions of O'Connor seem pallid and crude. Amazing how many writers fashion entire careers stealing from Borges.

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Well, I finally finished Borges: Collected Fictions which I've been reading off and on for over a year. The book contains every work of fiction Borges ever wrote, reprinting each volume in sequence. Consequently, having completed it, I now feel like I have inadvertently witnessed the life and death

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of Borges. It made finishing the book difficult and depressing.

The problem is, brilliant as Borges was he shines most fiercely in his most celebrated work [Ficciones]. Ficciones deserves it. It contains the strongest collection of stories of all of his books. This is where you will find "The Lottery of Babylon", "The Library of Babel", "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" and, my favorite, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", a summary of a book that doesn't exist about a world that never existed. The quality of his writing begins a subtle decline immediately after Ficciones. To be sure he wrote some very fine stories after Ficciones, "Death and the Compass", "The Gospel According to Mark", and "Brodie's Report" to name a few. But these are buried deeply among lesser stories. These lesser stories preserve the familiar themes (tigers, gauchos, knife fights, labyrinths, magical objects, etc.) and the air of intellectualism, but contain no real insight or invention of their own.

The further I went the more I felt I was being sold a bill of goods, that Borges was trying to pass off pseudo-intellectualisms as the real thing on the laurels of his past accomplishments. My suspicions were all but confirmed by a line in one of his later stories ("August 25, 1983"), "I was taken for a clumsy imitator of Borges--a person who had the defect of not actually being Borges yet of mirroring all the outward appearances of the original." And that really sums it up, Borges fell into to sort of imitation of himself, his airs and themes, but lost his grip on the interesting ideas that had driven them. It's quite sad really.

I speculated on what was behind the decline of his writing and always came back to two things. The first was the loss of his eyesight. Borges went blind later in his life and the subject of blindness and impaired vision comes up a few times in his later writings. I can't imagine how difficult it would be for a blind man to do rewrites and editing and I imagine this impediment took it's toll on his writing. The second is that Borges seems to have had an almost 180 degree shift in his philosophy. His early works use mystical elements as metaphor or framework for philosophical and intellectual puzzles, but his later works often just glorify mysticism and faith in mysticism. This is probably the part that frustrated me most about his later works, because it sees what had been used as an effective package for complex and interesting ideas become the focus of the story. It's like presenting an blown out eggshell as if it as substantive as a whole egg.

I apologize for how down on Borges this review has been. It's just very difficult to face a talented writer stagnating and fading away. I do whole-heartedly recommend Ficciones. Borges did write some unforgettable stories, he just couldn't keep it up for a lifetime.

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Borges is my favorite writer. His understanding of the world is breath-takingly large, and he is able to give complex ideas visceral, emotional weight. The feel of his poetry and stories is the feeling you have when you wake up from a disturbing, exhilerating dream. He was a librarian in Argentina

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for most of his life. Although he became blind in later life, he was able to recite passages from his favorite books from memory, even identifying the page numbers from which he recited. Amazing man.

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Stories about books within books. Infinite, perfectly symmetrical, recursive, eerie stories. Flights of allusional fancy. Poe mixed with Joyce mixed with Dali, armed with an enormous, multilingual vocabulary and multicultural semiology(and an apparently intimate knowledge of everything ever written

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in every Western language, and some of the Eastern ones), and yet somehow still eminently readable and engaging and humorous. Good stuff, in other words.

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Borges's short stories twist in the grasp like live fish, muscular and foreign. In the space of a few pages, or paragraphs, he sketches worlds (complete with gods and those who no longer believe in them, with base fools who become kings, or with an infinity of moments noticed only on the verge of

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death), and then leaves them to wisp away like smoke, or to sink into the bloodstream and resurface, unrecognizable, years later.I work my way carefully through this collection every few years, only to be surprised again at Borges's ability to be both sly and bold in the same sentence, and at his straight-forward approach to the unknowable.

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I'm afraid Borges' fictions suffered, for me, from expectations that had, over the years, been built up to far too great a height. I began this book expecting to have my socks knocked off, and while the stories were mostly quite good, my socks stayed firmly planted and there were a fair number of

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these that simply underwhelmed. I think I'll have to try again some other time with some sections to see whether it was simply a matter of timing.

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I don't think I have the words. Easily the best short stories I have ever read. The depth and breadth of this work isn't something I could have known before I picked this up. And to have picked up a copy at random and read the Library of Babel at random is a complete and total blessing. I'm so glad

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I did. He put words to many concepts and feelings that I didn't know could be worded, and redefined what I look for in literature and art in general. More thoughts to come later, maybe, when I collect my thoughts.

If you're reading this, read this goddamn book.

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Tlön, ...and Philosophy

The story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" first appeared in Ficciones in the 1940's I believe. It was first translated into English in 1962. I have long thought that "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" was the center of Borges thought. Below I endeavor to give some indications as to

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why.

Quote

"Contact with Tlön, the habit of Tlön, has disintegrated this world. Spellbound by Tlön's rigor, humanity has forgotten, and continues to forget, that it is the rigor of chess masters, not of angels. [...] A scattered dynasty of recluses has changed the face of the earth-and their work continues."

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Borges is a secret master of the metaphysical, the occult and all things esoteric. But rather than fight against our humanly manufactured secular world he quietly and gently laughs at it. Witness the fictitious world Tlön; and ask yourself, Who should rule - Angels or chess masters? - And then ask who does rule? And finally, who would you choose to have rule? About Borges there can be no doubt. He denies that there are any human possessors of complete Knowledge. But what of those very few (philosophers?) that do possess substantially more knowledge than the rest of us? What of their 'revelations'? "[...] of course, they are never divulged without a measure of deception." One supposes that the only answer to an Eternal Unknown is endless curiosity.

The Quest for Knowledge in the Endless Library

Like the bewildered Panther who inhabited a cage in order to supply the Poet Dante with a word and image for his Poem, Borges thoughtfully and relentlessly paced through our world. He too was here for a purpose, one that he never fully divined. He dreamed of an endless library; and even though it was mostly filled with entirely meaningless books, to be sure, the dream was still no nightmare. Because with each book there was always a possibility, however remote, of an underlying Sense, beyond the manifest nonsense, and that is what drove him forever on, deeper into the Library that is the World. Speculative thought strives to find the Sense in Nonsense; it is towards this 'possibility of Sense' that Borges tirelessly advanced. No one ever entirely reaches it...

The Specter that chases Borges as he wanders the stairwells of the Endless Library is not the notion that every book he finds there is either merely nonsense, or, at the very best, that any book he finds with a smidge of sense is merely a cipher of a more comprehensive book that has yet to turn up. This latter possibility is, after all, also his secret joy; it forever leads him further into the beloved Library. No. This Specter that haunts him is the dreadful fear that every book (possessing some Sense) in the endless Library was only written by a purposeful chess-master, and never a benign all-Knowing Angel. This last, if true, could only mean that either Knowing Angels don't exist, or that they don't truly possess complete Knowledge, ...or that they don't write.

Speculation

Now, are there only chess-masters but no Angels? I think that this is the question that Borges quietly (and fearfully) asks in so many of his essays and stories. It is here, in his magnificent "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" that he writes this question down. Are we looking at Actuality, or a mere maneuver, or worse still, merest Chance when we view either World or Text? Is there anything anywhere, in any book or thought or material circumstance that reveals Actuality, rather than merely another purposeful maneuver or pointless Chance.
Of course, chess-masters can be superbly talented, and even quite well-disposed towards us. I believe that Nietzsche is grappling with the same knot of questions as is Borges when he writes that the "gods too philosophize". Remember, it was only the deluded Sophists who believed they really possessed Knowledge. To Philosophize is to admit that one doesn't Know. (Philosophers love Wisdom; they do not fully possess it.) Thus Nietzsche is asserting, when he avers that "the gods too philosophize", to speak as Borges might, that the Angels are only disembodied chess-masters,

When we first read Borges statement regarding 'a scattered dynasty of recluses' changing the world, we thought of the modern project of secularization. Later, we thought he meant the progenitors (and the propaganda) of the plague of ideologies that so disfigured the twentieth century. And finally, I came to think of those recluses as the several handfuls of Philosophers who strove to both find and give Sense to a senseless world lo these past 2500 years. And if there is a Beyond after our material world, which I believe Borges always suspected, I find it strangely reassuring to think that the Philosophical Project (loving Wisdom without fully attaining it) continues even there ...Forever.

Esoteric

It has fallen to the Philosophers to play the part of both Angel and chess master in a world bereft of complete Knowledge. Angels and chess masters, of course, are but avatars of the two fundamental esotericisms. The first is metaphysical esoteric, which tries to lead Man (at least a few men) to the Truth behind merest appearance. Its concern is the unfolding of Actuality. The other esotericism has to do with the political, it is fundamentally only concerned with Order. That is, the proper ordering of the civilized world in given circumstances.

The concern of one esotericism is Actuality, the other is merely Order. Both are the concern of Philosophy. And so, in the beginning, Plato writes his Timaeus; but also his Republic, Statesman, and Laws. Spinoza gives us his Ethics, and then his book on Political Theology. Nietzsche gifts the world his Zarathustra; and then punishes us with Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals.
The great and genuine philosophers have always spoken in these two idioms. They study, probe and speak of Actuality, while trying to either maintain or establish an Order where the study of Actuality can continue..

The Philosophers are Angels and chess masters ...forever.

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Deep in Don Quixote, for a while I convinced myself that Cervantes had written the footnotes too, and the Quixote commentators the editor cited were actually made up by Cervantes. He messes with you like that: he plays so many tricks that you end up thinking anything is possible.

Four months later I

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pick up Borges, and...here he is doing exactly that. Writing essays about imaginary books, with footnotes pointing to other imaginary commenters on the same imaginary books. Layer on layer of fiction.

Obviously I'm not the first to point out that Borges is Cervantes' spiritual descendant. The first was, in fact, Borges. Or, more likely, some guy Borges made up.

One of his persistent themes is the relative reality of literature, something I (and lots of other, smarter people) have been thinking about for a while now. The example I like to use is Richard III. There are two of them: the monster in Shakespeare's play, and the slightly-less-monstrous asshole in real life. But Shakespeare's version is, of course, much better known. In fact, his is so dominant that most people assume it's the only one. Richard III is cited as a warning story, used as a measuring stick for other monstrous leaders. So isn't he more real than the real one? Hasn't he had more impact on history?

Borges is obsessed with this idea, as for example in "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," in which a secret cabal writes an encyclopedia of an imaginary world so detailed and convincing that it takes over the real world. Yeats deals with it too, and more recently, comic writers like Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. And, of course, it's the whole point of Don Quixote.

(He also, BTW, in The Garden of Forking Paths, suggests a quantum multiverse that scientists would begin to take almost seriously fifty years later. The possibility of a particle being in two places at once suggests the possibility that, given a choice, both outcomes always happen, with reality forking infinitely off and there being as many times as points on a line. Which is, like, whoa, man, and then Borges wrote a story about it.)

I made the mistake of blazing through all of "Ficciones" on a flight; these are not stories to read in great gulps. Since then I've read them intermittently, and I'm occasionally going back to Ficciones to take those one at a time as well. They're so intense and (I might as well just use the word) labyrinthine that you need to chew on each one for a while.

"Universal History of Iniquity" is Borges' first collection, and it's unlike the others: a series of almost straight-forward stories rewritten from sources. The only hint of Borges' upcoming trickery is the fact that sometimes the story he tells is radically different from its source, or not from that source at all. (And how would I know that if I hadn't read the notes?) The final story, "Man on Pink Corner" or "Streetcorner Man," hints at the Borges to come.

With "Ficciones" he's suddenly here, apparently with no awkward middle period. This is his best stuff: staggeringly original and weird.

At its best, "The Aleph" matches Ficciones, but at its worst, it reminds one uncomfortably of M Night Shyamalan; Borges has developed an O Henry-esque obsession with twist endings, so that halfway through each story you start to guess what the twist is. Borges is still Borges, so you're often wrong...but being right even once is unworthy of him.

Many of "The Maker"'s stories are just sketches, tiny little puzzles. Whereas in Ficciones Borges wrote papers about imaginary books, now it sometimes seems like he's writing abstracts of the papers about the imaginary books. It works better than I've made it sound, and this is my second-favorite of his collections.

The remainder of the collection (In Praise of Darkness, Brodie's Report, Book of Sand and Shakespeare's Memory) is...spotty. At times ("Undr") it feels like Borges is just kinda flipping the switch on the crazy-idea machine. Others ("Shakespeare's Memory") stand up to his best stuff easily.

As I told Alasse below: I feel like I've been waiting for Borges all my life. He will take the rest of my life to read.

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Did Andrew Hurley use Google Translate? Awkward and stilted prose. Inferior to di Giovanni's translations in particular (which were made in collaboration with Borges), and other Borges translations in general. What a disservice to a great writer.

Just pretty much, wow.

A complete, one volume collection of ALL of the Argentine Literary Genius' short stories. All his 'Games with Time and Infinity'are to be found in here, along with complete collections like 'A Universal History of Infamy' and his unfinished 'Shakespeare's Memories'

“You who read me, are You sure of understanding my language?” Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel”

Even though I read Borges’s “Collected Fictions” in Spanish, my native tongue, I have to confess I didn’t understand half of it. Presumptuous of me to think I would. Famous for

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being the founder of postmodernist literature and influenced by the work of fantasists such Edgar Allan Poe and Franz Kafka, whom I adore, I was naive enough to assume I would be able to untangle Borges’s labyrinthine, almost rigorously mathematical style to form a coherent opinion of his short narratives. I was also deceived by the apparent simplicity of the tales which turned out to be complex, condensed and thought provoking meditations about philosophical and existential issues.

Borges’s enormous erudition, which might be appealing to others, worked the other way round for me, leaving me mostly frustrated by the multitude of literary allusions from cultures around the globe which I struggled to connect with the meaning of his surrealist inventions. It seems this proved to be too much of a strenuous task for my ignorant self.

The blurred line between reality and dream challenged comprehension in tales such as “Tlon, Uqbar and Orbis Tertius” where Borges depicts an ideal, metaphysic world made real by the power of imagination.

The same idea is reinforced in “The Circular Ruins” , in which a man is able to create a son only dreaming about him. Later, after the man accomplishes his goal, much to my astonishment, he discovers that he in turn is being dreamt by someone else. The tittle, which also notes the mythical temple where the man appears out of nowhere (maybe time travel?), might also carry the analogy of the infinite repetition which can be seen in a circle, a geometric figure which has no end and no beginning. Like the act of this neverending regression of dreaming and creating process presented in the story.

I was most disturbed by the oppressive idea “The Library of Babel” conveyed to me. We are introduced to a Library whose cataloguing system consists of hexagonal and identical galleries to classify the infinite books it contains. The inhabitants of this Library know the answers to all their questions lay somewhere, among the books, although the probability of being able to find those answers is close to impossible. The central conflict of the individual intellect and the physical manifestation of the infinite chaos is portrayed with negative connotations, pointing out the futility of trying to establish order in a chaotic universe, which reminds me of the insignificance of human beings.

"The Babylon Lottery” follows the same line of thought in presenting a detached narrator who depicts life as a labyrinth through which a man wanders without control over his own fate, which is governed by ruthless uncertainty. Here again there seems to appear the issue of trying to put order in a fragmented, indecipherable universe ruled by randomness.

My favorite one was “The secret miracle” probably because I could identify with the need of Hladík, a Jewish poet and the main character, to freeze time when he is arrested and condemned to death by the Nazis. I found the way Borges manages to portray the subjectivity of time simply brilliant, especially in the scene where Hladík is being executed. Everything seems to end in a second for the rest of world except for Hladík whose prayer is answered in the form of a precious year in which everything becomes paralysed so that he can mentally finish the last act of his half-written play. “Funes the Memorious” is similar in the way it deals with the curse of having an extraordinary memory to absorb details and subtle changes at a precise moment but not the capability of abstraction needed to control our acts.

It is in “The South” , “The Shape of the Sword” and “Three versions of Judas” where Borges’s metafiction is most palpable with the multiplication of character identity, combining historical facts with detectivesque narrative techniques.

I think I can sense the lurking forces behind Borges’s mathematical concision, audacious adjectives and unusual ideas, I think I grasp his need to defy understanding to make his point about incomprehensible concepts such as infinite, time and reality. I even feel strongly attracted to the notion that reality can be seen as a mere convention and that the true nature of things is vacuous, existing only in conditional relationship with other things. It is language which ultimately creates illusion and builds meanings. And it is the dreamer who creates reality as the writer creates the possibility of a reader.

The problem is that all these feelings didn’t implode in within me, I had to struggle against Borges’s detached, metallic style to get them through. Maybe I shouldn’t have read all the tales in one sitting, maybe Borges is that kind of author to read sparsely, one story at a time, like a rare, exquisite delicatessen to let all the flavors fuse and wholly impregnate the senses. It might not be very orthodox, but these three stars are meant to be a rating referred to my own inadequacy to truly enjoy this novel rather than directed to the novel itself, which I am not that fool to recognize as a genuine, exceptional work of art.

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Of the many authors that I swear by, some staples in the world of fiction and some out there on the fringe, none encompass more of the beauty, pain, and depth of writing than Jorge Luis Borges. His collected fictions are full of everything the human mind can love, fear, and mimic to try to make

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itself feel real.

Though some individual stories within the collection can be somewhat tedious, overdetailed with specific place names and dates that aren't entirely relevent to the story, there is always something of note, value, and originality in even the worst of the tales.

To put it simply, I have bought this collection three times because I have twice felt the overwhelming need to give it away to someone who may be enriched by it, and refused to take it back once it was given. I have twice chosen to pay such a great collection forward, and regret neither time.

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Marvelous.

Those who have enjoyed On Hundred Years of Solitude would do well to pick this up, for another sample of great South American literature. Borges was Argentinian, and his stories often dealt with paradoxes, gaucho knife fights, labyrinths, the question of identity, infinite libraries, and

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books which had never been written except in his imagination.

These stories are a lot like the ones in On Thousand and One Nights, except more bookish.

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After getting used to his style, I found these stories very good. There unusual and the reader has to read carefully because the prose is quite dense, but the stories really make you think, mind expanding.

In Jorge Luis Borges’ short story, “The Gospel According to Mark,” many religious symbols are represented in the story. It is not an overt comparison to Christian mythology but it is subtlety highlighted. The author uses many metaphors to compare the protagonist, Espinosa, to Jesus Christ.

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The first sign that shows that Espinosa resembles Christ is when Espinosa is the leader and caretaker of the Gentres. He begins to read the bible to them. They look up to him and he becomes more and more of a savior figure to them. He heals a hurt lamb, which is similar to Jesus because Jesus was always known to be a healer. He is also introduced to a woman who is the archetype for Mary. And while all these aspects add up to Espinosa becoming the Getres own Jesus they are easily missed to someone who is not looking for them. The reader has to be focused when reading this short story. To someone who is not familiar with Christianity this analogy can be easily missed. It is only with great attention to detail and at least a minor background in Christianity that one can easily make the distinction between the short story and the story of Christ.

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If I have to summarise very briefly what I love about this book, it's that it completely redefines what short stories can be. Many of them are not stories - they take non-fiction forms, or deliberately misquote from other books. He plays with form and narrative structure, writes mysteries and

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detective stories as high literature, and has stories with no real plot at all, just ideas played with at length. And throughout, the voice is compelling and assured, so that you stick with him through all the experiments and deceits and frustrations, just because you want to hear what he has to say next.

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Borges is a master of the essay, of short fiction, and a wizard at weaving deeply memorable stories out of his philosophical obsessions. With Neruda, my favorite Latin American writer, certainly my favorite prose writer from the Southern Hemisphere. If you like labyrinths, imaginary worlds, texts,

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mirrors, and gardens of forking paths (or even if you don't), this book will astound you.

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