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FICCIONES PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Jorge Luis Borges | 143 pages | 01 Oct 1997 | Random House USA Inc | 9780679422990 | English | New York, United States FICCIONES | JORGE LUIS BORGES | Comprar libro Every book is mirrored by one with all the opposite conclusions. Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is a story that gives us imaginary countries and worlds that get into encyclopedias and take on a life of their own. This week for example in Feb. In The Garden of Forking Paths, a Chinese spy for the Germans against the British can only pass on his secret information by killing someone. Meanwhile we hear speculation on the garden: is it a true labyrinth or a book about the labyrinth? In The Secret Miracle a man is condemned to the firing squad basically for being an erudite Jew. He tries to stop his execution by attempting to foresee all the details of the endless possibilities of the execution -- number of soldiers firing, how far away they stand, where it will take place, etc. He prays for a year to finish the book he is working on. He is granted that wish to finish the book in his head in the suspension of time between bullets leaving the guns and their impact on his body. But maybe the betrayal was necessary for God to prove his divinity. Perhaps because the stories are starting to show their age. Maybe we need a new translation — the edition I read was translated in Illustration of the Library of Babel from americandigest. From oddviser. View all 14 comments. Borges looked inside the swirling mind of man and made a maze of it. A glorious maze! The maze that is Ficciones is a maze built of mazes, one opening unto another, circling around and looping back, an infinity of mazes, small as the smallest of small minds, large as the universe can be imagined. Its architecture is delicate and refined; the wry wit of its creator is apparent in every twist and turn. Borges' maze gently mocks yet empathizes with the self-important, the self-absorbed, and the sel Borges looked inside the swirling mind of man and made a maze of it. Borges' maze gently mocks yet empathizes with the self-important, the self-absorbed, and the self-denying. He understands the foibles of man and his maze offers diverse commentaries on such things. But there are darker things lurking beneath that amiable surface; Ficciones is more than an academician's cleverly constructed playground. Beware the prickly thorns of this maze! There is anger there, under the charm and the playful games; anger at the systems of man and the futility of certain behaviors, at the machinery of government. There is sadness there too, at the thought of those who would treat such mazes as homes, at the machinations of fate. Like every writer, he measured the virtues of other writers by their performance, and asked that they measure him by what he conjectured or planned. An ironic dig, but that phrase is more than a shot fired. Borges is fascinated by the concept that if something has been thought about, has acquired meaning through that contemplation, then that something has become real. Thought creates its own reality, and reality is composed of varied systems of being and behavior; thought becomes the way that reality is interpreted - and therefore enacted. Ficciones tells stories about stories: each story is about the perspective of mankind, the symbols this species clings to, the metaphors they attempt to turn into living, breathing reality. Ficciones is an imaginarium; it is a weird and haunted carnival of games and sideshows come to life. It is a dazzling display of comic, sometimes cosmic gems Oh the mysterious fallibility and hypocrisy of the human kind! Their failures and their attempts to transcend their fates! The mazes and fictions that they create - and then proceed to live in! View all 19 comments. I've just finished the seventeenth and final story in this volume. My symmetry-loving self is pleased to note that I've been reading and rereading these seventeen Borges' stories for exactly seventeen days. Incidentally, Borges says reality favours symmetries. Another symmetry which strikes me is that the seventeenth story mirrors the fifteenth story which is called The End though we might expect the seventeenth story to be called The End instead. In any case, the seventeenth story is packed with I've just finished the seventeenth and final story in this volume. In any case, the seventeenth story is packed with many of the elements I had noticed in the earlier stories which makes it the perfect one to end the volume as well as to use as a launch pad for my thoughts on this first Borges reading experience. The South , for that is the name of the seventeenth story, begins in a typical as I now realise Borges manner with a factual sounding paragraph that could be straight out of an essay or a history book. Precise dates and place names and other historical references add weight to this impression, and the reader might feel overwhelmed by the amount of detail packed into that first paragraph. Which details will be useful ones to remember later, I wondered, as my mind reeled from the concentration of facts. The dates themselves destabilised me because one minute the story seemed to be set in and the next in Borges often uses numbers, shapes, places and compass points in his stories, and that numerical, spatial, geometrical and temporal data, combined with uncertainty about whether the 'facts' are historical or fictional, made me feel as if the ground was shifting beneath my feet, as in the twelfth story, Death and the Compass : …the second crime occurred on the night of the third of January But just when I might abandon a story in confusion as you might abandon this review , Borges offers an axiom that has the effect of a strong coffee, setting me back on solid ground, able to pay complete attention and avoid being slapped in the face by any further red herrings: destiny can be ruthless at one's slightest distraction. This is the stage when the story proper begins, or perhaps continues, since Borges likes to drop us into the middle of a story from time to time. Or indeed the 'story' might not 'begin' at all leaving the narrative to continue in the mode of an essay. That's only one of the games Borges likes to play with his readers, and when I understood how playful his writing could be, I enjoyed his stories much more. I also learned to look out for the signs that I shouldn't take everything literally as in the story called The Sect of the Phoenix which seems to be about a secret activity known only to an obscure group but instead turns out to be about something we all do instinctively and without which life couldn't go on. The story is very funny especially as Borges inserts corks and sealing wax into the scenario! However humour is generally not so apparent in Borges's writing, and certainly not in the ninth story about Ireneo Funes who is cursed with a phenomenal memory, not only of every word he had read but every transient pattern on water or in the sky, every scrap of dream he ever had. The oddest thing about that odd story is that, as I read it, I remembered reading it before though I had been certain that this volume of stories was my first experience of reading Borges! By stressing the weightiness of Borges's stories, and the red herrings that distracted me sometimes, I may have given the impression that the stories are long. The opposite is true. The South might well be one of the longest, at only eight pages while The End is one of the shortest at a mere four pages, and is an example of Borges's ability, when he so chooses, to make every word count: the setting, the timing, the oblique view of the action are precise and perfect. As I said earlier, those two stories are mirror images of each other, and, what's more, The South is divided into two halves which are mirror images of themselves. Orbis terrarum est speculum Ludi: The world is mirror to the game , says Borges in the thirteenth story, quoting a sixteenth century Latinist. Indeed mirrors and symmetry seem to be as much a part of his writing tools as games themselves are. As I began each new story, I never knew where it was going to be situated, south or north, west or east. And I was pleasantly surprised to find that several stories were set in my native country, or at least had characters who came from there. They weren't the most heroic of characters perhaps but I have no illusions about my countrymen so I wasn't perturbed. In any case, the countries Borges described became entirely new territories for me, places I have never visited or could never visit. He has created his own Orbis Terrarum with its own compass points, and as I read, I felt like an explorer, going where no one has ever gone before. I felt I'd discovered the planet Borges. View all 51 comments. Mar 28, Michael rated it it was amazing Shelves: recs , A series of laconic, fantastical tales that provoke thought at every turn. The work invites rereading. View all 6 comments. Apr 12, Vit Babenco rated it it was amazing. To me Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges is the ultimate anthology of short stories… I find in it everything I ever want to find in literature: reality and surreality, realness and surrealness, fables and parables, legends and myths, mysticism and philosophy, history and fantasy and an endless enigma.
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