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Jorge Luis Borges | 143 pages | 01 Oct 1997 | Random House USA Inc | 9780679422990 | English | New York, United States FICCIONES | | 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 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 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 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. , 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, : …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 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. I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia. The mirror troubled the far end of a hallway in a large country house on Calle Gaona, in Ramos Mejia; the encyclopedia is 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. The event took place about five years ago. Yes, use a combination of mirrors, and books and you too will be capable to live an idyllic, fabulous and mysterious life whenever you wish… With one quick look, you and I perceive three wineglasses on a table; Funes perceived every grape that had been pressed into the wine and all the stalks and tendrils of its vineyard. He knew the forms of the clouds in the southern sky on the morning of April 30,, and he could compare them in his memory with the veins in the marbled binding of a book he had seen only once, or with the feathers of spray lifted by an oar on the Rio Negro on the eve of the Battle of Quebracho. Nor were those memories simple—every visual image was linked to muscular sensations, thermal sensations, and so on. He was able to reconstruct every dream, every daydream he had ever had. A perfect memory and ability of perfect vision turns into a curse and we understand that our capability to forget is actually a divine gift. And Death and the Compass is an utmost detective story, an utter post-noir tale for me. I believe that this elaborate maze of misconceptions, false steps and deception was a main influence on Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco. View all 5 comments. What could be said about a book which is in itself many books in a book or many authors in one, for are you capable enough to said anything? What genre could encapsulate the breadth of this gem, which has been shining through the vagaries and austerity of time and space, of literature? What so called forms- which could have been defined by whatever produced, known and understood of literature for we are one and one is all - could best describe it, be it novel, poetry, non-novel, or essay, philosophy, memoir and others for that matter. For it surpasses all the known or created formal or informal forms of literature. The abovementioned questions come up from the vague recesses of our consciousness and challenge our so called knowledge and understanding of literature as we have known it. These questions tremble our shallow buildings of self- appeasing knowledge and send great discomfort for us to realize that we have absolutely no idea about literature, for our mind has been tied to the strings of dogmas, references for as human beings we need them which we have been telling ourselves since the very inception of literature. A sense of shame creeps up for us to recognize that we are quite mediocre in our so called progress, for we have kept beating around the bush. But then, suddenly, a sense of solace find its way to our heart and we come to discern that we are not Borges, for there had been only one, there would may be only one, for his style is inimitable. There have been very few authors in the history of literature who could produce such impact of originality and Borges is certainly right up there. There are many men adept in those diverse disciplines, but few capable of imagination- fewer will capable of subordinating imagination to rigorous and systematic plan. The plan is so vast that the contribution of each writer is infinitesimal. Fictions introduced entirely new voice into world literature. As we say one overdoes something until one perfects it, Borges has developed a much serene, subtler prose from the baroque style employing strained and startling metaphors from his early days, and mind you that quieter style has beauty of undertones which may take you to so many avenues in so little words. He became so adept at his style in 40s that it got a particular name- Borgesian- like those of Dickensian and Kafkaesque. But there was more than just the style, the unclassificability and originality of these stories were among the most prominent factors which led uncomfortable but curious stir among readers and writers of that time, probably still continues to do in modern world. The prose style of Borges may come across as intellectual with its allusion to literature which may be both existent or non- existent , philosophy, religion, theology, myth, culture, history of Latin America He deftly used parallelism, chiasmus, subtle repetitions-with-variations to shock the reader in a pleasant way. He combined literary and extraliterary genres in order to create a dynamic, electric genre. The ingenious playing with the boundaries of genre was underlined by playfulness, cleverly though, in both prose style and attitude. Borges was having real fun with these stories. We find that such spontaneous and playful attitude existed even in the most serious of his stories and readers unaccustomed to such techniques were constantly being made to feel just bit off balance. The characters are not being developed like in traditional fiction, the role of the characters is just to create effect, which comes up on the surface of the story, and then to dissolve in nothingness to convey the greater theme of the story. Borges considered and discarded seemingly all the previously known forms of literature and philosophy, creates a world ex nihilo- for there was nothing to write and nothing be written. Yet minutely studied, Borges, like Kafka, under close scrutiny reveals subtle affinities with other forms of literature, exhibits an unmistakable existential angst. This new wave of literature reintroduced irony, angst, existential dilemma, a knowing worldliness which was overshadowed by seriousness and realism of previous age. There have been ingenious authors in past too but it had taken them hundreds of pages and the invention of an entirely new language to communicate what Borges has done in sparingly three or four pages. He has managed to turn language upon itself to reverse himself time after time with a sentence or a paragraph with relentless logic so that it comes up as a pleasant surprise. The universe is based on all possible probabilities which in turn give rise to infinite successive possibilities which give birth to infinite universes co-existing together in a labyrinth, which is surreal, does not have clear demarcation between physics and metaphysics; real and unreal; right and wrong; myth and belief; the rules are, of course, different than that in our universe. The language and things derived from the language- religion, literature, metaphysics, myth- presuppose idealism. These universes are congenitally, idealistic. There is only one discipline which is psychology to which all others are subordinate. The fiction has only one plot, with every imaginable permutation; the works of philosophy invariably contains both thesis and antithesis. There is a library or universe itself which contains all possible books of entire universe or rather multiverses in it; all books, however different from one another they might be, consist of identical elements: the space, the period, the comma and letters of alphabet; so the library has all the possible combinations of all letters of the alphabet. He can even reconstruct an entire day and he had never erred. Several people count the same quantity come to the same result is an example of association of ideas or of memorization, for subject knowledge is one and eternal there. There are paths which fork from themselves and lead unto themselves. These universes are built upon various possibilities of a tussle between chance and self -determinism. These parallel or successive universes repeats themselves as a hand of card does after multiple runs. While we sleep in one universe, we are awake somewhere else, so every men is in fact many men, all men are one and one is all men. There is no concept of time there, for present is undefined and indefinite, the future has no reality except as present hope, and the past has no reality except as present recollection. It is believed that time passes differently for everyone for it is not uniform, depends upon medium and perceiver. Perhaps all the time has already passed, so that our life is but the crepuscular memory, or crepuscular reflection, doubtlessly distorted and mutilated, of an irrecoverable process. I recall him though I have no right to speak that sacred verb- only one man on earth did, and the man is dead holding a dark passionflower in his hand, seeing it as it has never been seen, even had it been stared at from the first light of dawn till the last light of evening for an entire lifetime. The stories of the collection co-exist in the same labyrinth wherein the reader may move one to another through strings of probabilities, intertextuality for some of the stories refer to other and narrator in one stories talks about creation of another one. The boundaries between fact and fiction, between essay and short story are being expertly blended and the border between genres too is obliterated quite adeptly. In fact, he created three genres- the essay, the poem and the short story as mentioned by Octavio Paz but the division is arbitrary: his essays read like stories, his stories are poems and his poems are essays. The themes of chance versus determination, conception and writing of our history, ideation and transmission of philosophical and mathematical systems; existence of various levels of realities could be explored in these stories of the collection. Funes, His Memory, The Garden of Forking Paths and The Shape of the Sword could be said as imaginative fiction where fictions- about-fictions anticipated metafictional concerns of postmodernism. We find traits of detective fiction too in The Garden of Forking Paths, Death and the Compass and The Theme of the Traitor amd the Hero on hand The Circular Ruins, The Lottery of Babylon and The Cult of the Phoenix were told in a style that recalled myth and were set in distant times and places that made them seem parables, both ageless and perfectly contemporary. But all the stories are common in a sense that we may find an existential angst in all of them wherein either characters or narrators or the story itself struggles to define its existence in the unique world of Borges. It is one of those unforgettable experiences which one may come across once in a lifetime but every word of this gem is worth it. In his essay on Borges, Perez wrote that he has created his own type of post-avant-grade literature- which shows the process of critical self- examination that reveals the moment in which literature becomes a reflection of itself, distanced from life- on order to reveal the formal and intellectual density involved in writing. I am something of a connoisseur of mazes: not for nothing am I the great- grandson of that Ts-ui Pen who power in order to write a novel containing more characters than the Hung Lu Meng and construct a labyrinth in which all men would lose their way. View all 31 comments. There is no logically understanding the mazes Borges creates, but that is what fantastical-realism is all about. Ficciones is a labyrinth, beautiful and witty, of ideas and feelings that mock and conquers the reader. Borges can speak for himself, who am I to explain his brilliance and imagination? All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal or world problem whose eloquent solution did not exist in some hexagon. The universe was justified, the universe suddenly usurped the unlimited dimensions of hope. At that time a great deal was said about the Vindications: books of apology and prophecy which vindicated for all time the acts of every man in the universe and retained prodigious arcana for his future. Thousands of the greedy abandoned their sweet native hexagons and rushed up the stairways, urged on by the vain intention of finding their Vindication. These pilgrims disputed in the narrow corridors, proffered dark curses, strangled each other on the divine stairways, flung the deceptive books into the air shafts, met their death cast down in a similar fashion by the inhabitants of remote regions. Others went mad The Vindications exist I have seen two which refer to persons of the future, to persons who are perhaps not imaginary but the searchers did not remember that the possibility of a man's finding his Vindication, or some treacherous variation thereof, can be computed as zero. View all 15 comments. Feb 06, Steven Godin rated it really liked it Shelves: latin-america , short-stories , fiction. Or even just the way that you read it. This is one of those very occasion where I will undoubtedly benefit reading again. It's clear to see why Jorge Luis Borges is regarded as one of the 20th century's most inventive writers, and Ficciones is a collection of small stories that are on a grand scale, but my overall problem was going through three or four at a time and finding them hard to digest, jumping fro 3. It's clear to see why Jorge Luis Borges is regarded as one of the 20th century's most inventive writers, and Ficciones is a collection of small stories that are on a grand scale, but my overall problem was going through three or four at a time and finding them hard to digest, jumping from one to another just didn't work for me. And only read the last few days apart giving me a chance to fully think about about them, this worked so much better, but still left me feeling a bit dumbfounded. Also was not reading the best translated version, so that didn't help either. Borges never compromised himself by writing a novel but instead left a whole library of delicately structured maze-like speculations. Each one is like the Tardis — little time-machines of the imagination and far bigger within than they appear on the outside, and there is certainly plenty to keep one occupied: writers, dreamers, heretics, young men with impossible memories, other worlds revealed by secret encyclopedias, traitors transformed by betrayal, conspirators that plot their own downfall: 17 pieces, none longer than 25 pages; none shorter than a lifetime. It's difficult to pick a favourite but 'Death and the Compass' and 'The Sect of the Phoenix' were two that I read twice. I am sure this collection will grow on me, and multiple readings built up over time will no doubt chance my perception from reading the first time, into something very special indeed! View all 9 comments. Mar 22, Steve rated it really liked it. Comprehension somehow boosts us to a higher plane. The ultimate in advancement, if it can be imagined, is the universal infinitude of all experience. And the more grounded me answers, yes. However, I contend that Borges himself, if asked, might have said the same thing though surely more artfully. For him, I think, it was the mind-bending absurdity of the questions he posed rather than some metaphysical and unattainable truth of the matter that excited him. If we take as a given that time is infinite, then every possible set of realities would have a chance to play out. If in one iteration I typed an O here, I could in another type an X, with all else being the same. Every single permutation imaginable could occur as each Big Bang and collapse in infinite time came to fruition. Imagine the implications! Borges did, at least in a way. In one story he imagined a near infinite library containing books with every possible letter combination. In such a place, a man could conceivably find the story of his life, though practically speaking, and without Google, it would be damned difficult. Borges also considered a single book that could contain all knowledge, made possible by pages that were infinitesimally thin. To Borges, a labyrinth is a similar metaphor of life. Each person has a complex set of turns in a ridiculously intricate path that I think represents every decision we face — right, left, X, O, date, dump — whatever. For instance, his philological references exposed me for the literary dilettante that I am. He could also come across as a bit too academic for my taste, and at times even tedious. I will not challenge its status as a classic, though. In fact, I truly enjoyed the quasi-logical extremes he went to in pursuit of intellectual entertainment, imaginative possibilities and hard won ah-ha moments. View all 59 comments. I read and then reread several of these stories some of them for a third time while I was writing my final review for Fantasy Literature , and they keep impressing me more My literary friends will be so proud of me! Ficciones is a classic collection of seventeen short stories by acclaimed Argentine 4. Ficciones is a classic collection of seventeen short stories by acclaimed Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges, originally published in the s in Spanish, and winner of the International Publishers Prize. These stories and mock essays are a challenging mixture of philosophy, magical realism, fantasy, ruminations on the nature of life, perception and more. There are layers of meaning and frequent allusions to historic figures, other literary works, and philosophical ideas, not readily discernable at first read. Reading Ficciones, and trying to grasp the concepts in it, was definitely the major mental workout of the year for me. My brain nearly overloaded several times, but reading some critical analyses of these works helped tremendously with my understanding and appreciation of these works … well, at least most of them. The first six stories in Part Two, Artifices , were added in , and the collection was named Ficciones at that time. Borges added the final three stories to Ficciones in the edition. For them, the world is not a concurrence of objects in space, but a heterogeneous series of independent acts. It is serial and temporal, but not spatial. Heady stuff! This twenty page story the longest in the book is so abstruse and heavily laden with philosophical ideas and allusions that I found it almost completely impenetrable. Brain cell verdict: no response. They totally shorted out on this one. When he perceives a note of tenderness and clarity in one of these vile men, he concludes that it is the reflection of a perfect man who exists somewhere. We have met the divine and it is us. My brain cells concluded that, although some of the allusions are obscure, this tale is far more readily grasped than the first one. There is hope! The brain cells were getting restive again. A lucky drawing might lead you to be elevated to the council of wizards or reunite you with a long-lost love; a losing ticket might land you in jail, or get your tongue burned, or lead to infamy or death. The ubiquitous lottery seems to be a symbol of the capriciousness of chance in life and the story in general seems to be taking an ironic view of the questionable role of deity in human life. The brain cells were quite amused. Borges playfully explores the labyrinth concept in different ways in each of these works. Each book contains pages, with 40 lines of 80 letters each. There are 25 letters and punctuation marks in the alphabet. The Library contains every possible combination of those letters. But life for the people dwelling in this library is profoundly frustrating, even depressing, since only a vanishingly small percentage of the books make any sense at all. Borges explores the ways that people react to this, with several nods to religion and philosophy. Yu discovers that an MI5 agent, Richard Madden an Irishman who also has equivocal feelings about the nation he is serving, due to his nationality has captured another German spy and is on the verge of finding him. Yu goes on the run. The plot is thickened by the fact that Dr. Yu has just found out the location of a new British artillery park. This is the first story in this book that has a substantial plot to go along with the play of ideas; hence, I enjoyed reading it more than the previous tales. The concepts in it are not as mentally challenging, although the labyrinth imagery and philosophical conjectures resurface toward the end. When Borges returns to this village three years later, Funes is now crippled from being thrown by a wild horse, but his mind is unimpaired. The narrator realizes that Funes also now has an infallible memory, with perfect recall. To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract. In the overly replete world of Funes there were nothing but details, almost contiguous details. This tale was, again, a little too opaque and short on plot for me to really enjoy. The brain cells were grumbling a little. The Irishman tells a story of his involvement in the battle for Irish independence, and his dealings with a disagreeable, cowardly man named John Vincent Moon. The house is not this large, he thought. It is only made larger by the penumbra, the symmetry, the mirrors, the years, my ignorance, the solitude. All he wants is the ability to finish up a play he has been working on, his masterpiece. A divine voice tells him that he will be granted the time to do this — even though he is set to die the next day. Borges-as-Runeberg recasts the character and nature of Judas in three different, heretical ways, including as a righteous man who knowingly accepted his role as the person who would force Jesus to declare his divinity, and even as another incarnation of God Himself. He challenges our comfortable religious views. Their conversation makes it clear that the black man has been waiting seven years for this meeting. In a famous scene in the poem, Fierro crudely provokes a black man and then kills him in the resulting knife fight. Several years later, in this story, Fierro is an aging man with some regrets for the life he has lived, and whose free and lawless gaucho way of life is passing. Once I really grasped the connection between the poem and this story, it became one of my favorites in this collection. Is it sexual intercourse? Or perhaps more particularly, homosexual sex? The main character is Juan Dahlmann, a mixture of German and Spanish ancestry, whose life is mundane but who dreams vaguely of a more romantic life, inspired by the Flores side of his heritage and the Flores ranch in the South that he owns but has never visited. One day Dahlmann brushes his forehead against something in a dark stairway and realizes afterwards that he is bleeding. He develops a life-threatening infection and is taken to a sanitarium for treatment. After many excruciatingly painful and feverish days, he recovers, and decides that he will take a trip to his ranch to convalesce. He travels out of the city on a train, feeling as though he is traveling into the past, and has an unexpected confrontation as he nears his final destination. Or does he? Repeated labyrinth imagery, scenes of deception, and challenges to our perceptions of what is real echo throughout the stories of Ficciones. Even the lightest stories have several layers and hidden meanings to unpack. The English translation by Anthony Kerrigan and other translators is excellent. View all 16 comments. Jun 29, David rated it it was amazing. The peer pressure from my intellectually superior friends finally shamed me into reading this as I had no Borges under my belt. Obviously from the 5 stars, I'm glad I caved in. This is a collection of 17 of his "best" short stories, held together merely by the thread that they are like nothing else you've ever read or even thought about. Not every story is perfection, but all are surprising, irritating, challenging and somehow rewarding. Standouts are "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote" - a The peer pressure from my intellectually superior friends finally shamed me into reading this as I had no Borges under my belt. Standouts are "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote" - a man who dedicates much of his life to the recreation of Don Quixote word for word, a stunningly insightful satire. Also, "The Circular Ruins" which challenges the reality of religion and even self-awareness. Borges uses very direct, sparse but extremely detailed language. His characters are full baked from the beginning, so he wastes no time on development - it's all about the idea, the innovation, not the plot. If you read one of these tales out of context you might mistake it for a non- fictional essay, albeit with quirks. Anyway, I'm recommending this to anyone who doesn't mind risking confusion and discomfort in the the pursuit of something truly unique and intellectually delicious. View 2 comments. Jul 28, Morgan rated it it was ok. Ok, I'd tried to read Labyrinths years ago and found it dry and dull. I thought that perhaps I just wasn't in the proper state of mind, or perhaps wasn't well read enough to get it. I'd also come off of a Calvino kick, so Borges felt boring. Fast forward to me thinking that I really should commit to Borges and give him a real chance. I have to say that hard a hard time with this book. I only really like one story The Babylonian Lottery. Most of the time I feel like I'm stuck as some shitty academic after-party listening to the drunken rambling of a self-indulgent lit professor trying to make himself believe that he is the smartest guy in the room. I get the references, but most of this just isn't that interesting. It all comes across as clinical, with a tone of little Jack Horner self satisfaction staring at his thumb saying "What a good boy am I. He had an experience the likes of which you will never have. Jews are mysterious. He solved a puzzle that he created for himself and figured out that he is Shakespeare and everyone wrote Henry V for it has always existed. There is a long history of naming a thing, but in reality everything is the same. Perhaps he was in a sanitarium with black circling walls. But, I later found out that he may not have been. View all 18 comments. Shelves: read-in Presumptuous of me to think I would. 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. It seems this proved to be too much of a strenuous task for my ignorant self. 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? Like the act of this neverending regression of dreaming and creating process presented in the story. 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. Here again there seems to appear the issue of trying to put order in a fragmented, indecipherable universe ruled by randomness. 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. 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. A dream within a dream It was a fascinating first-acquaintance with Borges, an author who has been staying with me for a long time, a house- ghost, a little of this and a little of that, a glimpse into my subconscious and all legends and myths in one place. Cleverly wrought essays on Swedish scholars and secret societies planting false information and a lot of babble — I clearly get the impression that Borges never minded hearing himself speak, and being spoken of. The best short stories are the A dream within a dream It was a fascinating first- acquaintance with Borges, an author who has been staying with me for a long time, a house-ghost, a little of this and a little of that, a glimpse into my subconscious and all legends and myths in one place. The best short stories are the ones set free of time and space, stories that easily could weave into each other if they were allowed to, they are dreamlike labyrinths of the mind. Rounded up to 4 stars. View all 4 comments. Feb 08, PGR Nair rated it it was amazing. Note: This is an article I wrote in to mark the th birth Anniversary of Borges. Therefore, some of the stories I cite here may not belong to this collection. I thought to post it here as this book is the most cited. If you plan to buy a book of Borges, buy this one or Labyrinth and other stories as both contain the same set of stories and translators. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which mangles me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges. During his life, Borges wore many hats. He was, variously, a poet, an essayist, a short-story writer, a librarian, and, for a short time, a poultry inspector. As a hauntingly original essayist and short story writer, his three or four dozen short stories and essays is mentioned in the same breath with the tomes of Thomas Mann or James Joyce. In his life, Borges was an extremely shy person and possessed an exceptional modesty that makes him endearing. Though a supreme writer, he always underrated his writings as an escape from the boredom of a blind man. His face lights up when anyone praises his work; yet he habitually conveys the deep stillness of a man with few illusions about himself or the world. He also conveys sweetness and wisdom, those refinements of perception that sometimes accompany old age. His aristocratic upbringing, cosmopolitan outlook and exposure to different cultures gave him a universal mind. As a precursor of the "Magical Realists", he ingeniously mixed philosophy, fact, fantasy and mystery in his stories. They are written in dense and challenging prose. Unlikely images and situations are woven into a richly complex tapestry that arouses questions of identity and the self, of reality and the possibility for dreams. Intellectual Labyrinths , time, space, infinity, memory, mirrors Borges delights in the multiplicity of things; he is fascinated with mirrors because they multiply and libraries are some of the principal themes in his works. Borges' stories take place in a world that is half commonplace, half fantastic. Dreams occur within dreams; time loses its significance. What counts is momentary impulse and observation. Economy, grace, humor and precise sounding historical and referential details and ingenious plots are hall marks of his style. In this world, philosophical systems, theological disquisitions, myths and literary symbols, reflection and speculation, and universal history are the raw material of invention. Vargas Llosa says that Spanish was suddenly "purified," "intellectualized" by the inimitable prose style of Borges. Let us dwell on the themes in some of them. He hardly cares. The fall has miraculously sharpened his perception so that his memories are boundless: "He knew by heart the forms of the Southern clouds on the 30th of April, , and could compare them in his memory with the mottled streaks on a book in Spanish binding he had only seen once and with the outlines of the foam raised by an oar in the Rio Negro the night before the Quebracho uprising. Anyone who gazes into it can see everything in the universe from every angle simultaneously, without distortion, overlapping or confusion. The story explores his fascination with infinity. He sees man's search for meaning in an infinite universe as a fruitless effort. In the universe of energy, mass, and speed of light, Borges considers the central riddle time, not space. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time. The killer in this story leaves clues indicating religious motives: a distortion of kabalistic tradition in which murders reveal the divine name, letter by letter. Seeing that the first three murders form an equilateral triangle on the map and took place at regular intervals, the detective Erik Lonnrot pinpoints the time and place of the final murder, only to discover he has been set up for a trap: A common outlaw has lured Lonnrot there to murder him. The detective knows this but he is so fascinated by the pattern that he goes anyway, thus solving the mystery of his own murder. A wizard retreats from the world to a location that possesses strong mystical powers: the circular ruins. There, the wizard tries to create another human being from his own dreams. Sleeping and dreaming longer and longer each day, the magician dreams of his young man becoming educated, and wiser. After time, though, the wizard can no longer find sleep, and he deems his first attempt an inevitable failure. After many sleepless nights, the wizard dreams of a heart; vaguely at first, but more and more clearly each night. Years pass and the wizard creates the boy piece by piece, in agonizing detail. The wizard calls upon the god Fire to bring his creation to life. Fire agrees, as long as the wizard accustoms his creation to the real world, and that only Fire and the wizard will be able to tell the creation from a real human. His creation is sent to a distant temple of the god Fire, and becomes famous as, because it is not real, it can walk through fire unharmed. The wizard hears of this, but at length he awakes to find the ruins ablaze. As he ultimately walks into the flaming house of Fire, the wizards notices that his skin does not burn. Disparate imageries and clinical contextual details in describing a place sometimes create a surreal landscape reminiscent of a Dali. The overall effect of his language is simply magical. The unemphatic style of Borges often achieves effects with a single exploding word or phrase, dropped almost as though off-handedly into a quiet sentence: "He examined his wounds and saw, without astonishment, that they had healed. Borges' writing has often been called intellectual, and indeed it is dense with allusion. But it is also simple: the sentences are almost invariably classical in their symmetry, in their balance. To conclude, Borges was a world-class artist-a brilliant, lyrical miniaturist, an uncomplicated genius who could pose the great questions of existence on the head of a pin. Reading him might alter the way you look at everything, including yourself. The perfection of his language, the extent of his knowledge, the universalism of his electrifying ideas, the originality and inventiveness of his fiction, and the beauty of his poetry still continue to enchant the literary minds all over the world. His short stories with his labyrinthine themes and language have been explored and analyzed to the point that he has been named one of the pioneers of post-modernist fiction. His fabulistic stories with strange fictional realms and complex social systems and unusual metaphors had a significant influence on the Latin American magical realism movement. Ficciones is a collection of short stories, and is considered to be his most popular anthology. Some of his best known and most influential works are in this collection. The book is divided into two parts: the first part, The Garden of Forking Paths , contains eight stories and the second part, Artifices , contains nine. The stories explore many themes of existentialism, creationist philosophy, fantastical realms and universes governed by strange theological and sociological systems, satirical reviews of fictional works and many more such unusual works of fiction. Highly recommended if you're into philosophical fiction. View all 3 comments. This collection of short stories is a great introduction to Borges' fictional universe. At times his stories read like a non-fiction article or book review, but Borges sort of sneaks up on you and gives a tug at your conception of what constitutes real versus imaginary. I would say that some of the stories are more engaging than others, but that's just a matter of personal interest. They are all worth reading, and recommended, especially to those who enjoy magic realism, fantasy, and sci-fi books This collection of short stories is a great introduction to Borges' fictional universe. They are all worth reading, and recommended, especially to those who enjoy magic realism, fantasy, and sci-fi books. View all 11 comments. Nov 08, K. Absolutely rated it really liked it Recommends it for: Tata J no one else among my friends can enjoy this book. For me, reading has always been like connecting your brain to that of the book's author. To understand the book, you really have to slow down and reflect on each phrase. It is different from reading Salman Rushdie who I find confusing be For me, reading has always been like connecting your brain to that of the book's author. It is different from reading Salman Rushdie who I find confusing because of the terms and phrases that maybe a Indian-English person can only understand. Jorge Luis Borges uses familiar words and phrases but they are often stated in confusing way so much like his "forking paths" with the thoughts going into different directions that you have to choose where you want to go or believe. His imagination is spectacular and limitless. It goes beyond the imagination of a child which is amazing considering that he was already past his middle life working in as a director in a library when he wrote this novel. Years later he lost his sight which I thought must have enhanced further his imagination. Entry in his Wikipedia says that he lived with his mother and he had a secretary to write down his thoughts in his twilight years. I agree that he must have felt bad not winning the Nobel. His literary style is far beyond advanced than what I saw and liked in the likes of G. Marquez, S. Bellow and J. Much of his work deals with people's efforts to find the center of the labyrinth, symbolic of achieving understanding of their place in a mysterious universe. In such later works as The Gold of the Tigers, Borges wrote of his lifelong descent into blindness and how it affected his perceptions of the world and himself as a writer. Borges died in Geneva in Jorge Luis Borges. The seventeen pieces in Ficciones demonstrate the gargantuan powers of imagination, intelligence, and style of one of the greatest writers of this or any other century. Borges sends us on a journey into a compelling, bizarre, and profoundly resonant realm; we enter the fearful sphere of Pascal's abyss, the surreal and literal labyrinth of books, and the iconography of eternal return. More playful and approachable than the fictions themselves are Borges's Prologues, brief elucidations that offer the uninitiated a passageway into the whirlwind of Borges's genius and mirror the precision and potency of his intellect and inventiveness, his piercing irony, his skepticism, and his obsession with fantasy. To enter the worlds in Ficciones is to enter the mind of Jorge Luis Borges, wherein lies Heaven, Hell, and everything in between. The Form of the Sword. Theme of the Traitor and Hero. Death and the Compass. The Secret Miracle. . Ficciones - Wikipedia

In spite of Borges's belief that people cannot understand the chaotic world, he continually attempted to do so in his writing. Much of his work deals with people's efforts to find the center of the labyrinth, symbolic of achieving understanding of their place in a mysterious universe. In such later works as The Gold of the Tigers, Borges wrote of his lifelong descent into blindness and how it affected his perceptions of the world and himself as a writer. Borges died in Geneva in Jorge Luis Borges. The seventeen pieces in Ficciones demonstrate the gargantuan powers of imagination, intelligence, and style of one of the greatest writers of this or any other century. Borges sends us on a journey into a compelling, bizarre, and profoundly resonant realm; we enter the fearful sphere of Pascal's abyss, the surreal and literal labyrinth of books, and the iconography of eternal return. More playful and approachable than the fictions themselves are Borges's Prologues, brief elucidations that offer the uninitiated a passageway into the whirlwind of Borges's genius and mirror the precision and potency of his intellect and inventiveness, his piercing irony, his skepticism, and his obsession with fantasy. The brain cells were quite amused. Borges playfully explores the labyrinth concept in different ways in each of these works. Each book contains pages, with 40 lines of 80 letters each. There are 25 letters and punctuation marks in the alphabet. The Library contains every possible combination of those letters. But life for the people dwelling in this library is profoundly frustrating, even depressing, since only a vanishingly small percentage of the books make any sense at all. Borges explores the ways that people react to this, with several nods to religion and philosophy. Yu discovers that an MI5 agent, Richard Madden an Irishman who also has equivocal feelings about the nation he is serving, due to his nationality has captured another German spy and is on the verge of finding him. Yu goes on the run. The plot is thickened by the fact that Dr. Yu has just found out the location of a new British artillery park. This is the first story in this book that has a substantial plot to go along with the play of ideas; hence, I enjoyed reading it more than the previous tales. The concepts in it are not as mentally challenging, although the labyrinth imagery and philosophical conjectures resurface toward the end. When Borges returns to this village three years later, Funes is now crippled from being thrown by a wild horse, but his mind is unimpaired. The narrator realizes that Funes also now has an infallible memory, with perfect recall. To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract. In the overly replete world of Funes there were nothing but details, almost contiguous details. This tale was, again, a little too opaque and short on plot for me to really enjoy. The brain cells were grumbling a little. The Irishman tells a story of his involvement in the battle for Irish independence, and his dealings with a disagreeable, cowardly man named John Vincent Moon. The house is not this large, he thought. It is only made larger by the penumbra, the symmetry, the mirrors, the years, my ignorance, the solitude. All he wants is the ability to finish up a play he has been working on, his masterpiece. A divine voice tells him that he will be granted the time to do this — even though he is set to die the next day. Borges-as-Runeberg recasts the character and nature of Judas in three different, heretical ways, including as a righteous man who knowingly accepted his role as the person who would force Jesus to declare his divinity, and even as another incarnation of God Himself. He challenges our comfortable religious views. Their conversation makes it clear that the black man has been waiting seven years for this meeting. In a famous scene in the poem, Fierro crudely provokes a black man and then kills him in the resulting knife fight. Several years later, in this story, Fierro is an aging man with some regrets for the life he has lived, and whose free and lawless gaucho way of life is passing. Once I really grasped the connection between the poem and this story, it became one of my favorites in this collection. Is it sexual intercourse? Or perhaps more particularly, homosexual sex? The main character is Juan Dahlmann, a mixture of German and Spanish ancestry, whose life is mundane but who dreams vaguely of a more romantic life, inspired by the Flores side of his heritage and the Flores ranch in the South that he owns but has never visited. One day Dahlmann brushes his forehead against something in a dark stairway and realizes afterwards that he is bleeding. He develops a life- threatening infection and is taken to a sanitarium for treatment. After many excruciatingly painful and feverish days, he recovers, and decides that he will take a trip to his ranch to convalesce. He travels out of the city on a train, feeling as though he is traveling into the past, and has an unexpected confrontation as he nears his final destination. Or does he? Repeated labyrinth imagery, scenes of deception, and challenges to our perceptions of what is real echo throughout the stories of Ficciones. Even the lightest stories have several layers and hidden meanings to unpack. The English translation by Anthony Kerrigan and other translators is excellent. View all 16 comments. Jun 29, David rated it it was amazing. The peer pressure from my intellectually superior friends finally shamed me into reading this as I had no Borges under my belt. Obviously from the 5 stars, I'm glad I caved in. This is a collection of 17 of his "best" short stories, held together merely by the thread that they are like nothing else you've ever read or even thought about. Not every story is perfection, but all are surprising, irritating, challenging and somehow rewarding. Standouts are "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote" - a The peer pressure from my intellectually superior friends finally shamed me into reading this as I had no Borges under my belt. Standouts are "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote" - a man who dedicates much of his life to the recreation of Don Quixote word for word, a stunningly insightful satire. Also, "The Circular Ruins" which challenges the reality of religion and even self-awareness. Borges uses very direct, sparse but extremely detailed language. His characters are full baked from the beginning, so he wastes no time on development - it's all about the idea, the innovation, not the plot. If you read one of these tales out of context you might mistake it for a non-fictional essay, albeit with quirks. Anyway, I'm recommending this to anyone who doesn't mind risking confusion and discomfort in the the pursuit of something truly unique and intellectually delicious. View 2 comments. Jul 28, Morgan rated it it was ok. Ok, I'd tried to read Labyrinths years ago and found it dry and dull. I thought that perhaps I just wasn't in the proper state of mind, or perhaps wasn't well read enough to get it. I'd also come off of a Calvino kick, so Borges felt boring. Fast forward to me thinking that I really should commit to Borges and give him a real chance. I have to say that hard a hard time with this book. I only really like one story The Babylonian Lottery. Most of the time I feel like I'm stuck as some shitty academic after-party listening to the drunken rambling of a self-indulgent lit professor trying to make himself believe that he is the smartest guy in the room. I get the references, but most of this just isn't that interesting. It all comes across as clinical, with a tone of little Jack Horner self satisfaction staring at his thumb saying "What a good boy am I. He had an experience the likes of which you will never have. Jews are mysterious. He solved a puzzle that he created for himself and figured out that he is Shakespeare and everyone wrote Henry V for it has always existed. There is a long history of naming a thing, but in reality everything is the same. Perhaps he was in a sanitarium with black circling walls. But, I later found out that he may not have been. View all 18 comments. Shelves: read-in Presumptuous of me to think I would. 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. It seems this proved to be too much of a strenuous task for my ignorant self. 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? Like the act of this neverending regression of dreaming and creating process presented in the story. 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. Here again there seems to appear the issue of trying to put order in a fragmented, indecipherable universe ruled by randomness. 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. 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. A dream within a dream It was a fascinating first-acquaintance with Borges, an author who has been staying with me for a long time, a house- ghost, a little of this and a little of that, a glimpse into my subconscious and all legends and myths in one place. Cleverly wrought essays on Swedish scholars and secret societies planting false information and a lot of babble — I clearly get the impression that Borges never minded hearing himself speak, and being spoken of. The best short stories are the A dream within a dream It was a fascinating first-acquaintance with Borges, an author who has been staying with me for a long time, a house-ghost, a little of this and a little of that, a glimpse into my subconscious and all legends and myths in one place. The best short stories are the ones set free of time and space, stories that easily could weave into each other if they were allowed to, they are dreamlike labyrinths of the mind. Rounded up to 4 stars. View all 4 comments. Feb 08, PGR Nair rated it it was amazing. Note: This is an article I wrote in to mark the th birth Anniversary of Borges. Therefore, some of the stories I cite here may not belong to this collection. I thought to post it here as this book is the most cited. If you plan to buy a book of Borges, buy this one or Labyrinth and other stories as both contain the same set of stories and translators. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which mangles me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges. During his life, Borges wore many hats. He was, variously, a poet, an essayist, a short-story writer, a librarian, and, for a short time, a poultry inspector. As a hauntingly original essayist and short story writer, his three or four dozen short stories and essays is mentioned in the same breath with the tomes of Thomas Mann or James Joyce. In his life, Borges was an extremely shy person and possessed an exceptional modesty that makes him endearing. Though a supreme writer, he always underrated his writings as an escape from the boredom of a blind man. His face lights up when anyone praises his work; yet he habitually conveys the deep stillness of a man with few illusions about himself or the world. He also conveys sweetness and wisdom, those refinements of perception that sometimes accompany old age. His aristocratic upbringing, cosmopolitan outlook and exposure to different cultures gave him a universal mind. As a precursor of the "Magical Realists", he ingeniously mixed philosophy, fact, fantasy and mystery in his stories. They are written in dense and challenging prose. Unlikely images and situations are woven into a richly complex tapestry that arouses questions of identity and the self, of reality and the possibility for dreams. Intellectual Labyrinths , time, space, infinity, memory, mirrors Borges delights in the multiplicity of things; he is fascinated with mirrors because they multiply and libraries are some of the principal themes in his works. Borges' stories take place in a world that is half commonplace, half fantastic. Dreams occur within dreams; time loses its significance. What counts is momentary impulse and observation. Economy, grace, humor and precise sounding historical and referential details and ingenious plots are hall marks of his style. In this world, philosophical systems, theological disquisitions, myths and literary symbols, reflection and speculation, and universal history are the raw material of invention. Vargas Llosa says that Spanish was suddenly "purified," "intellectualized" by the inimitable prose style of Borges. Let us dwell on the themes in some of them. He hardly cares. The fall has miraculously sharpened his perception so that his memories are boundless: "He knew by heart the forms of the Southern clouds on the 30th of April, , and could compare them in his memory with the mottled streaks on a book in Spanish binding he had only seen once and with the outlines of the foam raised by an oar in the Rio Negro the night before the Quebracho uprising. Anyone who gazes into it can see everything in the universe from every angle simultaneously, without distortion, overlapping or confusion. The story explores his fascination with infinity. He sees man's search for meaning in an infinite universe as a fruitless effort. In the universe of energy, mass, and speed of light, Borges considers the central riddle time, not space. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time. The killer in this story leaves clues indicating religious motives: a distortion of kabalistic tradition in which murders reveal the divine name, letter by letter. Seeing that the first three murders form an equilateral triangle on the map and took place at regular intervals, the detective Erik Lonnrot pinpoints the time and place of the final murder, only to discover he has been set up for a trap: A common outlaw has lured Lonnrot there to murder him. The detective knows this but he is so fascinated by the pattern that he goes anyway, thus solving the mystery of his own murder. A wizard retreats from the world to a location that possesses strong mystical powers: the circular ruins. There, the wizard tries to create another human being from his own dreams. Sleeping and dreaming longer and longer each day, the magician dreams of his young man becoming educated, and wiser. After time, though, the wizard can no longer find sleep, and he deems his first attempt an inevitable failure. After many sleepless nights, the wizard dreams of a heart; vaguely at first, but more and more clearly each night. Years pass and the wizard creates the boy piece by piece, in agonizing detail. The wizard calls upon the god Fire to bring his creation to life. Fire agrees, as long as the wizard accustoms his creation to the real world, and that only Fire and the wizard will be able to tell the creation from a real human. His creation is sent to a distant temple of the god Fire, and becomes famous as, because it is not real, it can walk through fire unharmed. The wizard hears of this, but at length he awakes to find the ruins ablaze. As he ultimately walks into the flaming house of Fire, the wizards notices that his skin does not burn. Disparate imageries and clinical contextual details in describing a place sometimes create a surreal landscape reminiscent of a Dali. The overall effect of his language is simply magical. The unemphatic style of Borges often achieves effects with a single exploding word or phrase, dropped almost as though off-handedly into a quiet sentence: "He examined his wounds and saw, without astonishment, that they had healed. Borges' writing has often been called intellectual, and indeed it is dense with allusion. But it is also simple: the sentences are almost invariably classical in their symmetry, in their balance. To conclude, Borges was a world-class artist-a brilliant, lyrical miniaturist, an uncomplicated genius who could pose the great questions of existence on the head of a pin. Reading him might alter the way you look at everything, including yourself. The perfection of his language, the extent of his knowledge, the universalism of his electrifying ideas, the originality and inventiveness of his fiction, and the beauty of his poetry still continue to enchant the literary minds all over the world. His short stories with his labyrinthine themes and language have been explored and analyzed to the point that he has been named one of the pioneers of post-modernist fiction. His fabulistic stories with strange fictional realms and complex social systems and unusual metaphors had a significant influence on the Latin American magical realism movement. Ficciones is a collection of short stories, and is considered to be his most popular anthology. Some of his best known and most influential works are in this collection. The book is divided into two parts: the first part, The Garden of Forking Paths , contains eight stories and the second part, Artifices , contains nine. The stories explore many themes of existentialism, creationist philosophy, fantastical realms and universes governed by strange theological and sociological systems, satirical reviews of fictional works and many more such unusual works of fiction. Highly recommended if you're into philosophical fiction. View all 3 comments. This collection of short stories is a great introduction to Borges' fictional universe. At times his stories read like a non-fiction article or book review, but Borges sort of sneaks up on you and gives a tug at your conception of what constitutes real versus imaginary. I would say that some of the stories are more engaging than others, but that's just a matter of personal interest. They are all worth reading, and recommended, especially to those who enjoy magic realism, fantasy, and sci-fi books This collection of short stories is a great introduction to Borges' fictional universe. They are all worth reading, and recommended, especially to those who enjoy magic realism, fantasy, and sci-fi books. View all 11 comments. Nov 08, K. Absolutely rated it really liked it Recommends it for: Tata J no one else among my friends can enjoy this book. For me, reading has always been like connecting your brain to that of the book's author. To understand the book, you really have to slow down and reflect on each phrase. It is different from reading Salman Rushdie who I find confusing be For me, reading has always been like connecting your brain to that of the book's author. It is different from reading Salman Rushdie who I find confusing because of the terms and phrases that maybe a Indian-English person can only understand. Jorge Luis Borges uses familiar words and phrases but they are often stated in confusing way so much like his "forking paths" with the thoughts going into different directions that you have to choose where you want to go or believe. His imagination is spectacular and limitless. It goes beyond the imagination of a child which is amazing considering that he was already past his middle life working in as a director in a library when he wrote this novel. Years later he lost his sight which I thought must have enhanced further his imagination. Entry in his Wikipedia says that he lived with his mother and he had a secretary to write down his thoughts in his twilight years. I agree that he must have felt bad not winning the Nobel. His literary style is far beyond advanced than what I saw and liked in the likes of G. Marquez, S. Bellow and J. Again, if what is stated in the Wikipedia is accurate, he lost his chance for a Nobel because he got his earlier awards on writing from a communist leader, Pinochet. I remember a story my brother Tata J when I was in high school. During his time, people laughed at his paintings because they "could not understand" them. This is the same as those people who rated this book less than amazing five stars. They just don't know how to appreciate a mind as beautiful as that of Jorge Luis Borges. View all 10 comments. May 27, [P] rated it it was amazing Shelves: bitchin. I owe the discovery of El Matrero to Harper Lee. Five years ago I was spending the evening with my friend Renaldo Compostella, and, as was often the way, literature was our main topic of conversation. Renaldo, who always, or certainly more than I, kept an eye on forthcoming releases and bookish news, happened to mention the scheduled publication of a new novel by Harper Lee, the American authoress famous for To Kill a Mockingbird. The ensuing discussion was notable not for what we had to say abo I owe the discovery of El Matrero to Harper Lee. The ensuing discussion was notable not for what we had to say about Lee and her work, but because it led Compostella to bemoaning the lack of specific details concerning the publication of the recently unearthed novel by Jorge Luis Borges. My friend, in so casually dropping this information into the conversation, must have thought that I was aware of such a discovery, but of course I was not. Borges wrote a large number of intelligent, speculative, metaphysical short stories, but he did not, to my knowledge, ever write a novel. My friend laughed and said that I must have skipped the footnotes. Knoff, ] in my apartment, I took it down from the bookshelf and handed it to him, with the instruction that he find me the relevant page. Compostella opened the slim volume and, as it often the case when you pass someone a book, flicked through it, seemingly distracted from the matter at hand. It seems to me that the story is about many things, about language and how it directs thought or the way that one approaches your world, about the possibilities of human imagination, about mirrors and how different cultures are a distorted reflection of your own. Compostella again flicked through Ficciones and came to a stop somewhere in the centre, in the middle of the story The Library of Babel. He turned one particular page, page 63, over and back numerous times. It is not here, he told me, by which he meant the footnote that he had seen, which, he assured me, was present in his own first edition copy of Ficciones , but was evidently absent from mine. At this point I considered it a fine joke at my expense, and bundled my friend out of the door. However, about an hour later my telephone started to ring. It was Renaldo Compostella. He told me that he had just arrived home, that he had dug out his copy of Ficciones , and had indeed found the footnote. Your copy, he said, must be subject to a printing error, or perhaps, as a later edition, the footnote had been expunged for reasons we can only guess at. I also pointed out that part of his appeal is that he did not draw clear lines between fact and fiction, that one was never sure in his stories what was true and what was not, because nearly everything he wrote appeared plausible. Moreover, Borges, so often described as an impersonal author, was actually the most personal, in that he almost always used himself and details about his own life as part of his fiction. So, it did not seem too much of a stretch to suppose that the novel he refers to is itself a fiction, an imaginary novel, and that the suggestion of its existence was part of a [not out-of-character] labyrinthian game he was playing. However, my friend replied that for years he had thought this too, but reminded me that it had recently been announced that the novel had been unearthed, and it was currently being readied for publication through Penguin in the UK and US. Well, this changed everything, of course. I asked him how I could find out more, and he said that if I googled Borges and El Matrero I was bound to turn up numerous articles, as the discovery was a big deal in literary circles. At this, I thanked Compostella and hung up the phone and switched on my computer. The story, called, in Spanish, Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote , appears to be about a fictional French writer, who re-writes Don Quixote word-for-word. In light of these articles, I was forced to ask myself, did Pierre Menard actually exist? Certainly, while one would assume that he did not, as Borges claimed, re- write Don Quixote , this naturally does not mean that, if he did exist, for surely he is dead now, he did not write the recently unearthed El Matrero. And yet if he did write the novel, why exactly is this a cause for excitement? It is worth noting that the story in Ficciones featuring Pierre Menard is, at least partly, concerned with authorship and plagiarism, is about who, if anyone, owns a work. So one might wonder, as indeed does Caroline Hurst in the Guardian, whether Pierre Menard is simply a pseudonym for Borges himself, that Borges wrote the novel as Menard, as one of his own fictional authors. Yet other commentators reject this idea, claiming, perhaps rightly, that as the footnote does not specify a title, or suggest a plot or theme, the novel referred to in Ficciones is not El Matrero. Therefore, I decided to reread The Library of Babel , which, as already noted, Renaldo Compostella claimed contained the footnote that first makes mention of a novel by Jorge Luis Borges. The Library of Babel , or La biblioteca de Babel , imagines the universe as a vast library, which houses every possible book, featuring every possible permutation of letters, and which, as a result, will contain many volumes of pure gibberish but also every possible piece of information, including that relating to the future and to your own life. If Compostella was to be believed, it would indeed make sense that it is here that Borges would mention the novel that he had apparently been working on, as it would, naturally, also exist within the library of Babel. However, the veracity of the information contained within the footnote now seemed even more doubtful. I may hope to complete a marathon, without ever taking part in the race. Furthermore, the library would of course still contain a copy of his novel, regardless of whether he had started it or not, because it contains copies of all books, past present and future. Some months after the night described above, the novel El Matrero by Pierre Menard was published to rapturous acclaim, being voted the book of the year in many publications, newspapers, magazines. Jorge Luis Borges, ran popular opinion, was merely a pseudonym for, a creation of, Pierre Menard, whose life has become the subject of endless speculation. View all 23 comments. My copy of Ficciones arrives on June 11th through the letterbox. It is raining, and the light is silvery in the house. This is a photograph of my parcel the way I found it. Perhaps, the Sellotape came away of its own accord. Perhaps, someone opened it, hoping for something worth more than a book; its general shape could have been a DVD or a video game. In any case, I consider a fictional sc 94th book of In any case, I consider a fictional scenario where the box arrives empty. That my copy of Ficciones had been stolen on its way to me. His name is George — he is somewhere between twenty and thirty years old. He has never heard of Jorge Luis Borges; he is not a thief, nor does he consider himself to be one. Fate means little to him and nor does chance, for now. Though, principally, the reason he decided to steal the book from the parcel he was hoping for a new video game or Blu-ray to sell on was because Jorge was very close to his own name. This does not occur to him as being anything to do with Fate. At best, it is a coincidence. Later that night, he lies down in bed beside his girlfriend and wonders who he has stolen the book from. He imagines someone his own age I am younger than George , a professor of some sort untrue , a man who reads books that George would never himself decide to read probably true. He had smuggled the book under his coat and slid it into his bedside table at home along with tissues, crinkly likes leaves, condoms, mints, and other random tack that belonged nowhere else. Presently, he imagines me with steel-rimmed glasses, clumsy-footed, maybe married, he cannot decide, but above all, rather irritated by his missing book. Only the latter of these imaginings are true. George falls asleep creating me in his mind. Elsewhere, I am falling asleep, creating George in my own mind. We are two spiders spinning our own respective webs, unaware that we are in the same corner, and our threads are tangling. The rain continues for several days. I ring the Post Office a number of times about my missing parcel, or rather, the book missing from my parcel, but the lady on the phone is uninterested. I call a final time, hoping to catch a more cooperative answerer, but it is only her again, droning into the phone. I give up. George is across town, watching his girlfriend get dressed for the day, scratching his head, itching to open the book in his bedside table. My book. She leaves. His most notable works as a key literary Spanish-language figure of the twentieth century include Ficciones Fictions and El Aleph . When you buy a book, we donate a book. Sign in. Halloween Books for Kids. Read An Excerpt. Sep 04, ISBN Add to Cart. Also available from:. Available from:. Paperback —. Also by Jorge Luis Borges. See all books by Jorge Luis Borges. Product Details. Inspired by Your Browsing History. Paulo Coelho. Nietzsche and the Burbs. The Sacred Book of the Werewolf. Victor Pelevin. Great Dream of Heaven. The Book of Mirdad. Mikhail Naimy. The Village of Stepanchikovo. Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges: | : Books

Jorge Luis Borges. The seventeen pieces in Ficciones demonstrate the gargantuan powers of imagination, intelligence, and style of one of the greatest writers of this or any other century. Borges sends us on a journey into a compelling, bizarre, and profoundly resonant realm; we enter the fearful sphere of Pascal's abyss, the surreal and literal labyrinth of books, and the iconography of eternal return. More playful and approachable than the fictions themselves are Borges's Prologues, brief elucidations that offer the uninitiated a passageway into the whirlwind of Borges's genius and mirror the precision and potency of his intellect and inventiveness, his piercing irony, his skepticism, and his obsession with fantasy. To enter the worlds in Ficciones is to enter the mind of Jorge Luis Borges, wherein lies Heaven, Hell, and everything in between. The Form of the Sword. Theme of the Traitor and Hero. Death and the Compass. It contained eight stories. In , a new section labeled Artifices , containing six stories, was added to the eight of The Garden of Forking Paths. These were given the collective title Ficciones. Borges added three more stories to the Artifices section in the edition. In , an English translation of Ficciones was published by Grove Press. Ficciones emphasizes and calls attention to its fictional nature. The choice and use of literary devices are conspicuous in the stories. Naomi Lindstrom explains that Borges saw an effort to make a story appear natural "as an impoverishment of fiction's possibilities and falsification of its artistic character. The labyrinth is a recurring motif throughout the stories. It is used as a metaphor to represent a variety of things: the overwhelmingly complex nature of worlds and the systems that exist on them, human enterprises, the physical and mental aspects of humans, and abstract concepts such as time. The stories of Borges can be seen as a type of labyrinth themselves. View 2 comments. Jul 28, Morgan rated it it was ok. Ok, I'd tried to read Labyrinths years ago and found it dry and dull. I thought that perhaps I just wasn't in the proper state of mind, or perhaps wasn't well read enough to get it. I'd also come off of a Calvino kick, so Borges felt boring. Fast forward to me thinking that I really should commit to Borges and give him a real chance. I have to say that hard a hard time with this book. I only really like one story The Babylonian Lottery. Most of the time I feel like I'm stuck as some shitty academic after-party listening to the drunken rambling of a self-indulgent lit professor trying to make himself believe that he is the smartest guy in the room. I get the references, but most of this just isn't that interesting. It all comes across as clinical, with a tone of little Jack Horner self satisfaction staring at his thumb saying "What a good boy am I. He had an experience the likes of which you will never have. Jews are mysterious. He solved a puzzle that he created for himself and figured out that he is Shakespeare and everyone wrote Henry V for it has always existed. There is a long history of naming a thing, but in reality everything is the same. Perhaps he was in a sanitarium with black circling walls. But, I later found out that he may not have been. View all 18 comments. Shelves: read-in Presumptuous of me to think I would. 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. It seems this proved to be too much of a strenuous task for my ignorant self. 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? Like the act of this neverending regression of dreaming and creating process presented in the story. 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. Here again there seems to appear the issue of trying to put order in a fragmented, indecipherable universe ruled by randomness. 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. 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. A dream within a dream It was a fascinating first-acquaintance with Borges, an author who has been staying with me for a long time, a house- ghost, a little of this and a little of that, a glimpse into my subconscious and all legends and myths in one place. Cleverly wrought essays on Swedish scholars and secret societies planting false information and a lot of babble — I clearly get the impression that Borges never minded hearing himself speak, and being spoken of. The best short stories are the A dream within a dream It was a fascinating first-acquaintance with Borges, an author who has been staying with me for a long time, a house-ghost, a little of this and a little of that, a glimpse into my subconscious and all legends and myths in one place. The best short stories are the ones set free of time and space, stories that easily could weave into each other if they were allowed to, they are dreamlike labyrinths of the mind. Rounded up to 4 stars. View all 4 comments. Feb 08, PGR Nair rated it it was amazing. Note: This is an article I wrote in to mark the th birth Anniversary of Borges. Therefore, some of the stories I cite here may not belong to this collection. I thought to post it here as this book is the most cited. If you plan to buy a book of Borges, buy this one or Labyrinth and other stories as both contain the same set of stories and translators. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which mangles me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges. During his life, Borges wore many hats. He was, variously, a poet, an essayist, a short-story writer, a librarian, and, for a short time, a poultry inspector. As a hauntingly original essayist and short story writer, his three or four dozen short stories and essays is mentioned in the same breath with the tomes of Thomas Mann or James Joyce. In his life, Borges was an extremely shy person and possessed an exceptional modesty that makes him endearing. Though a supreme writer, he always underrated his writings as an escape from the boredom of a blind man. His face lights up when anyone praises his work; yet he habitually conveys the deep stillness of a man with few illusions about himself or the world. He also conveys sweetness and wisdom, those refinements of perception that sometimes accompany old age. His aristocratic upbringing, cosmopolitan outlook and exposure to different cultures gave him a universal mind. As a precursor of the "Magical Realists", he ingeniously mixed philosophy, fact, fantasy and mystery in his stories. They are written in dense and challenging prose. Unlikely images and situations are woven into a richly complex tapestry that arouses questions of identity and the self, of reality and the possibility for dreams. Intellectual Labyrinths , time, space, infinity, memory, mirrors Borges delights in the multiplicity of things; he is fascinated with mirrors because they multiply and libraries are some of the principal themes in his works. Borges' stories take place in a world that is half commonplace, half fantastic. Dreams occur within dreams; time loses its significance. What counts is momentary impulse and observation. Economy, grace, humor and precise sounding historical and referential details and ingenious plots are hall marks of his style. In this world, philosophical systems, theological disquisitions, myths and literary symbols, reflection and speculation, and universal history are the raw material of invention. Vargas Llosa says that Spanish was suddenly "purified," "intellectualized" by the inimitable prose style of Borges. Let us dwell on the themes in some of them. He hardly cares. The fall has miraculously sharpened his perception so that his memories are boundless: "He knew by heart the forms of the Southern clouds on the 30th of April, , and could compare them in his memory with the mottled streaks on a book in Spanish binding he had only seen once and with the outlines of the foam raised by an oar in the Rio Negro the night before the Quebracho uprising. Anyone who gazes into it can see everything in the universe from every angle simultaneously, without distortion, overlapping or confusion. The story explores his fascination with infinity. He sees man's search for meaning in an infinite universe as a fruitless effort. In the universe of energy, mass, and speed of light, Borges considers the central riddle time, not space. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time. The killer in this story leaves clues indicating religious motives: a distortion of kabalistic tradition in which murders reveal the divine name, letter by letter. Seeing that the first three murders form an equilateral triangle on the map and took place at regular intervals, the detective Erik Lonnrot pinpoints the time and place of the final murder, only to discover he has been set up for a trap: A common outlaw has lured Lonnrot there to murder him. The detective knows this but he is so fascinated by the pattern that he goes anyway, thus solving the mystery of his own murder. A wizard retreats from the world to a location that possesses strong mystical powers: the circular ruins. There, the wizard tries to create another human being from his own dreams. Sleeping and dreaming longer and longer each day, the magician dreams of his young man becoming educated, and wiser. After time, though, the wizard can no longer find sleep, and he deems his first attempt an inevitable failure. After many sleepless nights, the wizard dreams of a heart; vaguely at first, but more and more clearly each night. Years pass and the wizard creates the boy piece by piece, in agonizing detail. The wizard calls upon the god Fire to bring his creation to life. Fire agrees, as long as the wizard accustoms his creation to the real world, and that only Fire and the wizard will be able to tell the creation from a real human. His creation is sent to a distant temple of the god Fire, and becomes famous as, because it is not real, it can walk through fire unharmed. The wizard hears of this, but at length he awakes to find the ruins ablaze. As he ultimately walks into the flaming house of Fire, the wizards notices that his skin does not burn. Disparate imageries and clinical contextual details in describing a place sometimes create a surreal landscape reminiscent of a Dali. The overall effect of his language is simply magical. The unemphatic style of Borges often achieves effects with a single exploding word or phrase, dropped almost as though off-handedly into a quiet sentence: "He examined his wounds and saw, without astonishment, that they had healed. Borges' writing has often been called intellectual, and indeed it is dense with allusion. But it is also simple: the sentences are almost invariably classical in their symmetry, in their balance. To conclude, Borges was a world-class artist-a brilliant, lyrical miniaturist, an uncomplicated genius who could pose the great questions of existence on the head of a pin. Reading him might alter the way you look at everything, including yourself. The perfection of his language, the extent of his knowledge, the universalism of his electrifying ideas, the originality and inventiveness of his fiction, and the beauty of his poetry still continue to enchant the literary minds all over the world. His short stories with his labyrinthine themes and language have been explored and analyzed to the point that he has been named one of the pioneers of post-modernist fiction. His fabulistic stories with strange fictional realms and complex social systems and unusual metaphors had a significant influence on the Latin American magical realism movement. Ficciones is a collection of short stories, and is considered to be his most popular anthology. Some of his best known and most influential works are in this collection. The book is divided into two parts: the first part, The Garden of Forking Paths , contains eight stories and the second part, Artifices , contains nine. The stories explore many themes of existentialism, creationist philosophy, fantastical realms and universes governed by strange theological and sociological systems, satirical reviews of fictional works and many more such unusual works of fiction. Highly recommended if you're into philosophical fiction. View all 3 comments. This collection of short stories is a great introduction to Borges' fictional universe. At times his stories read like a non-fiction article or book review, but Borges sort of sneaks up on you and gives a tug at your conception of what constitutes real versus imaginary. I would say that some of the stories are more engaging than others, but that's just a matter of personal interest. They are all worth reading, and recommended, especially to those who enjoy magic realism, fantasy, and sci-fi books This collection of short stories is a great introduction to Borges' fictional universe. They are all worth reading, and recommended, especially to those who enjoy magic realism, fantasy, and sci-fi books. View all 11 comments. Nov 08, K. Absolutely rated it really liked it Recommends it for: Tata J no one else among my friends can enjoy this book. For me, reading has always been like connecting your brain to that of the book's author. To understand the book, you really have to slow down and reflect on each phrase. It is different from reading Salman Rushdie who I find confusing be For me, reading has always been like connecting your brain to that of the book's author. It is different from reading Salman Rushdie who I find confusing because of the terms and phrases that maybe a Indian-English person can only understand. Jorge Luis Borges uses familiar words and phrases but they are often stated in confusing way so much like his "forking paths" with the thoughts going into different directions that you have to choose where you want to go or believe. His imagination is spectacular and limitless. It goes beyond the imagination of a child which is amazing considering that he was already past his middle life working in as a director in a library when he wrote this novel. Years later he lost his sight which I thought must have enhanced further his imagination. Entry in his Wikipedia says that he lived with his mother and he had a secretary to write down his thoughts in his twilight years. I agree that he must have felt bad not winning the Nobel. His literary style is far beyond advanced than what I saw and liked in the likes of G. Marquez, S. Bellow and J. Again, if what is stated in the Wikipedia is accurate, he lost his chance for a Nobel because he got his earlier awards on writing from a communist leader, Pinochet. I remember a story my brother Tata J when I was in high school. During his time, people laughed at his paintings because they "could not understand" them. This is the same as those people who rated this book less than amazing five stars. They just don't know how to appreciate a mind as beautiful as that of Jorge Luis Borges. View all 10 comments. May 27, [P] rated it it was amazing Shelves: bitchin. I owe the discovery of El Matrero to Harper Lee. Five years ago I was spending the evening with my friend Renaldo Compostella, and, as was often the way, literature was our main topic of conversation. Renaldo, who always, or certainly more than I, kept an eye on forthcoming releases and bookish news, happened to mention the scheduled publication of a new novel by Harper Lee, the American authoress famous for To Kill a Mockingbird. The ensuing discussion was notable not for what we had to say abo I owe the discovery of El Matrero to Harper Lee. The ensuing discussion was notable not for what we had to say about Lee and her work, but because it led Compostella to bemoaning the lack of specific details concerning the publication of the recently unearthed novel by Jorge Luis Borges. My friend, in so casually dropping this information into the conversation, must have thought that I was aware of such a discovery, but of course I was not. Borges wrote a large number of intelligent, speculative, metaphysical short stories, but he did not, to my knowledge, ever write a novel. My friend laughed and said that I must have skipped the footnotes. Knoff, ] in my apartment, I took it down from the bookshelf and handed it to him, with the instruction that he find me the relevant page. Compostella opened the slim volume and, as it often the case when you pass someone a book, flicked through it, seemingly distracted from the matter at hand. It seems to me that the story is about many things, about language and how it directs thought or the way that one approaches your world, about the possibilities of human imagination, about mirrors and how different cultures are a distorted reflection of your own. Compostella again flicked through Ficciones and came to a stop somewhere in the centre, in the middle of the story The Library of Babel. He turned one particular page, page 63, over and back numerous times. It is not here, he told me, by which he meant the footnote that he had seen, which, he assured me, was present in his own first edition copy of Ficciones , but was evidently absent from mine. At this point I considered it a fine joke at my expense, and bundled my friend out of the door. However, about an hour later my telephone started to ring. It was Renaldo Compostella. He told me that he had just arrived home, that he had dug out his copy of Ficciones , and had indeed found the footnote. Your copy, he said, must be subject to a printing error, or perhaps, as a later edition, the footnote had been expunged for reasons we can only guess at. I also pointed out that part of his appeal is that he did not draw clear lines between fact and fiction, that one was never sure in his stories what was true and what was not, because nearly everything he wrote appeared plausible. Moreover, Borges, so often described as an impersonal author, was actually the most personal, in that he almost always used himself and details about his own life as part of his fiction. So, it did not seem too much of a stretch to suppose that the novel he refers to is itself a fiction, an imaginary novel, and that the suggestion of its existence was part of a [not out-of-character] labyrinthian game he was playing. However, my friend replied that for years he had thought this too, but reminded me that it had recently been announced that the novel had been unearthed, and it was currently being readied for publication through Penguin in the UK and US. Well, this changed everything, of course. I asked him how I could find out more, and he said that if I googled Borges and El Matrero I was bound to turn up numerous articles, as the discovery was a big deal in literary circles. At this, I thanked Compostella and hung up the phone and switched on my computer. The story, called, in Spanish, Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote , appears to be about a fictional French writer, who re-writes Don Quixote word-for-word. In light of these articles, I was forced to ask myself, did Pierre Menard actually exist? Certainly, while one would assume that he did not, as Borges claimed, re- write Don Quixote , this naturally does not mean that, if he did exist, for surely he is dead now, he did not write the recently unearthed El Matrero. And yet if he did write the novel, why exactly is this a cause for excitement? It is worth noting that the story in Ficciones featuring Pierre Menard is, at least partly, concerned with authorship and plagiarism, is about who, if anyone, owns a work. So one might wonder, as indeed does Caroline Hurst in the Guardian, whether Pierre Menard is simply a pseudonym for Borges himself, that Borges wrote the novel as Menard, as one of his own fictional authors. Yet other commentators reject this idea, claiming, perhaps rightly, that as the footnote does not specify a title, or suggest a plot or theme, the novel referred to in Ficciones is not El Matrero. Therefore, I decided to reread The Library of Babel , which, as already noted, Renaldo Compostella claimed contained the footnote that first makes mention of a novel by Jorge Luis Borges. The Library of Babel , or La biblioteca de Babel , imagines the universe as a vast library, which houses every possible book, featuring every possible permutation of letters, and which, as a result, will contain many volumes of pure gibberish but also every possible piece of information, including that relating to the future and to your own life. If Compostella was to be believed, it would indeed make sense that it is here that Borges would mention the novel that he had apparently been working on, as it would, naturally, also exist within the library of Babel. However, the veracity of the information contained within the footnote now seemed even more doubtful. I may hope to complete a marathon, without ever taking part in the race. Furthermore, the library would of course still contain a copy of his novel, regardless of whether he had started it or not, because it contains copies of all books, past present and future. Some months after the night described above, the novel El Matrero by Pierre Menard was published to rapturous acclaim, being voted the book of the year in many publications, newspapers, magazines. Jorge Luis Borges, ran popular opinion, was merely a pseudonym for, a creation of, Pierre Menard, whose life has become the subject of endless speculation. View all 23 comments. My copy of Ficciones arrives on June 11th through the letterbox. It is raining, and the light is silvery in the house. This is a photograph of my parcel the way I found it. Perhaps, the Sellotape came away of its own accord. Perhaps, someone opened it, hoping for something worth more than a book; its general shape could have been a DVD or a video game. In any case, I consider a fictional sc 94th book of In any case, I consider a fictional scenario where the box arrives empty. That my copy of Ficciones had been stolen on its way to me. His name is George — he is somewhere between twenty and thirty years old. He has never heard of Jorge Luis Borges; he is not a thief, nor does he consider himself to be one. Fate means little to him and nor does chance, for now. Though, principally, the reason he decided to steal the book from the parcel he was hoping for a new video game or Blu-ray to sell on was because Jorge was very close to his own name. This does not occur to him as being anything to do with Fate. At best, it is a coincidence. Later that night, he lies down in bed beside his girlfriend and wonders who he has stolen the book from. He imagines someone his own age I am younger than George , a professor of some sort untrue , a man who reads books that George would never himself decide to read probably true. He had smuggled the book under his coat and slid it into his bedside table at home along with tissues, crinkly likes leaves, condoms, mints, and other random tack that belonged nowhere else. Presently, he imagines me with steel-rimmed glasses, clumsy-footed, maybe married, he cannot decide, but above all, rather irritated by his missing book. Only the latter of these imaginings are true. George falls asleep creating me in his mind. Elsewhere, I am falling asleep, creating George in my own mind. We are two spiders spinning our own respective webs, unaware that we are in the same corner, and our threads are tangling. The rain continues for several days. I ring the Post Office a number of times about my missing parcel, or rather, the book missing from my parcel, but the lady on the phone is uninterested. I call a final time, hoping to catch a more cooperative answerer, but it is only her again, droning into the phone. I give up. George is across town, watching his girlfriend get dressed for the day, scratching his head, itching to open the book in his bedside table. My book. She leaves. He has the day off. George makes himself a cup of instant coffee, sits down at the kitchen table, and he begins reading Ficciones. The reading is heavy, but George persists. It is unlike anything he has ever read before. Steam rises from his mug in front of the book, obscuring some words, spinning others through a haze. Meanwhile, I watch the rain and wonder about my book. I have other things to keep me company; I read Sebald. I make a cup of coffee, and unknowingly, George and I sit drinking coffee at the same time. To be dreamed by another. He puts it aside, looking at it as if it were some unpredictable animal. He runs from the station, down the road, into the next, he keeps running until he is sure I cannot catch him. Of course, my body travels so far, but my mind travels further — he knows this. In his office he slips Ficciones into his desk drawer and wishes he could lock it. He continually has the sensation that I am stood behind him, that my hand is reaching over his shoulder, prising at the drawer. By this point, I have bought a new copy of Ficciones , and read it with thoughts of George in the back of my mind. On June 22nd, I receive a letter. The handwriting is unfamiliar to me, and so is the name of the sender. It is long and meandering, and I cannot work out what it is all about. These facts mean nothing to me, nor do they correlate to one another. In the conclusion of the letter it informs me that a certain man named George, who lives in my town of W. It is signed without a surname, only the forename: Louis. Of course, I cannot fathom a number of things. Who is Louis? How does he know my address? And above all, how is the imaginary man I invented as the book thief, now real, living, and across town? The house is another Victorian terrace like my own. White bay windows, dark tea coloured walls. He lets me in. We, as if old friends, discuss the book over coffee. So, at his kitchen table, we sit side by side and read "The South. Awkwardly, at the door, I tell him that I thought I imagined him, until a random man sent me a letter saying where he lived. This distresses George. He also received a letter from a Louis, saying that the man he had stolen the book from was very much real, and not how he had imagined. The end of the letter told him that his address had been leaked. We are both aware of how Borges-like our days have become. I put my coat on and stand on the porch. I tell him that I am not sure if I existed before I bought the book. Before that is certainly hazy. Neither of us know who Louis is, either. Back at home, I open my new copy and find it has changed. It is the same book, but inside is a story about a character named George, who steals a book, written by a writer named Louis. Across town, George is investigating his own changed copy of Ficciones. His is now about a character called Matthew who has a book stolen from him, also written by a Louis. Both men are satisfied, for they believe that the other does not exist, and they do. I'm more a fan of "Artificios" than the actual "Ficciones" collection, though "El Jardin" remains one of the better ones from Ficciones. Reading this collection for my Boston book club made me realize that, having taught Borges short stories over the years and reading for my exams as a graduate student, I thought that I had read all of them. So I've erased Borges from my "read" lists a I'm more a fan of "Artificios" than the actual "Ficciones" collection, though "El Jardin" remains one of the better ones from Ficciones. So I've erased Borges from my "read" lists and will reread each anthology. Like Quiroga and Cortazar, he's been anthologized so often that one can find the same short story in several collections, thus making it seem as though you've read them all. Great stuff, especially when you consider that they're his first stories ever, written after a severe head injury. But I do remember, both in grad school and now, "skimming" some of these. Once you've grasped the idea of what he's proposing the infinite nature of the universe, chaos, the only truth is fiction, etc. Wonderful to do if you have the time and are so inclined. Also, there's a new one every two sentences, so it really broke up the "stories".

Reseña de Ficciones de Jorge Luis Borges – Leer es vivir dos veces

Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Letras Libres. Consultado el 19 de septiembre de Conferencia pronunciada por el Sr. Archivado desde el original el 5 de febrero de El Mundo. Consultado el 5 de septiembre de Cada tachadura es significativa porque muestra que cada palabra es pensada, y es intuida. Consultado el 27 de septiembre de Steel Beach. Thomas Bernhard. The Fermata. Nicholson Baker. The Brothers Karamazov. A Blink of the Screen. Terry Pratchett. Prince of the World. Christopher Howard. Yevgeny Zamyatin. Margaret Atwood. Shadows of the Short Days. Leonor Antunes. Villa Incognito. Lost in the Funhouse. Related Articles. Looking for More Great Reads? Download Hi Res. LitFlash The eBooks you want at the lowest prices. Read it Forward Read it first. Pass it on! Stay in Touch Sign up. I get the references, but most of this just isn't that interesting. It all comes across as clinical, with a tone of little Jack Horner self satisfaction staring at his thumb saying "What a good boy am I. He had an experience the likes of which you will never have. Jews are mysterious. He solved a puzzle that he created for himself and figured out that he is Shakespeare and everyone wrote Henry V for it has always existed. There is a long history of naming a thing, but in reality everything is the same. Perhaps he was in a sanitarium with black circling walls. But, I later found out that he may not have been. View all 18 comments. Shelves: read-in Presumptuous of me to think I would. 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. It seems this proved to be too much of a strenuous task for my ignorant self. 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? Like the act of this neverending regression of dreaming and creating process presented in the story. 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. Here again there seems to appear the issue of trying to put order in a fragmented, indecipherable universe ruled by randomness. 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. 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. A dream within a dream It was a fascinating first-acquaintance with Borges, an author who has been staying with me for a long time, a house-ghost, a little of this and a little of that, a glimpse into my subconscious and all legends and myths in one place. Cleverly wrought essays on Swedish scholars and secret societies planting false information and a lot of babble — I clearly get the impression that Borges never minded hearing himself speak, and being spoken of. The best short stories are the A dream within a dream It was a fascinating first-acquaintance with Borges, an author who has been staying with me for a long time, a house-ghost, a little of this and a little of that, a glimpse into my subconscious and all legends and myths in one place. The best short stories are the ones set free of time and space, stories that easily could weave into each other if they were allowed to, they are dreamlike labyrinths of the mind. Rounded up to 4 stars. View all 4 comments. Feb 08, PGR Nair rated it it was amazing. Note: This is an article I wrote in to mark the th birth Anniversary of Borges. Therefore, some of the stories I cite here may not belong to this collection. I thought to post it here as this book is the most cited. If you plan to buy a book of Borges, buy this one or Labyrinth and other stories as both contain the same set of stories and translators. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which mangles me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges. During his life, Borges wore many hats. He was, variously, a poet, an essayist, a short-story writer, a librarian, and, for a short time, a poultry inspector. As a hauntingly original essayist and short story writer, his three or four dozen short stories and essays is mentioned in the same breath with the tomes of Thomas Mann or James Joyce. In his life, Borges was an extremely shy person and possessed an exceptional modesty that makes him endearing. Though a supreme writer, he always underrated his writings as an escape from the boredom of a blind man. His face lights up when anyone praises his work; yet he habitually conveys the deep stillness of a man with few illusions about himself or the world. He also conveys sweetness and wisdom, those refinements of perception that sometimes accompany old age. His aristocratic upbringing, cosmopolitan outlook and exposure to different cultures gave him a universal mind. As a precursor of the "Magical Realists", he ingeniously mixed philosophy, fact, fantasy and mystery in his stories. They are written in dense and challenging prose. Unlikely images and situations are woven into a richly complex tapestry that arouses questions of identity and the self, of reality and the possibility for dreams. Intellectual Labyrinths , time, space, infinity, memory, mirrors Borges delights in the multiplicity of things; he is fascinated with mirrors because they multiply and libraries are some of the principal themes in his works. Borges' stories take place in a world that is half commonplace, half fantastic. Dreams occur within dreams; time loses its significance. What counts is momentary impulse and observation. Economy, grace, humor and precise sounding historical and referential details and ingenious plots are hall marks of his style. In this world, philosophical systems, theological disquisitions, myths and literary symbols, reflection and speculation, and universal history are the raw material of invention. Vargas Llosa says that Spanish was suddenly "purified," "intellectualized" by the inimitable prose style of Borges. Let us dwell on the themes in some of them. He hardly cares. The fall has miraculously sharpened his perception so that his memories are boundless: "He knew by heart the forms of the Southern clouds on the 30th of April, , and could compare them in his memory with the mottled streaks on a book in Spanish binding he had only seen once and with the outlines of the foam raised by an oar in the Rio Negro the night before the Quebracho uprising. Anyone who gazes into it can see everything in the universe from every angle simultaneously, without distortion, overlapping or confusion. The story explores his fascination with infinity. He sees man's search for meaning in an infinite universe as a fruitless effort. In the universe of energy, mass, and speed of light, Borges considers the central riddle time, not space. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time. The killer in this story leaves clues indicating religious motives: a distortion of kabalistic tradition in which murders reveal the divine name, letter by letter. Seeing that the first three murders form an equilateral triangle on the map and took place at regular intervals, the detective Erik Lonnrot pinpoints the time and place of the final murder, only to discover he has been set up for a trap: A common outlaw has lured Lonnrot there to murder him. The detective knows this but he is so fascinated by the pattern that he goes anyway, thus solving the mystery of his own murder. A wizard retreats from the world to a location that possesses strong mystical powers: the circular ruins. There, the wizard tries to create another human being from his own dreams. Sleeping and dreaming longer and longer each day, the magician dreams of his young man becoming educated, and wiser. After time, though, the wizard can no longer find sleep, and he deems his first attempt an inevitable failure. After many sleepless nights, the wizard dreams of a heart; vaguely at first, but more and more clearly each night. Years pass and the wizard creates the boy piece by piece, in agonizing detail. The wizard calls upon the god Fire to bring his creation to life. Fire agrees, as long as the wizard accustoms his creation to the real world, and that only Fire and the wizard will be able to tell the creation from a real human. His creation is sent to a distant temple of the god Fire, and becomes famous as, because it is not real, it can walk through fire unharmed. The wizard hears of this, but at length he awakes to find the ruins ablaze. As he ultimately walks into the flaming house of Fire, the wizards notices that his skin does not burn. Disparate imageries and clinical contextual details in describing a place sometimes create a surreal landscape reminiscent of a Dali. The overall effect of his language is simply magical. The unemphatic style of Borges often achieves effects with a single exploding word or phrase, dropped almost as though off-handedly into a quiet sentence: "He examined his wounds and saw, without astonishment, that they had healed. Borges' writing has often been called intellectual, and indeed it is dense with allusion. But it is also simple: the sentences are almost invariably classical in their symmetry, in their balance. To conclude, Borges was a world-class artist-a brilliant, lyrical miniaturist, an uncomplicated genius who could pose the great questions of existence on the head of a pin. Reading him might alter the way you look at everything, including yourself. The perfection of his language, the extent of his knowledge, the universalism of his electrifying ideas, the originality and inventiveness of his fiction, and the beauty of his poetry still continue to enchant the literary minds all over the world. His short stories with his labyrinthine themes and language have been explored and analyzed to the point that he has been named one of the pioneers of post-modernist fiction. His fabulistic stories with strange fictional realms and complex social systems and unusual metaphors had a significant influence on the Latin American magical realism movement. Ficciones is a collection of short stories, and is considered to be his most popular anthology. Some of his best known and most influential works are in this collection. The book is divided into two parts: the first part, The Garden of Forking Paths , contains eight stories and the second part, Artifices , contains nine. The stories explore many themes of existentialism, creationist philosophy, fantastical realms and universes governed by strange theological and sociological systems, satirical reviews of fictional works and many more such unusual works of fiction. Highly recommended if you're into philosophical fiction. View all 3 comments. This collection of short stories is a great introduction to Borges' fictional universe. At times his stories read like a non-fiction article or book review, but Borges sort of sneaks up on you and gives a tug at your conception of what constitutes real versus imaginary. I would say that some of the stories are more engaging than others, but that's just a matter of personal interest. They are all worth reading, and recommended, especially to those who enjoy magic realism, fantasy, and sci-fi books This collection of short stories is a great introduction to Borges' fictional universe. They are all worth reading, and recommended, especially to those who enjoy magic realism, fantasy, and sci-fi books. View all 11 comments. Nov 08, K. Absolutely rated it really liked it Recommends it for: Tata J no one else among my friends can enjoy this book. For me, reading has always been like connecting your brain to that of the book's author. To understand the book, you really have to slow down and reflect on each phrase. It is different from reading Salman Rushdie who I find confusing be For me, reading has always been like connecting your brain to that of the book's author. It is different from reading Salman Rushdie who I find confusing because of the terms and phrases that maybe a Indian-English person can only understand. Jorge Luis Borges uses familiar words and phrases but they are often stated in confusing way so much like his "forking paths" with the thoughts going into different directions that you have to choose where you want to go or believe. His imagination is spectacular and limitless. It goes beyond the imagination of a child which is amazing considering that he was already past his middle life working in as a director in a library when he wrote this novel. Years later he lost his sight which I thought must have enhanced further his imagination. Entry in his Wikipedia says that he lived with his mother and he had a secretary to write down his thoughts in his twilight years. I agree that he must have felt bad not winning the Nobel. His literary style is far beyond advanced than what I saw and liked in the likes of G. Marquez, S. Bellow and J. Again, if what is stated in the Wikipedia is accurate, he lost his chance for a Nobel because he got his earlier awards on writing from a communist leader, Pinochet. I remember a story my brother Tata J when I was in high school. During his time, people laughed at his paintings because they "could not understand" them. This is the same as those people who rated this book less than amazing five stars. They just don't know how to appreciate a mind as beautiful as that of Jorge Luis Borges. View all 10 comments. May 27, [P] rated it it was amazing Shelves: bitchin. I owe the discovery of El Matrero to Harper Lee. Five years ago I was spending the evening with my friend Renaldo Compostella, and, as was often the way, literature was our main topic of conversation. Renaldo, who always, or certainly more than I, kept an eye on forthcoming releases and bookish news, happened to mention the scheduled publication of a new novel by Harper Lee, the American authoress famous for To Kill a Mockingbird. The ensuing discussion was notable not for what we had to say abo I owe the discovery of El Matrero to Harper Lee. The ensuing discussion was notable not for what we had to say about Lee and her work, but because it led Compostella to bemoaning the lack of specific details concerning the publication of the recently unearthed novel by Jorge Luis Borges. My friend, in so casually dropping this information into the conversation, must have thought that I was aware of such a discovery, but of course I was not. Borges wrote a large number of intelligent, speculative, metaphysical short stories, but he did not, to my knowledge, ever write a novel. My friend laughed and said that I must have skipped the footnotes. Knoff, ] in my apartment, I took it down from the bookshelf and handed it to him, with the instruction that he find me the relevant page. Compostella opened the slim volume and, as it often the case when you pass someone a book, flicked through it, seemingly distracted from the matter at hand. It seems to me that the story is about many things, about language and how it directs thought or the way that one approaches your world, about the possibilities of human imagination, about mirrors and how different cultures are a distorted reflection of your own. Compostella again flicked through Ficciones and came to a stop somewhere in the centre, in the middle of the story The Library of Babel. He turned one particular page, page 63, over and back numerous times. It is not here, he told me, by which he meant the footnote that he had seen, which, he assured me, was present in his own first edition copy of Ficciones , but was evidently absent from mine. At this point I considered it a fine joke at my expense, and bundled my friend out of the door. However, about an hour later my telephone started to ring. It was Renaldo Compostella. He told me that he had just arrived home, that he had dug out his copy of Ficciones , and had indeed found the footnote. Your copy, he said, must be subject to a printing error, or perhaps, as a later edition, the footnote had been expunged for reasons we can only guess at. I also pointed out that part of his appeal is that he did not draw clear lines between fact and fiction, that one was never sure in his stories what was true and what was not, because nearly everything he wrote appeared plausible. Moreover, Borges, so often described as an impersonal author, was actually the most personal, in that he almost always used himself and details about his own life as part of his fiction. So, it did not seem too much of a stretch to suppose that the novel he refers to is itself a fiction, an imaginary novel, and that the suggestion of its existence was part of a [not out-of-character] labyrinthian game he was playing. However, my friend replied that for years he had thought this too, but reminded me that it had recently been announced that the novel had been unearthed, and it was currently being readied for publication through Penguin in the UK and US. Well, this changed everything, of course. I asked him how I could find out more, and he said that if I googled Borges and El Matrero I was bound to turn up numerous articles, as the discovery was a big deal in literary circles. At this, I thanked Compostella and hung up the phone and switched on my computer. The story, called, in Spanish, Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote , appears to be about a fictional French writer, who re-writes Don Quixote word-for-word. In light of these articles, I was forced to ask myself, did Pierre Menard actually exist? Certainly, while one would assume that he did not, as Borges claimed, re-write Don Quixote , this naturally does not mean that, if he did exist, for surely he is dead now, he did not write the recently unearthed El Matrero. And yet if he did write the novel, why exactly is this a cause for excitement? It is worth noting that the story in Ficciones featuring Pierre Menard is, at least partly, concerned with authorship and plagiarism, is about who, if anyone, owns a work. So one might wonder, as indeed does Caroline Hurst in the Guardian, whether Pierre Menard is simply a pseudonym for Borges himself, that Borges wrote the novel as Menard, as one of his own fictional authors. Yet other commentators reject this idea, claiming, perhaps rightly, that as the footnote does not specify a title, or suggest a plot or theme, the novel referred to in Ficciones is not El Matrero. Therefore, I decided to reread The Library of Babel , which, as already noted, Renaldo Compostella claimed contained the footnote that first makes mention of a novel by Jorge Luis Borges. The Library of Babel , or La biblioteca de Babel , imagines the universe as a vast library, which houses every possible book, featuring every possible permutation of letters, and which, as a result, will contain many volumes of pure gibberish but also every possible piece of information, including that relating to the future and to your own life. If Compostella was to be believed, it would indeed make sense that it is here that Borges would mention the novel that he had apparently been working on, as it would, naturally, also exist within the library of Babel. However, the veracity of the information contained within the footnote now seemed even more doubtful. I may hope to complete a marathon, without ever taking part in the race. Furthermore, the library would of course still contain a copy of his novel, regardless of whether he had started it or not, because it contains copies of all books, past present and future. Some months after the night described above, the novel El Matrero by Pierre Menard was published to rapturous acclaim, being voted the book of the year in many publications, newspapers, magazines. Jorge Luis Borges, ran popular opinion, was merely a pseudonym for, a creation of, Pierre Menard, whose life has become the subject of endless speculation. View all 23 comments. My copy of Ficciones arrives on June 11th through the letterbox. It is raining, and the light is silvery in the house. This is a photograph of my parcel the way I found it. Perhaps, the Sellotape came away of its own accord. Perhaps, someone opened it, hoping for something worth more than a book; its general shape could have been a DVD or a video game. In any case, I consider a fictional sc 94th book of In any case, I consider a fictional scenario where the box arrives empty. That my copy of Ficciones had been stolen on its way to me. His name is George — he is somewhere between twenty and thirty years old. He has never heard of Jorge Luis Borges; he is not a thief, nor does he consider himself to be one. Fate means little to him and nor does chance, for now. Though, principally, the reason he decided to steal the book from the parcel he was hoping for a new video game or Blu-ray to sell on was because Jorge was very close to his own name. This does not occur to him as being anything to do with Fate. At best, it is a coincidence. Later that night, he lies down in bed beside his girlfriend and wonders who he has stolen the book from. He imagines someone his own age I am younger than George , a professor of some sort untrue , a man who reads books that George would never himself decide to read probably true. He had smuggled the book under his coat and slid it into his bedside table at home along with tissues, crinkly likes leaves, condoms, mints, and other random tack that belonged nowhere else. Presently, he imagines me with steel-rimmed glasses, clumsy- footed, maybe married, he cannot decide, but above all, rather irritated by his missing book. Only the latter of these imaginings are true. George falls asleep creating me in his mind. Elsewhere, I am falling asleep, creating George in my own mind. We are two spiders spinning our own respective webs, unaware that we are in the same corner, and our threads are tangling. The rain continues for several days. I ring the Post Office a number of times about my missing parcel, or rather, the book missing from my parcel, but the lady on the phone is uninterested. I call a final time, hoping to catch a more cooperative answerer, but it is only her again, droning into the phone. I give up. George is across town, watching his girlfriend get dressed for the day, scratching his head, itching to open the book in his bedside table. My book. She leaves. He has the day off. George makes himself a cup of instant coffee, sits down at the kitchen table, and he begins reading Ficciones. The reading is heavy, but George persists. It is unlike anything he has ever read before. Steam rises from his mug in front of the book, obscuring some words, spinning others through a haze. Meanwhile, I watch the rain and wonder about my book. I have other things to keep me company; I read Sebald. I make a cup of coffee, and unknowingly, George and I sit drinking coffee at the same time. To be dreamed by another. He puts it aside, looking at it as if it were some unpredictable animal. He runs from the station, down the road, into the next, he keeps running until he is sure I cannot catch him. Of course, my body travels so far, but my mind travels further — he knows this. In his office he slips Ficciones into his desk drawer and wishes he could lock it. He continually has the sensation that I am stood behind him, that my hand is reaching over his shoulder, prising at the drawer. By this point, I have bought a new copy of Ficciones , and read it with thoughts of George in the back of my mind. On June 22nd, I receive a letter. The handwriting is unfamiliar to me, and so is the name of the sender. It is long and meandering, and I cannot work out what it is all about. These facts mean nothing to me, nor do they correlate to one another. In the conclusion of the letter it informs me that a certain man named George, who lives in my town of W. It is signed without a surname, only the forename: Louis. Of course, I cannot fathom a number of things. Who is Louis? How does he know my address? And above all, how is the imaginary man I invented as the book thief, now real, living, and across town? The house is another Victorian terrace like my own. White bay windows, dark tea coloured walls. He lets me in. We, as if old friends, discuss the book over coffee. So, at his kitchen table, we sit side by side and read "The South. Awkwardly, at the door, I tell him that I thought I imagined him, until a random man sent me a letter saying where he lived. This distresses George. He also received a letter from a Louis, saying that the man he had stolen the book from was very much real, and not how he had imagined. The end of the letter told him that his address had been leaked. We are both aware of how Borges- like our days have become. I put my coat on and stand on the porch. I tell him that I am not sure if I existed before I bought the book. Before that is certainly hazy. Neither of us know who Louis is, either. Back at home, I open my new copy and find it has changed. It is the same book, but inside is a story about a character named George, who steals a book, written by a writer named Louis. Across town, George is investigating his own changed copy of Ficciones. His is now about a character called Matthew who has a book stolen from him, also written by a Louis. Both men are satisfied, for they believe that the other does not exist, and they do. I'm more a fan of "Artificios" than the actual "Ficciones" collection, though "El Jardin" remains one of the better ones from Ficciones. Reading this collection for my Boston book club made me realize that, having taught Borges short stories over the years and reading for my exams as a graduate student, I thought that I had read all of them. So I've erased Borges from my "read" lists a I'm more a fan of "Artificios" than the actual "Ficciones" collection, though "El Jardin" remains one of the better ones from Ficciones. So I've erased Borges from my "read" lists and will reread each anthology. Like Quiroga and Cortazar, he's been anthologized so often that one can find the same short story in several collections, thus making it seem as though you've read them all. Great stuff, especially when you consider that they're his first stories ever, written after a severe head injury. But I do remember, both in grad school and now, "skimming" some of these. Once you've grasped the idea of what he's proposing the infinite nature of the universe, chaos, the only truth is fiction, etc. Wonderful to do if you have the time and are so inclined. Also, there's a new one every two sentences, so it really broke up the "stories". Now, I just get the concept and plow through a lot of those references. That's why I prefer "Jardin de los senderos que se bifurcan" and the stories from "Artificios"; they're more in the line of actual stories, that do contain a plot but also posit some of those same ideas and concepts the way, for example, "La muerte y la brujula" is similar to "Jardin" in its structure, a variation on the same theme, if you will. Jan 20, Cecily rated it it was amazing Shelves: short-stories-and-novellas , scifi-future-speculative-fict , maths , magical-realism , south-america , jorge-luis-borges. May 21, Lauren rated it it was amazing Shelves: hoopla-rentals , classics , best-of , sa-argentina , short-stories , translated-works , ebook. Century follows century, and things happen only in the present. Just finished this spectacular and complicated collection of short stories that span time and dimension, and genre. To state the obvious, Borges was a genius. I see direct links to Borges in th 'Then I reflected that all the things happen, happen to one, precisely now. When every story strikes awe, how do you choose a favorite?

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