Jorge Luis Borges

Short narratives probe man's soul to reveal his conflicting emotions, motives, and desires and his tortured struggle for salvation

Ficciones

Iris Adi

Que el cielo exista, aunque mi lugar sea el infierno. 

Anthony Kerrigan

Anthony Bonner

Although Borges loves reviewing fictional books, I have a hard time reviewing Ficciones. The stories are just so dense. They are like multidimensional philosophy told through intertextual word puzzles. There is enjoyment to be found, but of a purely intellectual nature. In short, this is ultimate flex of a literary genius. But I'm not smart enough to put stars on this one.

Frederik De Bosschere

“Borges’s composed, carefully wrought, gnarled style is at once the means of his art and its object—his way of ordering and giving meaning to the bizarre and terrifying world he creates: it is a brilliant, burnished instrument, and it is quite adequate to the extreme demands his baroque imagination makes of it . . . . Absolutely and most vividly original.”—Saturday Review 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.

Sarah Sammis

** spoiler alert **
           Although this collection contains one of his most famous stories, "La biblioteca de Babel", my two favorites were actually "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Teritus" and "Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote."

"Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Teritus" covers a man's obsession with finding the source of a quote another man tells him during a dinner party. The practical conclusion would be that the man with the quote made it up. But the main character becomes obsessed with tracking down its source at the cost of mental and physical health. In this regard, the story reminds me of a recent YouTube video I quite like, "The Tale of Tiffany" by CGP Grey.

"Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote" is about a man so obsessed with Cervantes that he sets out to live his life as closely to the authors in the hopes of learning how to write like him. The end result is another copy of Don Quixote. Borges leaves it up to the reader to figure out if the extant version of Don Quijote is the original or the copy.

http://pussreboots.com/blog/2024/comm...

Cody Degen

think I wish I liked this book more. i know he's renowned for his economy of language but ngl, i really wish there were more words here

iamazoo

love the repeated themes and a sort of…mathematical quality to the writing?

favorites: “the circular ruins” / “the babylon lottery” / “the garden of forking paths” / “the form of the sword” / “death and the compass”

Laura Mauler

Reading this book was like getting stuck in conversation with a boring co-worker who doesn't want to get back to work.

I did not like it.

heleen de boever

Intricate, dense, pushing the limits of what fiction can be.

Fictions

Gavin

Deeply uncanny - without worshipping mystery. ("Tlön" is scarier to me than anything in Lovecraft. "Babel" is also horrifying in its way.) Playing at the limits of reason - without renouncing objectivity. (There is something of the unearthly drama and transcendence of higher mathematics in a couple of these stories.) Somehow it manages to be cryptic without being annoying, to use literary gossip and the droning of archivists straight. Some of this is 80 years old, and it's still completely fresh.

He makes literature larger, by bringing new things into scope - bibliographic minutiae, English department arcana, salon gossip. There's something refreshing about his perfect fake book reviews. Gushing praise of nonexistent authors draws back the veil (as if our world's reviewers would say the same things whether or not the authors existed). 

Borges was not a postmodernist but these anyway have the best of what postmodernism is taken to mean: nonliteral play, generative scepticism about sense and reference and language-games, reasoning about the limits of reason.

I'm not sure of the significance of some of Borges' sentences here. But for once the critic's working assumption of meaning seems sound: if I thought about it, I could find out. (And not just in the ordinary way, by projection. I expect to find Borges in them if I try.)

I've some ideas about each story, but none that fit completely or exhaust them. Here's one:

---

Here's a banal idea: "language is composite". Characters go into words into sentences into works into worldviews. In "The Library of Babel", Borges stretches this fact until you see the horror in it, the shocking vastness of exponentiation on the tiny scale of a human life. The simple idea of mechanically generating all strings of length n=1,312,000 leads to an incredibly claustrophobic closed system. The story is not 8 pages long but contains more than most books.

There exists one truth; there are uncountably many falsehoods; but worse, there's a far larger infinity of nonsense, of things which make sense in no language, which don't make enough sense to be false, which never will. This is the horror of Platonism or Many-world physics or Meinong: that we could be invisibly boxed-in by garbled infinities, endless keyboard mashing. The "noosphere" - all the good ideas, all the bad ideas ever had - is a tiny pocket of meaning in a sea of meaninglessness.

The stunning effect of "Babel" depends on its not being magic, not hand-wavy (merely monstrous, physically impossible for interesting reasons which violate no particular law). Ted Chiang is grasping at a similar titanic scale when he uses a truly alien language to explain variational physics.

Remember that Borges was a librarian. But, while he said photogenic things about libraries, he didn't necessarily like being in them. "The Library of Babel" adds an extremely mordant overtone to that quotation, by imagining an otherworldly library which breaks men just by being there. Sturrock, his biographer:

   Borges had some reason to dislike libraries because for nine years "of solid unhappiness", from 1937 to 1946, he was obliged to work in one, as a quite junior librarian, in order to make money. The cataloguing work he did was futile... 


The alphabet used for the Babel books has 22 letters and no uppercase. We could try and look up human languages with that many letters, but better to take this as a hint that our narrator is not us - he can be a total alien, far from Earth, and the exact same library will still confound him the exact same way. The same geometry constrains all minds. What looks like meaning need not be, if your sample is large enough:

  This useless and wordy epistle itself already exists in one of the thirty volumes of the five shelves in one of the uncountable heaxgons - and so does its refutation. (And n possible languages make use of the same vocabulary; in some of them the symbol 'library' admits of the correct definition 'ubiquitous and everlasting system of hexagonal galleries', but 'library' is 'bread' or 'pyramid' of anything else... You who read me, are you sure you understand my language?) 


The narrator says that the fall from his floor "is infinite" (or indefinite), that the rooms are "uncountable", but we can do better than this quite easily, given only the text. There are 410*40*80 = 1312000 characters per book. The number of distinct books is thus (22 + 3)^{1312000} or about 2 followed by about 1.8 million zeroes. It is hard to give a reference for how large this is: if every atom in the universe contained as many atoms as are in the universe (10^80), and each of the nested atoms was a Babel book, this would still contain only a laughably tiny fraction of Babel, less than one googolplexth. There's 4*5*32 = 640 books per hexagon, so we need about 3 x 10^1834094 room-sized hexagons. This is the full implication of the simple thought "every book of length 1312000".

It couldn't possibly be even fractionally built. And yet, through the power of maths, it has been built - "only implicitly, skeletally", but it still counts.

(Borges notes this infinity/finity conflict on the last page, explaining that the Library is unbounded and periodic, a hypersphere.)

There is a beautiful, inspiring lesson to be taken from it actually: think about what the incredible feat of writing any book - no matter how bad - actually entails. Our nervous system shields us from Babel, from the larger part of possible meanings and the overwhelming majority of string space. This is an astonishing act, in information-theory terms: the ultimate search, which we succeed at effortlessly, many times a day. Epic achievements in life-giving ignoring.

Felipe Saldarriaga 

Es sorprendente todo lo que Borges fue capaz de hacer en su vida, en Ficciones se refleja la cantidad de personas influyentes con las que pudo interactuar y en cada cuento abre tu mundo a lo que significó para el conocerles a cada uno de ellos.

Si bien es un libro corto requiere que vengas con un conocimiento de base o que te detengas a indagar quienes cada una de las personas a las que dedica y aparecen en sus cuentos, así se puede disfrutar realmente de su contenido.

FICTIONS is perhaps the single most mysterious and extraordinary collection of short stories written this century. Influenced by writers as disparate as Lewis Carroll, Stevenson and Cervantes, Borges is nethertheless a complete original who can turn dry logical puzzles in to enchanting fables. The Pieces in this volume represent his most accomplished work.

Ashlyn

4.5 rounded up

Standouts include: The Circular Ruins, The Library of Babel, The Garden of the Forking Paths, The Shape of the Sword

Fraser Simons

Self aware, self referential, and meta in, essentially, all the ways I can think of. While meta is something I quite like as additional context through connective tissue, the other qualities are things I typically dislike - sometimes outright despise, actually. 

Yet it all works wonders here. Even when referencing antiquated stories I am barely familiar with or haven’t even a vague inkling of, because they are make his own, it also doesn’t quite matter. I’m sure it might be slightly more satisfying to know how they have been altered but the context provided through the one of the particular piece usually enough. And then it begins to build on itself in compelling ways. Referring to books that do or do not exist and have been expounded on previously. Altering existence as we know it in order to theorize about the craft even as he is applying the trade as you watch. 

Even the book gets additional context through a fictional book and location in one such ‘story’. It’s very stimulating and dense in a way I had not expected. The accessibility, I think, is not as exclusive as I imagined. Diction is intuitive and does much of the work. It’s economical and has flow, but you also cannot read it quickly. You’ll trip over yourself and need to go at the pace Borge likes, controlling even that aspect of experience. 

Where most fiction attempts to produce some kind of truth, or universal kind of experience as the buttressing for the lie, that is, the conceit or overt fiction which will require the suspension of disbelief, Borges simply refuses to distinguish or accept that framing device. A review of a story sounds incredible. When you search for it, however, it is completely fictional. But it is also already somewhat consumed by the reader with the review and by the intertextual elements later on in the book. 

While I have always subscribed to the strict framing of the real and the unreal, I have also never read an agreement that illustrated my own position to me before.

Donald

I'd read some of these stories many times. Pierre Menard, Tlön, and a few others are perfect, immortal stories, but it was kind of shocking how pedestrian some of the others are, how they rely on final line surprises.

And I'd forgotten about all the suicides in the Library of Babel.

Bob Simone

There were a couple stories in here that were really, really good. I suspect that the others are equally good and that I am not smart enough to appreciate them. I spent most of my energy trying to understand what the hell the words I was reading were saying.

Carolina

I mean some are super cool, otros te dan ganas de darte la cabeza contra la pared. Y seamos sinceros, probablemente le podría tener más más cariño si no fuera por lo gomas que son con Borges en letras ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Melody Izard

You have to really concentrate while reading Borges and maybe I just wasn't in the mood to stay with his complex sentences. There were some amusing ideas presented, such as the country with the language with no nouns - only strings of adverbs and adjectives. But for the most part, I'd find myself thinking about what I needed to be doing and then realize I didn't have a clue what I'd just read or how I got from the planned assassination of Lincoln to a tunnel in France. 

I'll try Borges again when I'm feeling more intellectual and less needy for entertainment.

In honor of the centenary of the birth of Borges, this collection of his fiction has been gathered into a single volume. "An unparalleled treasury of marvels."--"Chicago Tribune."

Collected Fictions

Simon Elliott Stegall

Mystical, beautiful, inspiring. But I would recommend reading his collection The Aleph (contained in this volume) rather than this anthology. 600 pages of Borges is a bit much.

John Balek

I've finally read Borges Collected Fiction! For the last few years I've heard about Jorge Luis Borges, read other South American authors (Ocampo, Aira), and searched bookstores for this collection to finally make my introduction. There's been a lot of hype around this book and it had a lot to live up to.

This has been the year of reading short stories and if there's anyone who can write short stories it's Jorge Luis Borges. Borges' stories draw you in quick and make the most of its word count. A story that is only a few pages long can feel like a complete folktale. In fact, I would describe Collected Fictions as a fictional record of human history. The settings of these stories cover many different cultures and time periods; although they focus on European, Arab, and South American culture of the last few centuries. Borges can tell a story well and really perfected his formula.

There are many common themes that Borges' stories follow. Knife fights, labyrinths, dreams; these topics are so synonymous with Borges that even he acknowledges this fact. Borges writes about these subjects in great detail but he finds many ways to make unique stories with them.

While reading this book I definitely get why it is so praised. Stories like Deutsches Requiem, The Aleph, and The Congress are all time favorites. There were many more I enjoyed too as Borges really is that great a writer. 

That being said, I felt like these stories did get a little repetitive or blur together. Borges has a clear formula when he writes stories. While it works well it is easy to notice this pattern and get distracted by have a narrator introducing a story told by another narrator. At least I was distracted by this repetition. 

I also would read a few stories in succession and by the time I finished the second or third story I would have already forgotten a lot of the the first story. I would recommend trying to read one story at a time and sitting with it to fully appreciate it. I thought I went pretty slow, only reading a few stories a day for two months, but I guess I was still rushing it. With Borges' theme of dreams my immediate forgetfulness of a story almost felt like a dream. While I was reading it, it was vivid and enthralling but the second I started the next that memory quickly faded. 

There is a lot to love a bout a collection like this. While not his entire bibliography, this collection covers a large perspective of his life. From his 30's to 80's. It is fascinating to see how Borges ages, how he changes and stays the same. I haven't read a book like this that really gives you a great insight into an author's work and life without being a direct bibliography.

I've heard this book describes as "If I could only pick one book to read for this rest of your life it would be this". I definitely get why this is said. There are so many different stories and ideas being shared that you could spend your entire life with a book like this. I will, most certainly, be returning to this book and these stories in the future. While not my favorite book, I know I can get more out of this from multiple read throughs.

The only thing that really keeps me away from praising this book as the magnum opus that it is, is the same problem I come across with many short stories collections; the consistency isn't always there. There are fantastic stories in this book. Maybe some of the best short stories I've ever read but there are also a lot that fall flat. While nothing is necessarily bad there were too many that were forgettable or repetitive for me to absolutely love this book, at least on this first read through.

Daryl Houston

Some books you can't make yourself put down, and others you can't make yourself pick up. Gass's The Tunnel ruined reading for me for months because I didn't feel like I could read anything else until I finished it, and I couldn't bear to read much of it at a time. Jorge Luis Borges's Collected Fictions I carried around like some sort of a curse for a couple of weeks. These are books that you feel like you ought to read, that you know people admire, that you really do want to get through, that you know are probably good for you, but that just don't do it for you.

I finally finished the Borges today and really don't understand the fascination people have for him. His is a name you hear with awe and respect. I had meant to read him for years and was finally nudged into doing so upon reading several references to him in a John Barth essay collection recently. The Barth also nudged me to read Don Quixote, which I enjoyed a lot, and The Thousand Nights and a Night, which will take a good long time but which I'm digging. So I was optimistic about Borges.

His stories seem to take a few forms:
 
	 History (usually about gauchos or knife fighting or Argentenian politics) retold. 
	 Revenge plots (some overlap with the history here). 
	 Brief philosophical or mystical musings that fall really flat. 
	 Fantasies. 
 
The first three varieties generally don't much interest me. I don't have a head for or a particular interest in history or politics, and though the knife-fighting gauchos make for an occasional fun (if oddly subdued) read, I don't need a dozen of them. The fantasies, and particular those that touch on the infinite and on doubling, are the stories that required less of a stiff upper lip for me to get through. Even those sometimes Borges delivers in a way that winds up feeling sort of deflated. He's a master of telling a story and then adding a punchy closing line that wrecks the whole thing. In the shorter mystical pieces, he has a way of making simple statements about things and then adding a feeble flourish that seems designed to make you think the story is deep, but to me, it comes off pretty badly, as if he's a magician doing the thumb-removal trick we all learned as kids and finishing with a big "ta-da" and a deep bow. His tricks, in other words, don't merit nearly the response he seems to expect. It's pretty annoying.

The later work appealed to me more than the earlier work, as evidenced by the sharply increasing frequency of dog-eared stories toward the end of the book. I dog-eared nothing until nearly halfway through the book, when I was struck by "The Zahir." Others that I liked to some degree or another include the following:
 
	 The Aleph 
	 The Interloper 
	 The Encounter 
	 The Gospel According to Mark 
	 Brodie's Report 
	 The Other 
	 The Book of Sand 
	 Blue Tigers 
 
The penultimate collection, The Book of Sand, is the strongest in the book.

A few references in Barth's book aside, I've studiously avoided reading any criticism or even biographical information about Borges in hopes that I could form my own opinion unsullied. My opinion's obviously not very high. I'll be curious now to read a bit to discover all the ways in which my opinion is ill-informed and unjust; I'm sure there must be much to Borges that I'm missing. He seems to have been an awfully smart man, just not one whose fictions struck me in general as being as great as a whole as I gather they're trumped up to be. I'm glad I read the book, and I'll likely revisit a few of those dog-eared pieces. I'm also glad to be done with the book and eager to move on.

Ficciones

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