Reviews
A great book full of short stories, parables, and essays - all from the highly creative, immense, and provocative thoughts of Jorge Luis Borges. Admittedly some of the stores can get dry, but short stories are allows to be 'hit and miss' considering the number of them in this book. The stories are full of philosophical and societal challenges, through Borges' relentless endeavour to journey through some of the thickest forests of the human psyche.
having read some of borges's short stories before, it was a revelatory experience to read them in the context of the remainder of his work.
it is abundantly clear how erudite and intelligent borges was; it is an intrinsic quality of his writing. thus, the collection covers literary and philosophical criticism and - as le guin would call it - thought experiments. the short stories and essays oven speak to each other which further emphasises the importance of looking at his body of work as a whole, even when the individual fragments can be outstanding on their own.
there is a unique and undeniable pleasure of devouring a book like this one, a book that opens your mind to many ideas, as well as many forms of the craft of writing. on that last point, borges manages to perfect and elevate the short story as a literary form. nowadays somewhat overlooked in contemporary literature, collections like 'labyrinths' make the case for the short story as a storytelling tool and a tool of experimentation.
it is no wonder that susanna clarke read 'the house of asterion' and 20 years later wrote 'piranesi'. she had not revisited the story before publishing the book, by the way - only after, when she was surprised to find out the similarities in tone and language. the impact of borges's work is simply that strong.
it is full of ideas that are worth exploring and that are worth inspiring further generations of writers.
as a personal note, other than 'the house of asterion' which remains sublime, i also enjoyed the following: 'the garden of forking paths', 'the lottery of babylon', 'the circular ruins', 'funes the memorious', 'the shape of the sword', 'themes of the traitor and the hero', 'death and the compass', 'the secret miracle', 'the immortal', 'story of the warrior and the captive', 'emma zunz', 'the zahir'.
An imperfect way of describing Borges' fictions and non-fictions might be the metaphor of a college tutorial class. One comes in and for an hour discusses an idea/case/situation and that short time is all we have to entertain a specific possibility. Neither his essays nor his short stories extend beyond ten pages (and even ten might be a tad generous an estimation), but they are concentrated and thought-provoking. Borges reads like a succinct version of Umberto Eco, ruminating and spinning off ideas found in theology (especially sub-varieties of Christian theology), western and chinese philosophy, and mathematics. His worlds are fantastic and yet keenly real, such that the sudden intrusion of the name of another Latin American writer, or 'I, Borges' shocks the reader into our own world at the exact moment where we may be miles or parallel universes away. Borges seems to deal in two effects. (1) Our world, but stranger, where a postulation applied alters its operations in a specific way, so objects can duplicate, a mythical place may be found, etc. and (2) An world made of a thought experiment - the whole universe as an infinite library and its inhabitants are librarians searching for books or keeping watch over the section they are in-charge of. His stories reveal the depth of his intellect, the breadth of his knowledge, and the bizarre dislocated sense of his work. He is not localised in Argentina, he is nowhere, he is universal, picking pieces out from the marginalia of world history and indeed the whole history of the written word. Andre Maurois sums up the effect very well: 'their wonderful intelligence, their wealth of inventions, and their tight, almost mathematical style. ... He creates, outside time and space, imaginary and symbolic worlds.'
