Jorge Luis Borges

Summer was drawing to a close, and I realized that the book was monstrous.' These labyrinthine short stories dissolve the boundary between reality and illusion and describe the limits of infinity.

The Garden of Forking Paths

"With slow precision, he read two versions of the same epic chapter. In the first, an army marches into battle over a desolate mountain pass. The bleak and somber aspect of the rocky landscape made the soldiers feel that life itself was of little value, and so they won the battle easily. In the second, the same army passes through a palace where a banquet is in progress. The splendor of the feast remained a memory throughout the glorious battle, and so victory followed."

Bala

Trever

[2.5] I read this technically because I read part one of  Ficciones. I don't know, I get why people are gaga for Borges but I felt like he was trying to pack as much knowledge into these stories as possible that the stories themselves became secondary matter. He's one of those writers, in my opinion, whose influence on other writers outweighs the work of the writer themselves. "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" was enjoyable only upon a second read, and "The Library of Babel" was the only one that grabbed me right away. "An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain" felt like it was trying too hard to be "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote", which didn't get me either. Anyway, sorry all, Borges isn't my guy.

Emily Morgan

Still a big fan of Borges’ whimsical metaphysical tales. There’s always something odd about how time flows and wraps around itself in his pieces, and i love it. 

“Then I reflected that everything happens to a man precisely, precisely now. Centuries of centuries and only in the present do things happen; countless men in the air, on the face of the earth and the sea, and all that really is happening is happening to me...”

The Garden of Forking Paths

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