Borges: Collected Fictions

By the time of his death in 1986, Borges had been granted old master status by almost everybody (except, alas, the gentlemen of the Swedish Academy). Yet his work remained dispersed among a half-dozen different collections, some of them increasingly hard to find. Andrew Hurley has done readers a great service, then, by collecting all the stories in a single, meticulously translated volume. It's a pleasure to be reminded that Borges's style--poetic, dreamlike, and compounded of innumerable small surprises--was already in place by 1935, when he published A Universal History of Iniquity: "The earth we inhabit is an error, an incompetent parody. Mirrors and paternity are abominable because they multiply and affirm it." (Incidentally, the thrifty author later recycled the second of these aphorisms in his classic bit of bookish metaphysics, "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Teris.") The glories of his middle period, of course, have hardly aged a day. "The Garden of the Forking Paths" remains the best deconstruction of the detective story ever written, even in the post-Auster era, and "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" puts the so-called death of the author in pointed, hilarious perspective.

But Hurley's omnibus also brings home exactly how consistent Borges remained in his concerns. As late as 1975, in "Avelino Arredondo," he was still asking (and occasionally even answering) the same riddles about time and its human repository, memory: "For the man in prison, or the blind man, time flows downstream as though down a slight decline. As he reached the midpoint of his reclusion, Arredondo more than once achieved that virtually timeless time. In the first patio there was a wellhead, and at the bottom, a cistern where a toad lived; it never occurred to Arredondo that it was the toad's time, bordering on eternity, that he sought." Throughout, Hurley's translation is crisp and assured (although this reader will always have a soft spot for "Funes, the Memorious" rather than "Funes, His Memory.") And thanks to his efforts, Borgesians will find no better--and no more pleasurable--rebuttal of the author's description of himself as "a shy sort of man who could not bring himself to write short stories." --James Marcus

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All Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

Intelligent fiction - makes you think, 2008-07-26
My first experience with the writing of Borges. I enjoy his ability to bring the reader into the middle of an ongoing experience - that is, to create the sense that the story had been going on long before one starts reading. My only hesitation in this review is that the translation might make his writing less accessible. I need to read the other translator to determine which I like best.


0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

The path you are to take is endless..., 2008-06-21
Trying to full describe the writings of Jorge Luis Borges is like trying to explain exactly why Leonardo da Vinci's art still captivates. The man wrote works of art.

And this classic writer's brilliant, surreally exquisite works are on best display in "Borges: Collected Fictions," whose plain name belies the subtle power and exquisite beauty of Jorges' short stories. His intricate and atmospheric narratives are magical, rich in language, and lets us glimpse the minds of anything and anyone he can conjure up.

Interestingly, the first of these "Fictions" is a series of fictionalized stories about real people -- veiled prophets, Chinese pirates, silver-tongued outlaws, Swedenborg, a Japanese courtier and a legendary American outlaw. Only Borges' vivid writing gives these stories a larger-than-life quality, as if he had spun them out of his imagination.

But the completely fictional stories he created don't take long to appear. Among them are more gritty narratives -- a pair of brothers torn by their mutual love for a woman, a girl coldly calculating her revenge, a labyrinthine story of espionage during World War II, and a woman whose obsession with her dead, dashing husband leads her down into madness.

But these are far outweighed by Borges' magical realism, which soaks the book from start to finish -- encounters with past and future selves, brilliant books and authors that never existed, the mystical Aleph and Zahir which show everything and nothing, a hunt for blue tigers that leads to strangely fascinating stones, an alchemist's rose, a poet telling a king of pure beauty and wonder, and receiving the hazy memories of Shakespeare.

And then some of his stories cross the border into pure wonder and fantasy. Borges explores the concept of the Eternal Library that catalogues reality, masks, Minotaurs, a man who tries to dream a new being into existence, a search for a city of ancient immortals, and the exploration of ancient heresies, cities, endless books and cults that never existed at all, except in the confines of Borges' mind.

If this collection has any flaw at all, it's that Borges isn't at his best when he tells gritty realistic stories, about knifings, mobs and barroom murders. While these stories are powerful, they feel vaguely restrained, as if he's holding back his writing skill from its fullest.

The rest of the time, Borges' writing is exquisitely detailed and atmospheric, and densely packed with philosophical pockets. And these stories are magical realism in the purest sense, with a slight, almost mystical twist to the everyday events that we take for granted. Being mistaken for someone else, being sold a book, and visiting a relative all take on deep significance.

And Borges wraps these stories in lush, digified prose that takes a little while to wade through, but the richness of the words he uses is worth it ("A landscape dazzlingly underlain with gold and silver, a windblown, dizzying landscape of monumental mesas and delicate colouration..."). He's even able to alter his style drastically -- one story has the flavor of an Irish legend, while another is a Lovecraftian sci-fi horror story about aliens in a farmhouse. And his writing takes on many different people's selves -- he even makes readers squirm by taking us into the mind of a loyal Nazi.

It's almost like another world, Borgeworld, which is almost like ours, but where magical items are hidden in the cellars, houses are built by angels, the Minotaur plays in his maze, and God dreams of mortal lives. The most entrancing foray into Borgeworld is "The Immortal," about a Roman soldier who goes searching for a city of immortals, and finds an ancient poet who seems very familiar.

"Borges: Collected Fictions" is a very dull name for the collected works of a literary genius, full of shadows, mirrors, masks and the expanses of the human mind. Definitely a must-have.


3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

The Greatest Collection , 2008-04-07
When you read Kafka and you hear the term "Kafkaesque" you understand a little more about the world we live in. From the bureaucratic nonsense of your neighborhood government office to the futility of using reason/logic when dealing with the criminally stubborn and arrogant, the twentieth century Prague author understood what the next hundred years would be like.

Borges is Borges... in some sense he is the literary figure behind magic realism (along with German literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth century). I've heard the term "Borgesian" once or twice but it's not quite as famous. Nonetheless, the two authors have a lot to offer. I prefer Borges. There is something mystical to him, a sage-like presence in his writings. His genius isn't complicated, it is very honest - he writes stories that feel like essays, narratives that are poignant and celestial, and prose poems that breathe heavy with philosophy and feeling. Reading this collection you'll encounter: the entire universe in one's basement, a youth retrieving a souvenir of another life, a man trying to understand the "play of goodbyes"... as well as bandits, ruffians, librarians, Don Quixote, Shakespeare and other vast, quiet dreams, from the double to the figure of the alchemical Golem.

It is a great treat to have all the stories together in one volume (in my hometown I had to do an interlibrary loan through the central library to track down his prose poems - the university at the time didn't have a copy either). I believe if you read Borges, you'll not only appreciate his genius, the direction Latin American literature has taken but also the literature of the past. Since my first introduction to his works I have gained a new love of English literature, philosophy and the religions of the far east.

Borges is essential and that too me is "Borgesian".


1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

Amazing deal, 2008-01-07
Bought this book for myself a while ago at a cheap used bookstore for $50 and loved it so much that I decided to get it for someone as a gift. I couldn't believe Amazon sold it for less than $15. Amazing deal on a great book - easily the cornerstone of a personal library.


5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

A book you and your doppelganger will both enjoy, 2008-01-05
There are works of fiction that change the way you look at life, and then there is the work of Jorge Luis Borges, which just might alter the way you look at everything, including yourself. The best way to explain Jorge Luis Borges is to compare him to painters - if you combined Picasso, Dali and Escher's imaginations into a writer, you would have Borges. His visions of doppelgangers, puzzles, labyrinths, infinite libraries and Argentine Gauchos are on a level of reality different from any other storyteller in history. My personal favorites here are Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, The Aleph, and The Gospel According to Mark, among many others. Recommended for anyone interested in short stories or Latin American writers.

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