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Borges: A Life

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Jorge Luis Borges famously wrote that all literature is autobiographical, something so true in his own case that I had my doubts whether his any biography of him could tell us any more than his literature. After all, there isn't much compelling about Mr. Borges' life aside from his writing: he lived at home with his mother until she died when he was 75 years old, and he boasted about not venturing beyond his bedroom and his father's library for days at a time. Without a doubt, Mr. Borges' extremely original work is far more interesting than his seemingly unimaginative life.

All that made for a challenging assignment for biographer Edwin Williamson, who pulled it off surprisingly well. Mr. Williamson certainly did his leg work: he apparently read everything Mr. Borges wrote short of his laundry lists, and he talked to scores of people who knew Mr. Borges when he was alive.

But the most interesting parts of this book's 384 pages was still the examination of the literature, where Mr. Williamson convincingly reveals how much of the great writer's work was an elaborate code hiding his personal suffering coming from failed loves, and a feeling of inadequacy in regard to his mother, who all but worshipped the heroes of the Argentine independence movement in her family line.

But that is about as close as Mr. Williamson comes to uncovering Mr. Borges' inner self. He could have come a bit closer had he not left out several important facts that must have been easy to come by: Mr. Borges' finally found love with former student María Kodama, who was many years younger than the writer. But Mr. Williamson doesn't tell us how much younger. Additionally, Mr. Borges' well-known and important (but puzzling) estrangement from his boyhood friend Adolfo Bioy Casares gets only a passing mention. And Mr. Borges' political naïveté and confusion -- he called Argentina's dictatorship of the mid-1970s to the early 1980s a "necessary evil" and he turned his back on his native land by choosing to die in Switzerland -- is chronicled but not explained.

It's difficult to judge how much of this is Mr. Williamson's fault. As one of the 20th century's most important and influential writers, Mr. Borges is clearly a worthy subject for a major biography. But the man's private life perhaps means that a worthy biography is impossible. Despite Mr. Williamson's noble effort, the best biography of the enigmatic Argentine may still be his collected works.

This is a fine biography of the great Argentine writer, Jorge Luis Borges. Williamson's primary goals are to provide a good description of Borges' life and to correlate events of his life with his written works. This good book is the product of both careful research on Borges' life and a sensitive reading of Borges' publications. This book is best appreciated by those with a good familiarity with Borges' fictions and poetry. Penguin has recently published excellent collections of Borges' fictions, poetry, and non-fiction writing. If you haven't read Borges for a while, reading Williamson's biography in tandem with parts of the Penguin collections is a good experience.
Williamson does a particularly good job of pointing out the parallels between Borges' personal preoccupations, particularly his search for love, and changes in directions in his work. Borges was a sickly, bookish child who became one of those people who view the world through a highly intellectualized prism. For example, one of his enduring preoccupations was a search for love that would accomplish what Borges thought the love of Beatrice had done for Dante. Borges also had a complex relationship with his parents which also had significant intellectual dimensions and was entangled with his sense of identity as an Argentine. Like many very creative people, Borges was an odd and often unhappy individual who was able to turn some of his personal conflicts and agony into substantial work. Many of the apparently metaphysical themes of his fictions were personal issues for Borges. Williamson does an excellent job of illuminating Borges' work.
Williamson is also very good on Borges' somewhat convoluted relationship to his home country. As mentioned about, this was bound up with his complex relations with his parents. Borges was often, however, an engaged intellectual. In the 30s, 40s, and 50s, he was an outspoken opponent of the right and of Peron. Some of his stands demonstrated real courage because he spoke out when Peron was at the height of his power. Late in life, unfortunately, his hatred of Peronism led to him to give support to the detestable military dictatorship responsible for the Dirty War. He came to regret this stance and did exhibit some moral leadership in human rights campaigns against the dictators.
This will be the standard biography, at least in English, for some time.

Edwin Williamson turns Borges' own oft employed techniques of psychoanalysis and detective work on his subject in an effort to link events in Borges' life with Borges' literary creation. He seizes on several themes, honor, rebellion, alienation, love, nationalism, and responsibility to forge these links.

The results are decidedly mixed for Mr. Williamson sometimes seems to omit detail for conjecture without justifying his viewpoint. The author may make too much of some of the linked themes here, for sometimes he seems to be straining to force circumstances in Borges' life to correspond to a story or poem. That is not to deny the clearly articulated autobiographical nature of Mr. Borges' writing. But Borges favored the aforementioned themes and a well-known and oft-used set of symbols---tigers, mirrors, daggers, books, and so on---throughout his career and did not necessarily employ a specific theme because of a particular event.

Borges' political philosophies and missteps are crucial elements as are his early artistic leanings toward the avant garde. His boldness in those areas contrasts harshly with his sometimes weak personality, most notably demonstrated by his nearly lifelong deference to his mother (who lived to be 99) and his repeated failing at establishing and maintaining a meaningful, normal long-term romantic relationship until he was elderly.

Whether one quibbles with Mr. Williamson's presentation, one has to admire the attention to detail and the effort he has poured into "Borges: A Life." Mr. Williamson has consulted with an array of sources, reviewed myriad documents, and perhaps more crucially, interviewed many who knew Borges, especially Maria Kodoma, his companion and eventually his wife. Yet while he often seems to leave no stone unturned, he otherwise glosses over other significant events such as Borges' estrangement from his remaining family after his mother died or his separation from literary compatriots and collaborators.

As a previous reviewer here noted---and I agree---there is some degree of repetition employed in this biography, perhaps a tad too much. At times the book drags a bit and in other spots it does compel one to stay up a bit too late. All in all, this biography meets its stated goal of examining Borges' literary output in context of his life. But the result of applying this lens is that Borges the person does not fully come into view and the characterizations may make him appear more ineffectual and enigmatic that he actually was.

I support the notion that this work will remain an important but imperfect distillation of Borges' life but suspect that some scholarly missive will one day supplant "Borges: A Life" as the definitive biography of Borges.

Borges famously wrote that all he'd been was a weaver of dreams. Williamson's life of Borges shows him to have dreamt copiously through his long existence. He was a wreckless public speaker who loved to drop bombs in interviews and was unafraid to court controversy. He started his literary life as an ensign of the avant-garde and a bolshevik sympathiser. He morphed into a cultural nationalist, an admirer of the cut-throats of the barriadas, the knife-men of the Pampas and of old-fashioned milongas and tangos (he even wrote a few). He was remarkably clear-sighted about the awfulness of Argentinian fascism, headed by the indestructible General Peron and was a philo-semite. He later endorsed several dictatorships both in Argentina and abroad because he regarded them as the lesser evil (and he might have been right, although it probably cost him his Nobel prize). But he opposed the torture and vanishings of the Dirty War and he decried the manipulation of popular sentiment that General Galtieri achieved when he chose to invade the Malvinas (Falklands). He ended his life as mystical agnostic and chose to die in his second fatherland, Geneva.

Having read several Borges biographies I was surprised at the considerable links between his life (especially his sentimental life) and his work. Williamson teases the meaning of many obscure lines in Borges's work, by showing how they emanated from specific experiences, usually negative. This approach, while frequently enlightening, occasionally has its limitations. This biographer attempted to show that virtually everything Borges ever wrote , said or thought (at least until he met Maria Kodama, in the early 1970s) was a consequence of a battle in his head, between his mother ("the sword of honor") and his father ("the dagger of the compadrito"). While this framework can be enlightening, Williamson is so exhaustingly repetitive at flogging this horse, that the reader ends up feeling rather like someone who is accosted in a bar by a tiresome drunk who just goes on and on about some pet peeve. An insight is not a worldview, Mr. Williamson! Also, some of the chapters repeat themselves almost word for word, as if though the author had forgotten what he wrote before. The reader, alas, like Funes the Memorious, cannot forget and is therefore tempted to gloss over these bits. I was also surprised not to see any reference to Naipaul's essay "The Return of Eva Peron". Naipaul met Borges, interviewed him and also reviewed his work in a very lucid fashion. Surely the thoughts of one of the greatest living writers about one of his predecessors would have been of some interest?

The conclusion is that Borges definitive life in English (such as Boyd's life of Nabokov) remains to be written. While that happens, this is a better place to start than most. I give the book four stars because it has rekindled my old love for the Master's work. I think I'll dip into it in the next few weeks.

It could be said that Jorge Luis Borges, one of the most important writers of the 20th Century, was also one of its most interesting individuals, a person who led an uneventful and yet strangely fascinating life. Anyone who has read his works has probably been charmed by this man who so kindly invites the reader into his own world of sparkling erudition and ceaseless invention. Little is there to wonder, then, that so many books have been written about him. Borges: A Life, manages to be both the most detailed and problematic of such books.

JLB was characteristically insightful and concise when he wrote in his own biography of Evaristo Carriego: "That someone may want to awaken in someone else memories that only belonged to a third person, is an obvious paradox. To carry out that paradox with nonchalance, is the naïve purpose of every biography." Edwin Williamson, apparently unsatisfied with the difficulty posed by that paradox, has raised the challenge. With this book he has set out to show the world the secret impulses behind Borges's works, to explain how even the slightest event in his life dictated everything he wrote down to the last comma, to discover things Borges would never have guessed. As one would expect, Williamson prefers psychology to logic, and non-sequiturs to arguments.

First of all, there is Williamson's habit of inferring something that in little probability happened and for what there is little or no evidence, and then taking that assumption as a hard fact throughout book. For example, since Borges used daggers as a recurrent symbol, and since in his short-story "The Maker" the main character's father gives his son a dagger to stand up to someone who disrespected him, Williamson is convinced Borges's father actually gave his son a dagger when he was a small child, too. (Apparently, it is perfectly rational to suppose an educated man would give his doted son - who happens to be short-sighted, sickly, and bookish - a dagger to "have it out" with school bullies.) This "episode" is then used as one of the keys to crack Borges's work.

Another of Williamson's earth-shaking discoveries is that Borges tried to write a novel in his thirties. Twice. He proves this with an irrefutable syllogism:

1- Borges said that he had been planning "The Congress", a long short-story published in 1971, for some 30 or 40 years.
2- In 1932, he had published his first review of an apocryphal book, "An Approach to Al-Mu'tasim", a text which, like "The Congress", dealt with pantheism.
3- Therefore, that review was originally a novel Borges struggled to write.

No other explanation is given: Q.E.D. The very important fact that "Al-Mu'tasim" was the first of the many faux reviews that would become a Borges trademark, that he himself described it as "both a deceit and a pseudo-essay", that he declared several times he was not a fan of novels, that in his own autobiography he doesn't mention ever trying to write one, and that pantheism is a recurrent theme in his works, are all some of the many things to which Williamson chooses to turn a blind eye. Furthermore, since in "Al-Mu'tasim" two editions of the book are described, he infers that, after failing once, Borges tried to write his "novel" a second time, also to no avail. To top it all off, he claims this failed novel was supposed to be a "masterpiece that would justify his whole career as a writer". He then uses this useful information to interpret the author's later works. This sort of topsy-turvy reasoning pervades the whole book. The least evidence there is for assuming something actually happened, the more importance and attention is given to it. Borges's life, it seems, revolved around the implausible.

Although Williamson does occasionally offer enlightening comments on some texts, he mostly sticks to ludicrous literary interpretations (who would have thought "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", of all stories, "evinces Borges's fears of ending up as a reflection of his father"?) and even indulges in weird, far-fetched orthographic cabbalism, like devoting half a page to prove how the name Emma Zunz, a name JLB once said he chose because it was "so insignificant, so meaningless", actually "functions as ideogram of the kind of solipsistic labyrinth in which Borges imagined himself to be trapped..."

Besides the gaps of logic, there are important gaps in a few other areas: Borges's estrangement from life-long friend Bioy Casares is just faintly alluded to, and nothing is said about Maria Kodama's alleged part in it. In fact, one would hardly guess from reading this book what a controversial figure Kodama - who has spent most of the last two decades suing liberally and fending off accusations - actually is, since Williamson gives such a romanticized portrait of her.

All that being said, however, it must be admitted that, when it sticks to the facts, this can truly be a very illuminating piece of work. Williamson has spent nearly ten years of his life reading and re-reading piles of documents and interviewing dozens of people to gather as much information as possible -and it shows. The amount of detail provided here surpasses any previous book on the subject. Therefore, if we judge biographies solely by the amount of research behind them or by the audacity of their assertions, Borges: A Life will seem truly impressive. The problem is that, in my opinion, a biography is supposed to be more than scholarly work or a provoking string of theories; it is supposed to be the picture of a man. And Williamson, whose garrulous prose frequently descends to cheap drama, illogical hypothesis and contorted psychology interpretations, is the exact opposite of the lucid, succinct, elegant and witty Borges -who, it should be noted, never had more than contempt for psychological literature in general. I don't think the irony would have escaped him. Indeed, sometimes Williamson comes off as the sort of writer Borges would have created to poke fun at everything he thought ridiculous in modern biographies; an apocryphal author weaving delusions about a weaver of dreams.

I would recommend those who are interested on the life of the great Argentinean author to check out his own "Autobiographical Essay", Yates's biography, or, if able to read in Spanish, Vaccaro's recent Vida y Literatura and Bioy Casares's priceless "Borges". Considering the amount of books, essays and bios on JLB published every year, and the number of documents still unavailable to the public, I suppose a "definite" biography is still a long way off. But there is obviously nothing preventing us from rebuilding on our own, little by little and reading upon reading, that perplexing labyrinth that was the life of this great man.

This is an impressive piece of detective work, but fundamentally flawed in that Williamson does not know where to draw the line between biography and literary criticism. No doubt it is true that Borges's work was more autobiographical than that of many other 20th century giants, but it is psychologically reductionist to assume that his life can be boiled down to a few metaphors involving swords, daggers, tigers and Dante. Strip out these allusions and the book would be half as long, which might not be a bad thing.
Nonetheless I worked through the redundant tedium and learned a lot about an extraordinary individual.

I have read all of Borges' ficciones multiple times in translation and I consider him one of the most important writers of the last century. That's easy: there is a case to be made that he is, or will eventally be seen as, the most important writer - his familiarity with ancient texts, islamic matters and philosophical puzzles makes his stories seem far more contemporary, as we move further into the 21st century, than the works of authors to whom postwar scholars usually award that level of accolade.

I found this book to provide useful critical insights that greatly enhanced my understanding of Borges' work. That said, it was awfully ironic that an author whose works rarely exceeded 10 pages in length and who frequently made fun of pedantic academic men and their works is memorialized by a biography of this length and detail. It seemed as if the governing principle of the book was to incorporate every scrap of paper the author had found concerning Borges's life, and he was not to be deterred. I would have thought the first 150 pages or so, covering a period during which none of his stories were written, could have been condensed to about 50, and that is being generous; Borges himself might have done it in 5 to 10. Is there not a biography to be written of Borges that narrates events with the same economy as his own stories reflect? He loved, the woman was important to him, the love was reciprocated for a time, but ultimately the woman did not maintain the relationship - ok, that is good to know, and certainly the hunt for the impact of the relationship in the stories is justifiably at the heart of the biography, but must we be presented with entire chapters devoted to each year of the relationship? The detail adds little to an understanding of the stories; it is neither novel nor particularly entertaining; and, as noted, such level of detail is fundamentally at odds with the aesthetics of the subject of the biography. If there is ever another edition, a severe edit would be of great assistance to future readers.

I started reading Borges a little over three years ago and I'll be reading him the rest of my life, but up until now I knew only the broadest outline of his life. I knew he was from Buenos Aires. I knew he went blind late in life and I knew that around the time he went blind he became director of the national library in Buenos Aires. In short - I knew the wikepedia biography. It was time to learn more about Borges so when I saw this in my local library I picked it up. It's a well written and researched biography with lots of exploration into the psychology and motivations for Borges's writing. By necessity some of this is speculation and must be accepted as such, but Williamson presents his material well. Argentine history, culture, politics and personal relationships play a big part in Borges's writing and Williamson does an admirable and detailed job of giving us the appropriate context for the subject at hand, making this a dense, filled with detail, but rewarding work. So much so that I purchased a copy for reference purposes. I would have liked to have seen more about the writing for TV that Borges and Bioy Casares collaborated on, but I guess I'll have to wait for another work for that - perhaps Bioy's book on Borges that is yet to be translated to English.

Jorge Luis Borges is not one of my favorite writers. I admire his poetry and there are some stories have stayed in mind over the years since first reading them. But I believe him an important writer and a most fascinating man.

Edwin Williamson has done a stunning job in piecing together the details of his life and unraveling much of the enigma which surrounds him yet today, though he does tend to stray into Freudian analysis a little too much, often with astonishingly unconvincing results.

There's no denying Borges life had to have been influenced by the difficulty of living up to the expectations of a father who had himself failed at writing and the demands of a mother who sought to control every aspect of his life. The father died early after succumbing to the hereditary blindness he passed on to his son. Borges then lived with his mother until her death at the age of 99, a life in which she decided whom he should and should not marry and even dictated to the extent of whether he should be served wine with a meal.

Bullied in the schoolyard as a child, he didn't even complete high school and never had a paying job until the age of 38.

Yet he promoted the avant-garde, founded literary magazines, was among the first to translate Joyce and Kafka into Spanish and might be considered the father of the magic realism school of writing. He failed consistently at love until finally finding satisfaction with a woman decades younger than himself in the waning days of his life.

He was sometimes more brave than he believed himself to be, speaking out against the fascism of Peron even when others were being imprisoned for less cause. Yet he could be equally a coward, refusing to speak up for friends, declining to tell his wife he was leaving her and even at one point supporting other military dictators. He was a paradox, and I suppose that's part of what makes him so fascinating.

From his early days as an Ultraista to the latter years when he served at the helm of Argentina's most prestigious library, Borges, as defined by Williamson, was himself a work in progress, his life that of a book under constant revision, even though the cover remained the same.

Williamson's take on "Georgie" is sincere, playing to the sympathies of the reader. In his attempt to flesh out Borges the man versus Borges the writer, Williamson may have proven once and for all that Borges' life was the real work of fiction.