Brodie's Report (Penguin Classics) [Mass Market Paperback]

Jorge Luis Borges (Author), Andrew Hurley (Editor, Translator, Introduction)

Book Description

Series: Penguin Classics | Publication Date: July 26, 2005

At the age of seventy, after a gap of twenty years, Jorge Luis Borges returned to writing short stories. In Brodie’s Report, he returned also to the style of his earlier years with its brutal realism, nightmares, and bloodshed. Many of these stories, including “Unworthy” and “The Other Duel,” are set in the macho Argentinean underworld, and even the rivalries between artists are suffused with suppressed violence. Throughout, opposing themes of fate and free will, loyalty and betrayal, time and memory flicker in the recesses of these compelling stories, among the best Borges ever wrote.

Editorial Reviews

Review

[Borges] renovated the language of fiction and thus opened the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish-American novelists. (J.M. Coetzee, The New York Review of Books) Hurley’s efforts at retranslating Borges are not anything but heroic. His versions are clear, elegant, crystalline. (The Times Literary Supplement)

About the Author

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), born in Buenos Aires and educated in Europe, was one of the most widely acclaimed writers of his time. He published many collections of poems, essays, and short stories, and in 1961 shared the International Publishers’ Prize with Samuel Beckett.
Andrew Hurley is a professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan. His many translations include the work of Reinaldo Arenas and Arturo Pérez-Reverte.

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Mass Market Paperback: 144 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Classics (July 26, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0143039253
• ISBN-13: 978-0143039259
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 6.5 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,081,791 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Simple Stories in Old Age, June 7, 2011

By 

Shalom Freedman "Shalom Freedman" (Jerusalem,Israel) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Brodie's Report (Penguin Classics) (Mass Market Paperback)

Borges wrote these stories after seventeen years in which he had written no stories. They are described by him as 'simple' though he immediately qualifies this by saying 'complexity' is the heart of reality as each text relates to the world as a whole. He speaks too of these stories as stories without surprise stories which lead to a gradual realization of expectation planted earlier in the work.
The stories are it is true without the complexity, the metaphysical and philosophical element, the scholarly element which plays such a large part in Borges 'Ficciones'. They are not the Borges of the most incredible Imagination but the Borges of the mystery novel and popular fiction.
And in fact a large number of the stories have to do with a kind of 'murder' or at least violent death at the end. They are stories in which masculine honor plays a major part. And in fact I believe many readers would in today's world find them defective in their over- macho traditional Spanish and Argentinean cultural emphasis.
None of the stories is great but all are highly readable and told with Borges great narrative skill.
If these were the only stories he had ever written he would not be known outside his native Argentina. But they are Borges and for the Preface and Afterward alone well worth reading.