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Everything & Nothing

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The introduction to this celebratory volume "shocked" me - Borges was first published in English in 1962. Within five years, a farm kid like myself was familiar with him. Obviously, he work immediately was recognized as exceptional, out of the ordinary ... This slim volume provides an enjoyable reminder of his other works or a great introduction to the themes and style of Borges.

The volume begins with a handful of stories - the rewriting of Don Quixote, the imagined world, life as chance, spies and detectives. All of which explore language, imagination, reality, labyrinth ... In all, Borges displays a broad education, mingling literature, psychology, philosophy, philology, the occult in a manner both entertaining and provocative.

The stories are followed by essays - a meditation on the Great Wall of China and the destruction of history, a consideration of precursors to Kafka with provocative ideas of how Kafka affects our reading of his precursors, Shakespeare and self-identity, Borges and self-identity. In reading these, one is reminded how thin the line between essay and fiction is in the work of Borges.

Finally, the book closes with transcriptions of two speeches - one on dreams and nightmares, the other on blindness and the poet.

This wonderful selection provides a representative and varied introduction to Borges that is not to be missed. The translations are excellent, the writing superb.

This beautiful little book contains just a few of Borges' best works from his 1944 work Ficciones (also widely available in the 1964 collection of English translations entitled Labyrinths).

It also includes important later works of Borges, Nightmares and Blindness (transcriptions of two lectures from 1977).

His own worst nightmare involves discovering the King of Norway, with his sword and his dog, sitting at the foot of Borges' bed. "Retold, my dream is nothing; dreamt, it was terrible." Such is the power of describing, of reading this father of modern literature.

In Blindness, he examines his own loss of sight in the context of examining poetry itself. In a story right out of, well, Borges, he discusses his appointment as Director of a library at the very time he has lost his reading sight. (Two other Directors are also blind.)

"No one should read self-pity or reproach
into this statement of the majesty
of God; who with such splendid irony
granted me books and blindness at one touch."

This lecture is a moving (and brief, just 15 pages) ode to poetry . If one wants ironic context, just consider that these lectures on Nightmares and Blindness were delivered in Buenos Aires at the height of the State of Siege of the Argentine Generals.

...

The indefinability of the self and the multiplicity of personal identity are the main lines of thought connecting these 11 pieces of excellent literature, among the finest of Borges's. An author of short fiction stories, essayist and poet -though perhaps too much of a thinker for poetry-, Borges is, without hesitation, one of the greatest writers of all time. This careful, well-thought selection gives a brilliant account of one of Borges's conspicuous, recurrent themes: the difficulty of defining self-identity, since a man's distinctive features, whether mental, physical or even metaphysical, are not unique to him. As in some of the most noted masterpieces of literature, the philosophical substrate provides the background for fascinating and intriguing stories, frequently trespassing the fantastic or the bizarre. So, we witness the struggle of an early 20th Century French novelist to write The Quixote -not a contemporary version of Cervantes's renowned work, but the original -- and succeeding! We have the occasion to come to terms with the strange world of Tlön and its uncanny understanding of reality, as shown by its diverse, odd languages. The Lottery of Babylon gives every man the opportunity to become rich, powerful and exultant...or appallingly miserable and abject -by chance? The Garden of Forking Paths is a legacy of innumerable futures -which, however, does not include all of them. Death and the Compass displays the confrontation of a detective with his murderer, whom he is chasing, in a labyrinth of clues spread throughout space and time. The brief historical and literary essays concerning the elusive and somewhat contradictory character of the Emperor of China, builder of the Great Wall and destructor of books, and the precursors of Kafka, paving the way for something they ignore and being later re-created, explore the indefinability of man's essence, in much the same way as the previous fiction stories, since one never knows quite what are the limits between fiction and fact, both inside and out of Borges's work. Borges and I and Everything and Nothing -the latter is the original title by the author in English, though the work was written, as the rest of the compilation, in Spanish- express succinctly the core argument of the book, raising an uneasy metaphysical question: Whereas man may not know exactly who he is, does God know? Finally, two conferences given by Borges close the volume, turning to episodes from Borges's own life, in order to resume somehow the book's contents by invoking the fantastic worlds of dreams -rather, of nightmares- and of blindness, that suggest a vaster and more weird reality with perhaps blurrier limits than we can possibly understand. However, there is space for man if we are able to accept what we cannot understand, as a starting point for creating our own-made life.

It seems alternately true and false that Jorge Luis Borges lives inside each of his writings in a completely symbiotic or photosynthetic way, feeding off his own product until the man and his work are indistinguishable; the man never seemed to be able to detach himself from his story and simply write, and yet at times his expected voicing disappears and one might believe another author has usurped Borges' pen to complete another metaphysic tale. Borges wore many masks, and that fact is acknowledged by the man himself here, in the tiny, fascinating "Borges and I," in which Stevenson is both invoked and mentioned, crafting a Jekyll-and-Hydean bit of self-awareness with the unmistakable tango twist of Borges' playful Argentinian idiom. Everything and Nothing is a sampler of Borges' finest work from his fiction and nonfiction batteries, which are almost indistinguishable. They overflow with Borges' fascination with logic, labyrinths, language, and the relation between the three (for a fine nonfiction work in this vein, read Poundstone's Labyrinth of Reason) and how they figure in philosophy and metaphysics. For a more whole view of Borges, try the new large collections of his work, but for a tiny glance at the genius of this literary superstar, Everything and Nothing is perfect.

At long last we have a good-looking paper volume of Borges published in a pleasant font. The beautifully designed cover makes the book appealing. We are fortunate to have this evidence of Borges' brilliant mind . Start with the essay on blindness.

This work contains a number of Borges' most- well known 'ficciones'. 'Pierre Menard Author of the Quixote' starts off with a catalogue of the surviving known writings of this 'fictive' author. It then describes his great project the rewriting or writing anew of 'Don Quixote' and his completion of chapters nine, and thirty- eight, and partial completion of chapter twenty- two. It goes on to explore the meaning and implication of a writing which word- by- word is identical with the original and yet reads differently.
The other stories are also among Borges' most well- known. 'Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius' 'The Lottery in Babylon' 'The Garden of Forking Paths' 'Death and the Compass'.
Among the non- fiction works are 'Kafka and his Precursors' the now legendary 'Borges and I' ' Everything and Nothing' ' Nightmares' and 'Blindness'.
Borges games with Identity and Time are played here in the most masterful way. His depiction of the elusiveness and non- apprehendable reality of the private self is complemented by his celebration of the communal cooperative creation which is Literary Tradition.
This does not mean the work is not moving on a private confessional level. For however metaphysical it may seem Borges and I tells us much about the man himself, coffee- drinker, map- reader and student of Stevenson and Kipling. The concluding essay is of course a most moving one, as it is impossible not to be touched by the voice of 'sightlost creators who heroically persist in creating literature for the world- Homer, Milton and Borges who God 'provides day- labor for, light denied.'
The mystery and joy of great Literature is in these pages.
Read and delight.