Ficciones (Everyman's Library Classics & Contemporary Classics) [Hardcover]

Jorge Luis Borges (Author)

Book Description

Series: Everyman's Library Classics & Contemporary Classics | Publication Date: May 25, 1993

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)Jorge Luis Borges was one of those very rare creators who changed the face of an art form—in his case, the short story. His work has been paid the ultimate honor of being appropriated and imitated by innumerable writers on every continent of the world.The seventeen brief masterpieces of FICCIONES explode the boundaries of genre, offering up labyrinthine libraries, a fictional encyclopedia entry that spawns an entire world, a review of a nonexistent writer’s attempt to re-create Don Quixote word for word, a man with the disabling inability to forget anything he has ever experienced, and other metaphysical puzzles. But the true measure of Borges’s greatness lies in the fact that his fictions—elaborately paradoxical, postmodern, and intellectually delicious as they are—managed to return the short story to the realm of the fabulous and the uncanny from which, as parable and fairy tale, it originally came.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Reading Jorge Luis Borges is an experience akin to having the top of one's head removed for repairs. First comes the unfamiliar breeze tickling your cerebral cortex; then disorientation, even mild discomfort; and finally, the sense that the world has been irrevocably altered--and in this case, rendered infinitely more complex. First published in 1945, his Ficciones compressed several centuries' worth of philosophy and poetry into 17 tiny, unclassifiable pieces of prose. He offered up diabolical tigers, imaginary encyclopedias, ontological detective stories, and scholarly commentaries on nonexistent books, and in the process exploded all previous notions of genre. Would any of David Foster Wallace's famous footnotes be possible without Borges? Or, for that matter, the syntactical games of Perec, the metafictional pastiche of Calvino? For good or for ill, the blind Argentinian paved the way for a generation's worth of postmodern monkey business--and fiction will never be simply "fiction" again.

Its enormous influence on writers aside, Ficciones has also--perhaps more importantly--changed the way that we read. Borges's Pierre Menard, for instance, undertakes the most audacious project imaginable: to create not a contemporary version of Cervantes's most famous work but the Quixote itself, word for word. This second text is "verbally identical" to the original, yet, because of its new associations, "infinitely richer"; every time we read, he suggests, we are in effect creating an entirely new text, simply by viewing it through the distorting lens of history. "A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships," Borges once wrote in an essay about George Bernard Shaw. "All men who repeat one line of Shakespeare are William Shakespeare," he tells us in "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius." In this spirit, Borges is not above impersonating, even quoting, himself.

It is hard, exactly, to say what all of this means, at least in any of the usual ways. Borges wrote not with an ideological agenda, but with a kind of radical philosophical playfulness. Labyrinths, libraries, lotteries, doubles, dreams, mirrors, heresiarchs: these are the tokens with which he plays his ontological games. In the end, ideas themselves are less important to him than their aesthetic and imaginative possibilities. Like the idealist philosophers of Tlön, Borges does not "seek for the truth or even for verisimilitude, but rather for the astounding"; for him as for them, "metaphysics is a branch of fantastic literature." --Mary Park --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Review

“[Borges is] a central fact of Western culture.”—WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD“Borges is the most important Spanish-language writer since Cervantes.”—Mario Vargas Llosa“Without Borges, the modern Latin American novel simply would not exist.”—Carlos Fuentes“[Borges] engages the heart as well as the intelligence.”—John Barth“The economy of his prose, the tact of his imagery, the courage of his thought are there to be admired and emulated.”—John Updike“These brief Ficciones . . . throb with uncanny and haunting power. A strange and formidable writer, Sr. Borges is also a magisterial stylist.”—ATLANTIC MONTHLY“The stories in Ficciones are the very best of Borges . . . They mean more than they seem to mean . . . Borges’ fictions are narrative at its purest.”—from the Introduction by John Sturrock

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: Everyman's Library (May 25, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679422994
• ISBN-13: 978-0679422990
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (58 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #88,669 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A sly milestone of 20th century literature, July 11, 2002

By 

Christopher Culver - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Ficciones (English Translation) (Paperback)

While only a slim volume of about 100 pages, Jorge Luis Borges' FICCIONES is one of the 20th century's most original and influential works. A set of two collections of short stories, ''The Garden of Forking Paths" and ''Artifices", FICCIONES was the world's first exposure to the Argentinian writer and Borges' all-around best work.

The nature of the stories which Borges crafted is so unique and subtle that it defies description. He portrayed unusual occurrences, and peppered his stories, narrated in a faux-scholastic style, with references to colourful sources that, while sounding plausible, are of Borges' own invention and can be found in no library. In the first story of FICCIONES, ''Tlon, Uqbar, Orbius Tertius," he imagines an encyclopedia mysteriously containing a entry for a country that is not to be found - at least not in our reality. ''The Approach to Al-Mutasim" is a review of a book which doesn't exist; here, in a reversal of the usual order, the review brings the book into being. ''The Babylon Lottery" and ''The Library of Babel" are both clever metaphors for the human world. In the first, Borges describes an ancient society which lets all things be decided by chance. In the second, which introduced the concept of the infinite library, the story's setting is an unimaginably vast archive whose librarians from birth to death care for books whose meanings cannot be deciphered.

Jorge Luis Borges often used several key motifs in his books, such as mirrors and labyrinths, and it is this reuse of symbols which has created the ''Borgesian" genre. These symbols and the offbeat constructions which Borges almost singlehandedly invented went on to inspire legions of writers, including Gene Wolfe and Salman Rushdie.

The translation of FICCIONES has long been a divisive issue. While some, such as myself, believe that this versions of FICCIONES follows the original Spanish closely and, in any event, Borges' genius is found not as much in his language as in his concepts, others detest this 1962 version. Andrew Hurley has recently translated all of Borges fictional stories, including FICCIONES, in COLLECTED FICTIONS published by Penguin, but even his translation has sparked new battles. Should one wish to read FICCIONES in English, however, I'd suggest getting this translation. It is less expensive than COLLECTED FICTIONS and contains only Borges' finest work. For those who can read Spanish decently, I'd recommend even obtaining the original language, as Borges' stories do not use vocabulary much outside what one gets after four-years of high school Spanish.

While some readers may not "get" Borges (he can be compared to H.P. Lovecraft in possessing great influence on some but total obscurity to others), I'd certainly recommend trying FICCIONES.

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Metaphysical Angst, December 12, 2001

By 

Jason Baer - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ficciones (English Translation) (Paperback)

After years of running into this name, "Borges," I felt as though I were falling short of my expectations as a reader to ignore this man and his colossal reputation. Ficciones seemed to be his most widely read and critically acclaimed book, and so I inevitably found myself reading it.

To try to capture the essence of Borges in a handful of words is like trying to capture the Lochness Monster on film: impossible, but frequently attempted. With that understanding in mind, here's my assessment:

All of Borges's stories are very different, and yet they all share a common sensibility, one of understated but very deeply felt anguish. This is not the anguish of an ordinary writer feeling sorry for himself and his fate. This anguish is deep, metaphysical. You get the sense that Borges views life and his fellow human beings at a distance, and yet is able to see more and understand more from this distance. He does not attempt to explain; he simply wants to impart his sense of awe, wonder, and inevitability.

The subject matter varies widely: an infinite library, a scholarly review of the life's work of a fictional writer, a boy with a perfect memory. Some of his stories are Kafka-esqe in a nightmarish sense, while others have the intellectual playfulness of an M.C. Escher drawing: what you thought was 'up' is really 'down,' and yet once you see the big picture you realize that this is the only way it can be. The endings are as inevitable as death, and yet you rarely see them coming.

I'm not so sure that Borges wrote his stories with a specific point or message, although many of them seem to have one. I believe that most of these stories are simply meant to inspire thought and contemplation of the very issues that Borges had been thinking of when he wrote them. One could do a lot worse than to see things through the eyes of this great thinker.

My only complaint is that his stories are not as accessible as they could be, and his scholarly manner may be problematical for some. But the most effective pills are often the hardest to swallow...

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Good Start to Borge's Universe., November 22, 2004

By 

Maximiliano F Yofre "Maxi" (Buenos Aires, Argentina) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Ficciones (English Translation) (Paperback)

Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986) was one of the greatest Argentinean's writers of all times. Since 1970 he was candidate to Nobel Literature Prize, which he never attained. In 1980 he was bestowed Cervantes Prize, the Spanish major literary award. He influenced two generations of Latin American writers. Even those who despised him as "elitist writer" admired his powerful imagination and writing skills.

Jorge Luis was born in a high-class family. He was bilingual, due to his English grandmother. He moved with his parents to Europe where he resided from 1914 till 1921. When he returned to Argentina he fells in love with Buenos Aires. This love affaire begot several poetry volumes and inspired him many stories.
Borges was an omnivorous reader with a wide range of interests: from Cabbala thru Golems; from Mythology thru Gaucho's hardships; from Immortality thru Infinite; from Buddhism thru Christianity. His tales reflect this interest.

The present volume encompasses two of his earlier stories collections: "The Garden of Forking Paths" (1941) and "Fictions" (1944) and constitute a fair sample of his writings and style.
"The Babylon Lottery" describes an improbable world, ruled by fate embodied in a lottery game. "Funes the Memorious" elaborates on what happens if a person may recall every instant of his whole life. "The Garden of Forking Paths" is an elegant spy's story, mixed with subtle laberynths. "The Library of Babel", is one of Borge's best known texts, where he speculate on an infinite library containing every volume of human literature and gave way to mathematical speculation.
In other tales the reader will get in touch with some themes very dear to Borges: mirrors, treason, solitary Hero, multiple divergent versions of the same character, whole universe created ex nihlo from his imagination and more much more.

If you like fantasy you probably will fall in love with this book and search for more Borge's works. If you don't like fantasy you may be hooked by a prose rich in images and a powerful literary and philosophical imagination.
Give this book a chance, you will no be disappointed!
Reviewed by Max Yofre.