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Ficciones

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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.

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...

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.

These whimsical, fantastic tales explore the Borgesian themes of mirrors, cults, plots, and history. Borges is a modern master, with one foot planted firmly in the traditions of Miguel de los Cervantes's age, the other foot planted in solidarity with (post)modern writers such as Umberto Eco or even Thomas Pynchon. It's a shame that Borges never achieved the fame of the latter two, at least not in the United States.

Perhaps this comparison is off-base, but this collection makes me think of JS Bach's "inventions": brilliantly written, innovative little morsels that you must take sensitively and savor long after you are done with them.

The only criticism I sometimes hear about these short stories is that there are no genuinely human, fleshed out characters (besides perhaps the narrator), and the plots tend to be about abstract ideas and individual conflictedness, rather than the more conventional plots about human interactions. What can I say? That's just how Borges is. I think he's a great (and underrated/underappreciated!) storyteller and literary craftsman, but maybe if you like a lot of character realism and musings about interpersonal relationships in your stories, Borges isn't for you.

This is a thoroughly enjoyable collection, especially if you like "magical realism" and short stories that read like clever inventions.

FICCIONES is a slender collection of mercifully short stories by Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. These brightly sterile and rigidly structured stories require such careful attention that they would be impossible to digest were they any longer. Fortunately, Borges is disdainful of literary navel gazing and gets to the point. In the prologue he writes, "The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance. To go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes!" Borges is faithful to himself. His prose is stark and purposeful. Imagine GRAVITY'S RAINBOW collapsing under it's own weight to form a neutron star.

The seventeen stories in FICCIONES (the first eight originally published as "The Garden of Forking Paths" in 1941 and the last nine as "Artifices" in 1944) explore language, thought, memory, logic and literature through the distortions of time. The relative nature of time is a central preoccupation in the work of Borges, though no comparison to Einstein is implied. Borges has much more in common with the inexplicable world of sub-atomic particles, full of strange charms and flavors. Sometimes these stories seem to start at random, following twisting strings forward for an infinty before looping back to an irreducible point, culminating in a new view on exsistence. As he writes in one of the best stories "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote" (the absurd title of which may give some clue into Borges' style), "A philosophical doctrine is in the beginning a seemingly true description of the universe; as the years pass it becomes a mere chapter - if not a paragraph or a noun - in the history of philosophy". All of the stories in FICCIONES, the absurd memoirs, self-referential mysteries and reviews of imaginary books, reflect this idea and are rendered with care, every noun vital.

In "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", the story of an otherworldly encyclopedia, Borges writes, "To explain or judge an event is to identify or unite it with another one". It is difficult to explain Borges by identifying him with another author or book. He is often compared to Stanislaw Lem and Italio Calvino. There are some superficial similarities, but most of Borges stories lack any trace of humanity. Even at their most abstract, Lem and Calvino are concerned with mankind. For Borges, his characters are a literary device, a McGuffin. The most accesible story in FICCIONES, "Form of the Sword" appears to be a character study, but that is just a disguise for an exploration into memory and questions about the true nature of reality. The closest approximation to Borges is a (supposedly) non-fiction book, Douglas Hofstadter's GODEL, ESCHER, BACH, which in all fairness should include Borges in the title instead of relying on Lewis Carroll for literary support. Of course, the inclusion of Borges would have rendered much of GODEL, ESCHER, BACH unnecessary. Why be obtuse for 700 pages when Borges can enlighten in 140?

Nearly every story in this historic work takes literature to a new level and in a new direction simultaneously. This is Borges in his full-blown form, which can still be read today and seem altogether different from what any other writer is doing. It is the stories from this work and El Aleph which make Borges the most influential South American writer of the 20th century.

FICCIONES, published in 1944, was the result of gathering together two volumes of Borges' short stories. The first volume, EL JARDIN DE SENDEROS QUE SE BIFURCAN (which contains the short story of the same name) was published in Buenos Aires, December 30, 1941; it is a rare book, and was never separately translated into English. The second volume, ARTIFICIOS, contains stories of a somewhat different nature than the first. Many of the stories in both volumes had previously appeared in the literary journal Sur.

The most famous story is 'El jardin de senderos que se bifurcan', or 'The Garden of Forking Paths'. On the surface, it is a spy story set in World War I, although the plot seems to erupt out of the tatters of an old newspaper left in a cafe. But slowly the story also concerns itself with labyrinths (one of Borges' pet devices), the metaphysical nature of time, fictional versus real people, events, and history, etc. By the end of the story, it is not even clear if the characters, the Chinese Dr. Yu Tsun, 'former professor of English at the Hochschule at Tsingtao' or expert sinologist Dr. Stephen Albert, are real or fictional constructions. Borges vast comprehension of Spanish and the romance languages, of English and German, are often on display; occasionally, as in this work, he reveals a knowledge of China as well.

In addition to its enormous influence, FICCIONES has the virtue of being very brief, although the reader may return to the stories over and over again without tiring of them.

I'll put it as bluntly as I can: Jorge Luis Borges is an absolute genius, a staggering mind of supreme proportions, and I thank the gods of literature that he was able to compress his ideas into these seventeen short stories for the betterment of anyone willing to read and learn from them.

As a writer, Borges is not particularly interested in the reader having empathy with the characters, he doesn't really set the scene, and the storylines - when there are one - are generally fairly weak. His strength lies in the depth of thought placed within the short pages, and the general mysteries of the infinite and reality.

I'll admit, the first few stories I didn't really 'get'. I read 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius', a story of an encyclopedic entry about a fictional world, and while it was enjoyable, seemed a mere flight of fancy. The second story, 'The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim' seemed to be a short variation on the theme, and by the time that one was finished, I wasn't particularly impressed. But then I read 'Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote', a treatise on why the 20th century scholar and writer Pierre Menard has written a better version of Don Quixote than Cervantes, even though the two versions are identical, and everything clicked. I realised that Borges was not trying to entertain me - and the language used and obscure literary/historical references thrown about certainly don't aid casual enjoyment - rather he was exercising my mind. By considering the ideas he presents about reality and infinity under the careful tutelage of his examples, I was, by the end of the book, struggling with concepts that I perhaps previously wouldn't have considered.

The seventh story, 'The Library of Babel', was perhaps my favourite, dealing with a library that had the every single possible combination of letters within its hallowed halls. The story was an essay on life in the Library, but in actuality it was about the nature of infinity and what it means when it is applied to something tangible, like a library, or a garden.

The second part of the novel, Artifices, had more of a story-telling flavour, but generally these fictional setups were used mainly to get two characters talking to one another so that they could discuss reality. While they were all amazing and essential reads, I enjoyed the more abstract pieces in the first part, 'The Garden of Forking Paths'.

Borges is a difficult writer. He has an extensive vocabulary and enormous literary and historical knowledge to draw from, and he uses both without hesitation. The ideas he presents are deep, the fact that he is willing to share them in the way that he has suggests to me that he is aware that his readers are intelligent people capable of greater thought. Don't let the dry tone fool you though, while this book can't be said to be enjoyable in a swashbuckling, rolicking sense, Ficciones is a phenomenal, mind-blowing, absolutely essential read, I recommend it to everyone.

Jorge Luis Borges may not be as famous as other latin-american writers such as Octavio Paz because of the lack of the Nobel Prize... but after reading this book one is left to wonder why... Each and every story is unique in its own way, creating shimmering images of reality that blend dreams, illusions, past, reality, misfortunes, eternity, infinity, life, death, religion and more... It is difficult to explain the effect Borges' stories have on the reader... It is like reading an Escher painting... Amazing.

Be warned. After reading Borges you'll have the feeling there aren't much ideas left to think - or to write about. Borges is a miracle in more than a sense. His shortstories are unlike anything you may have ever seen. It would be wise not to classify any of them in a single genre (science fiction? thriller? fantasy? intelectual speculation?). Well, he goes beyond all that every time, and he keeps readable and enjoyable all the way.

Borges had the curious belief that writing long stories are a waste of time. "Why to spend one's time writing long, laborious volumes," he used to say, "if one's argument may be presented in a few pages?" Lovers of long stories, like myself, tend to disagree, until they know Borges. In fact, before reading Borges one may have all the reasons in the world not to trust the potential of the shortstory. To create a true impact in a few pages? Exploring and presenting a whole new world in a brief shortstory? Where in the world?

Here.

Some science fiction writers (creators of worlds) need 700 pages to present us their visions (see Frank Herbert's Dune). Borges does that using less than twenty pages every time. And we are talking real worlds here, in the physical and the intelectual sense. Take The Library of Babel, an endless library where every story has already been written (including mine and yours). Take The Lottery Of Babylonia, where a secret society controls Fortune, and "where everyone was a king and a slave." Take Tlön, Uqbar, Orbius Tertius, where a new, invented worlds quietly overlaps our own.

Borges was extraordinary in his simplicity and humbleness. His favorite prayer was that of a sixteen century monk: "O Lord, may there be not so much beauty!"

Once Borges said: "I hope you may find some beauty in my books. In this world beauty is common."

Well, now it is.

I found a worn copy of this slim, powerful work in a dusty used bookstore in Portland, Maine. That is the best way to find book, by the way...i recommend it. But, if this is your only means of purchasing this volume, i recommend this way too.

Jorge Luis Borges is brilliant beyond the comprehension of normal man. Jorge Luis Borges can constuct the fantastic through the innovative manipulation of language as no one else can. Jorge Luis Borges has absolutely no regard for reality whatsoever.

..but only in the best of senses...

Discussing a fictional entry in a fictional volume of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, Borges leads the reader to witness the creation of an entirely new world - grants it a mythology, a legal structure, and a myriad of necessary societal quirks. And this is one of the pieces that impresses me the least.

In "The Circular Ruins" we witness an entirely surreal event occuring in a land with no context - no history, no geography. The dreamer and his creation are mere vehicles of the plot, which itself is extranneous. Borges's characters evoke no sympathy or empathy; they have no tangible presence, but are merely the embodiments of concepts. Without real indentities, their names are often omitted entirely.

There is something Big about his work. It continuously reminds me that there is so much that I am not understanding; there is so much in the beyond me. I can almost hear the ideas, the symbolisms, the metaphors, whipping past my head, and I love it. A delicious challenge, an exercise in humility. The feeling is akin to that of standing at the base of a very tall mountain, or looking up at the night sky when the clouds have parted, revealing the black infinity between the stars - so vast in scale we can't wrap our consciousness around it, but we often love to try, to marvel at the sheer scope of it.

In "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote" he makes the statement "There is no intellectual exercise which is not ultimately useless. A philosophical doctrine is in the beginning a seemingly true description of the universe; as the years pass it becomes a mere chapter - if not a paragraph or a noun - in the history of philosophy" which can be a damn depressing thought - 'This is all minutia, these massive theories, these concepts, this which we base our world on, when given perspective is insignifigant." There's nothing like feeling that everything you've studied and contemplated and lost sleep over is no less than negligible, in the broad scheme of things. Its somewhat refreshing.

Of course, thinking over that concept is an intellectual exercise in itself. I in no way denounce this futile, pointless mulling over of philosophy, literature, what the meaning of life is and and other cliched questions to deliberate over. What is accompished by this? Absolutely nothing. The hungry aren't fed, the ozone is still rapidly deteriorating and The Killers are still overplayed. Yet I persist. I will always love being made to truly think, being fascinated by the complex and obscure, being introduced to the absurd, and I hope you do to.

Read this book.