ed, tr & w/intro by Anthony Kerrigan
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Book Description
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 an alternate 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 --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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 --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Complex and fascinating philosophical fictions,
This review is from: Fictions (Calderbooks S.) (Paperback)
Placing an exagerated emphasis on the `mind game' aspect of Borges' work - especially when referring to Fictions - tends to make one consider his writings as huge mystifications which, although interesting enough to read, are first and foremost games of no major consequence. This underestimates the ambiguity that Borges knowingly uses and strips his works of their speculations' positivity. The use of the `what if...?' motif, intrinsic to all fiction writing, is systematically employed by Borges in stories which, starting from axioms (explicitely acknowledged in `The Library of Babel'), explore themes from multiple viewpoints (cosmology, philosophy, theology, art...) and provide multiple levels of interpretation. Stories such as `Death and the Compass' and `The Garden of Forking Paths' are as much about the mechanics of suspense-laden literature as they are, among other things, about the relationship between someone and his/her intellectual and spiritual pursuits; pieces like `The Library of Babel' and `Funes the Memorious' are at once fairy tales and fascinating texts on knowledge. Through metaphor and allegory, the stories of `Fictions' provide a vision of the world devoid of restraining reflexes; reading them, one is forced to question his/her own habits (the same can be said about Borges' reviews of imaginary authors and books). The theme of the double, which was to become even more important later, here surfaces in stories where the notions of hero and villain are reconfigured. `Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius' and `Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote' are probably the best-known, but every piece manages to raise questions and problems, not always solving them. Essential reading.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Reality is Fiction, and Fiction is Reality.,
By A Customer
This review is from: Fictions (Calderbooks S.) (Paperback)
Recommended for extremely sensitive individuals who have asked themselves "Quién soy?" and are still looking for the answer.</p> Su literatura es una verdadera obra de arte. Imperdible!</p>
5.0 out of 5 stars
A classical of latinoamerican literature,
By A Customer
This review is from: Fictions (Calderbooks S.) (Paperback)
This is the best book of the best argentinian writer of all times.
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