Borges: Selected Non-Fictions (Paperback)

~ Jorge Luis Borges (Author), Eliot Weinberger (Editor, Translator), Esther Allen (Translator), Suzanne Jill Levine (Translator)
Key Phrases: gauchesco poetry, ensayos dantescos, first reprinted, Buenos Aires, Martin Fierro, Don Quixote (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Jorge Luis Borges was our century's greatest miniaturist, perpetually cramming entire universes onto the head of a pin. Yet his splendid economy, along the wafer-thin proportions of such classic volumes as Ficciones and Labyrinths, has given readers the impression that Borges was miserly with his prose. In fact, he was something of a verbal spendthrift. His collected stories alone run to nearly 1,000 pages. And his nonfiction output was even more staggering: the young Borges cranked out hundreds of essays, book notes, cultural polemics, and movie reviews, and even after he lost his sight in 1955, he continued to dictate short pieces by the dozens. Eliot Weinberger has assembled just a fraction of this outpouring in Selected Non-Fictions, and the result is a 559-page Borgesian blowout, in which the Argentinean fabulist takes on being and nothingness, James Joyce and Lana Turner, and (surprisingly) racial hatred and the rise of Nazism. So much for our image of the mandarin bookworm! The very engagé author of this book seems more like a subequatorial Camus, with a dash of Siskel and Ebert on the side.

Selected Non-Fictions demonstrates just how quickly Borges began wrestling with such brainteasers as identity, time, and infinity. Indeed, the very first piece in the collection, "The Nothingness of Personality" (1922), already finds him fiddling with the self: "I, as I write this, am only a certainty that seeks out the words that are most apt to compel your attention. That proposition and a few muscular sensations, and the sight of the limpid branches that the trees place outside my window, constitute my current I." There are many such meditations here, including "A History of Eternity" (in which Borges maps out his own, disarmingly empty version of the eternal, "without a God or even a co-proprietor, and entirely devoid of archetypes"). But it's more fun--and more revelatory--to see the author venturing beyond his metaphysical stomping grounds. Borges on King Kong is a hoot, and a cornball masterpiece such as The Petrified Forest elicits this terrific nugget: "Death works in this film like hypnosis or alcohol: it brings the recesses of the soul into the light of day." His capsule biographies are a delight, his critiques of Nazi propaganda are memorably stringent, and nobody should miss him on the tango. True, the sheer variety and mind-boggling erudition of Selected Non-Fictions can be a little forbidding. But, taken as a whole, the collection surely meets the specifications that Borges laid out in a 1927 essay on literary pleasure: "If only some eternal book existed, primed for our enjoyment and whims, no less inventive in the populous morning as in the secluded night, oriented toward all hours of the world." Oh, but it does. --James Marcus --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Reviewing a book that seeks to validate the existence of ghosts through testimony by the upper crust of British society, Borges writes: "the Honorable Reginald Fortescue became a firm believer in the existence of 'an alarming spectre.' As for myself, I don't know what to think: for the moment, I refuse to believe in the alarming Reginald Fortescue until an honorable spectre becomes a firm believer in his existence." In this compilation of nonfiction prose, the third of Viking's magisterial three-volume collection of Borges's complete works, a new, fuller Borges emerges, as the writer becomes a joker; the fabulist shows himself to be a rationalistic skeptic; and the alleged conservative skewers upper-class pretensions. We also find the familiar man of letters in such classic essays as "A New Refutation of Time" and "Kafka's Precursors" (which foreshadows the most interesting ideas of Harold Bloom in a mere two and a half pages). Among the gems to appear in English for the first time are slyly brilliant literary essays, such as an appreciation of Flaubert's enigmatic novel, Bouvard and P?cuchet, and an authoritative critical history of the translations of the 1001 Nights. Other newly available aspects of Borges's oeuvre are trenchant critiques of Argentinean anti-Semitism; contemporary reviews of such works as Citizen Kane, Absalom, Absalom and Finnegan's Wake (Borges finds it incomprehensible); and capsule literary biographies for a woman's magazine. While the translations capture Borges's unfailingly elegant style, the editing at times seems overly academic: certain sentences, even paragraphs, are repeated, and certain topics (particularly time and eternity) are overrepresented, a tendency that makes the book rather difficult to read straight through. Even so, this is a volume of inexhaustible delights. First serial to Grand Street. (Sept.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 560 pages
• Publisher: Penguin; 1st US Edition 1st Printing edition (October 31, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140290117
• ISBN-13: 978-0140290110
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #126,172 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

47 of 50 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Across The Ocean - Another Labyrinth., March 24, 2000

By	david ewing (Dunfermline, Scotland.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Selected Non-Fictions (Hardcover)

One of the most cherished items in my ever-expanding library is my dog-eared copy of "Labyrinths", complete with the coffee-, alcohol-, and bath stains which lend it almost as much character as the words within its covers. This new edition of Borges selected non-fiction will no doubt in the fullness of time reach a position of equal prominence on my bookshelves. The debate will forever rage as to whether Borges deserves that grandest(yet often all too hollow and ephemeral) of epithets - "Great Writer", purely by virtue of the fact that he never wrote anything of more than a few pages in length. But the pellucidity and erudition of his prose raises quality above quantity to an altitude from where we lose sight of the debate, thus rendering it redundant. Along with a number of essays already available elsewhere, including the seminal "New Refutation Of Time", this collection ranges in typical Borges style from film reviews (King Kong, The Petrified Forest etc.), through dispassionate yet condemnatory meditations on Fascism, to his well- ploughed but ever-fruitful ground of literary rumination.His series of essays on Dante opened this reader's eyes-and heart- to the true heartbreaking nature of that poet's relationship with Beatrice, prompting a reappraisal of a book I gave up on fifteen years ago, halfway through "Il Purgatorio"; this summer, I've promised myself, I WILL read the whole of "Il Divina Commedia".Not out of a sense of duty, you understand, but because I WANT to. Therein lies the hub of Borges greatness as a writer: his self-proclaimed greatness as a reader manifests itself on the written page as dizzying eclecticism and enthusiasm for allusion that moves the reader to explore not only new avenues of thought, but also a newer and more verdant landscape of literature than had previously been suspected to even exist. Sail with Borges and new continents, new constellations will rise before you. On a personal note I have Borges to thank for my discovery of Hume, Chesterton, the Pre-Socratics, St Augustine,Flann O'Brien,Thomas Browne, and so many others who would have remained permanently below my horizon otherwise. If you feel that reading a book should an experience of expansion, of glimpsing new vistas,to develop a hunger for exploration, then this is for you.

32 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Vastly enjoyable, January 18, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Selected Non-Fictions (Hardcover)

In one of the pieces contained in this book, Borges claims that more than a writer, what he really was was a great reader. That was his vocation. Indeed, I do not know of anyone who read more widely, with more understanding, and with more contagious enjoyment that Borges. The pieces in this collection shine through with his delight for what has been termed "the aesthetics of intelligence": knowledge and abstract thought as art.

Borges, who never wrote anything long in his life, was the master of the short essay. Every piece is full of profoundest and most unexpected insights, whether it purports to be about Citizen Kane, Argentinian literature, or the Ars Combinatoria of Ramon Llull. I recommend this book very highly.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A True Lover of Books, July 3, 2007

By	Stephen Curry (New Orleans, LA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Borges claims in one of these articles that he was "more proud of the books he has read than the books he has written." I imagine I would feel the same way, had I written any books! And I think this statement captures the unifying theme of this compendium. Herein Borges will astonish and charm you with the breadth, variety, and whimsy of his literary taste.

The book is a compilation of critical essays, social commentary, reviews of the fledgling film art, and other oddities published in various media from throughout Borges's literary life. Each offers you new horizens for literary pursuit and further reading, and all are executed with Borges's renowned concision.

What I like most of all is that Borges is more interested the kinds of books people really enjoy reading, such as Bradbury, HG Wells, Lord Dunsany, and Kipling, rather than the fossilized academic "classics." One of my favorite features are the several recommended reading lists, in which Borges passes on his own most pleasurable reading experiences. There is also a refreshing eclecticism in Borges's taste--for example, this book lead me to Mathematics and the Imagination, a fun popular math book. Another personal highlight is the essay on Edward Fitzgerald.

This volume is not something one would read from cover to cover in several sittings, but rather a treasure trove to be mined from time to time, like the famous cave discovered by Ali Baba in that book so dear to Borges's heart!