Ficciones (English Translation) by
Jorge Luis Borges
The Labyrinth That Consists Of A Single Straight Line
Reading Jorge Luis Borges is an experience akin to having the top of ones
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 Wallaces 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 generations 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. Borgess Pierre Menard, for

instance, undertakes the most audacious project imaginable: to create
not a contemporary version of Cervantess 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
Personal Review: Ficciones (English Translation) by Jorge Luis
Borges
Jorge Luis Borges was one of those rare writers who can take even a
bizarre, utterly unbelievable idea, and spin it into an exquisite little gem of
prose.
And this classic writer was at the peak of his powers when he collected
together "Ficciones," whose plain name belies the subtle power and
exquisite beauty of Jorges' short stories. Even among Borges' many short
stories, few of them can rival this little labyrinth of strange ancient cities,
fictional histories, and the eerie depths of the human mind.
"I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an
encyclopedia." An odd old saying from the Middle-East leads the narrator
to seek out the long-lost heretical histories of a fictional world known as
Tlon. Its beliefs, language, and metaphysical eccentricities increasingly
fascinate the narrator, until it's almost a surprise to realize that Borges
invented all of this.
The stories that follow are no less engrossing -- the recounting of a
strange, haunting novel, a man who attempts to LIVE as Don Quixote, a
man who tries to dream a new being into existence, a lottery that
determines the way the people of Babylon are to live, an examination of a
brilliant and underrated author, an exploration of the eternal Library of the
universe, and a labyrinthine spy story.
The second round of short stories is a bit less enthralling, merely because
it focuses more on "typical" Borges short stories. But they are still pretty

enthralling pieces of work -- the remembrance of the brilliantly eccentric
Ireneo Funes, the story of a scar, a series of murders linked to "the secret
Name," a condemned man's begs God for a year to perfect his art, a
forgotten heretic, a conversation leading to revenge, the Cult of the
Phoenix, and a man entranced by the "Arabian Nights."
Mirrors and labyrinths fill Borges' work -- real and imagined, in word,
metaphor and reality. You see them in an endless library, a guitar melody,
a contradiction in religious faith, a complex plot, and in the mind of a man
who loses himself to an obsession. The mirrors show you the sides of
people that they would never see themselves, and the labyrinth twists the
mind into new places where it would never normally go.
"Ficciones" explores places where normal fiction would never go -- such as
a Babylonian lottery for different places in society, corrupted by greed --
even as it imbues its eulogies, metaphysical ponderings and explanations
with the tinge of reality. The cults, deaths, and art that Borges describes
seem so plausible, and are given such depth and detail, that it comes as a
mild shock when you realize, "Hey, he made all of this up."
Part of that is due to his unique style, full of elegant wordcraft and gently
luminous imagery ("a round yellow moon defined two leaf-clogged
fountains in the dreary garden"). Even a stabbing is made brutally
beautiful, and often dialogue is unnecessary -- the most beautiful and
striking stories in here are the ones where Borges (aka the narrator)
eagerly explores some invented facet of the world.
And woven through these stories are many of the things that fascinated
Borges through his career -- a tragic hero, ancient heresies, an elusive
God, and people whose lives he could somehow explore through his own
imagination.
If you could criticize anything at all, it's that few of the characters -- aside
from the Borges "narrator" -- are much more than walking symbols of a
murky little message. But hey, you could simply see this entire book as an
exploration of Borges' own imagination by himself. He happily recounts
countries that are nonexistant, books that were never written, geniuses
who never were.
"Ficciones" is about the dullest name you can possibly give to a work of
genius -- an intricate little web that is all mirrors and mazes. Absolutely
stunning.
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