Borges: Collected Fictions

Amazon.com

Although Jorge Luis Borges published his first book in 1923--doling out his own money for a limited edition of Fervor de Buenos Aires--he remained in Argentinian obscurity for almost three decades. In 1951, however, Ficciones appeared in French, followed soon after by an English translation. This collection, which included the cream of the author's short fictions, made it clear that Borges was a world-class (if highly unclassifiable) artist--a brilliant, lyrical miniaturist, who could pose the great questions of existence on the head of pin. And by 1961, when he shared the French Prix Formentor with Samuel Beckett, he seemed suddenly to tower over a half-dozen literary cultures, the very exemplar of modernism with a human face.

By the time of his death in 1986, Borges had been granted old master status by almost everybody (except, alas, the gentlemen of the Swedish Academy). Yet his work remained dispersed among a half-dozen different collections, some of them increasingly hard to find. Andrew Hurley has done readers a great service, then, by collecting all the stories in a single, meticulously translated volume. It's a pleasure to be reminded that Borges's style--poetic, dreamlike, and compounded of innumerable small surprises--was already in place by 1935, when he published A Universal History of Iniquity: "The earth we inhabit is an error, an incompetent parody. Mirrors and paternity are abominable because they multiply and affirm it." (Incidentally, the thrifty author later recycled the second of these aphorisms in his classic bit of bookish metaphysics, "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Teris.") The glories of his middle period, of course, have hardly aged a day. "The Garden of the Forking Paths" remains the best deconstruction of the detective story ever written, even in the post-Auster era, and "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" puts the so-called death of the author in pointed, hilarious perspective.

But Hurley's omnibus also brings home exactly how consistent Borges remained in his concerns. As late as 1975, in "Avelino Arredondo," he was still asking (and occasionally even answering) the same riddles about time and its human repository, memory: "For the man in prison, or the blind man, time flows downstream as though down a slight decline. As he reached the midpoint of his reclusion, Arredondo more than once achieved that virtually timeless time. In the first patio there was a wellhead, and at the bottom, a cistern where a toad lived; it never occurred to Arredondo that it was the toad's time, bordering on eternity, that he sought." Throughout, Hurley's translation is crisp and assured (although this reader will always have a soft spot for "Funes, the Memorious" rather than "Funes, His Memory.") And thanks to his efforts, Borgesians will find no better--and no more pleasurable--rebuttal of the author's description of himself as "a shy sort of man who could not bring himself to write short stories." --James Marcus

Book Description

The New York Times bestseller, "a marvelous new collection of stories by . . . one of the most remarkable writers of our century" --Richard Bernstein, The New York Times

Jorge Luis Borges has been called the greatest Spanish-language writer of our century. Now for the first time in English, all of Borges' dazzling fictions are gathered into a single volume, brilliantly translated by Andrew Hurley. From his 1935 debut with The Universal History of Iniquity, through his immensely influential collections Ficciones and The Aleph, these enigmatic, elaborate, imaginative inventions display Borges' talent for turning fiction on its head by playing with form and genre and toying with language. Together these incomparable works comprise the perfect one-volume compendium for all those who have long loved Borges, and a superb introduction to the master's work for those who have yet to discover this singular genius.

* Exquisitely packaged edition with French flaps and rough front, quality paper stock
* Named a Notable Book by the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, and the American Library Association

"An unparalleled treasury of marvels." --Chicago Tribune

"An event worthy of celebration . . . Hurley deserves our enthusiastic praise for this monumental piece of work." --San Francisco Chronicle

Customer Reviews:

Sobering readings.......2007-05-08

After reading Borges Collected Fictins I have found it difficult to take most other authors seriously.
Borge's prose is fluent and easily read. The stories are short, sometimes even short-short, which makes them suitable for reading before going to sleep. The stories have a basic structure with a beginning, middle, and end.
So much for the easy part! There is the superficial text, of course, but within each story are metaphors and philosophical questions that stimulate my mind. Each story reads like a riddle - that's the closest simile I can think of. Borges is never obscure, even when the riddle is unsolvable it is very clear what he means. Borges himself does not claim too have any answers that are general. That makes his writings so very human.
Life for Borges is just too rich and complex to recude it just too a series of problems and their solutions. Therefore, and this is possibly Borges's only firm stance, he is decisively against any form of dictatorship or mass-movement, since they destroy the identities, and importance, of the individual.

Magnificent.......2007-05-07

Excellent collection of Borges' Fictions. Borges transports you to reasonings and philosophies not so common in the world we live in. There is a message behind every single story, one has to look deeply to see it.

Excellent Book, Grating Translation.......2007-02-18

I will admit that my Spanish is not amazing, but I understand enough to get a sense of Borges' work, and I have read enough translations to be able to speak with a certain degree of confidence. And I have to ask, who let Andrew Hurley near this book, and were they appropriately disciplined?

His English is flat and completely without style, very much the work of an academic. As Eric Ormby wrote in The New Criterion, "he appears not to have a good sense of English prose style, or to command such a style himself." Alberto Manguel hammered the nail in Hurley's coffin when, for the Observer, he wrote: "English-language readers have either to resign themselves to the old, barely serviceable translations, or submit to the new, barely serviceable translations by Andrew Hurley, Professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico. Hurley has no ear for the rhythms of Borges's language." I could not agree more. Hurley's translation was minimalist where Borges was baroque, stiff where Borges was supple, and obvious where Borges was sly.

Hurley's endnotes were also obsessive to the point where I began to wonder if he was going to annotate every concept that might be above the reading level of a five year old. This felt more like a kind of intellectual arrogance rather than scrupulousness. And the change of the title "Funes the Memorious", quite possibly the most compelling and apt translation of a title in all of short fiction, to the clunky and obscene "Funes, His Memory" is frankly nothing less than a sin against literature.

I have given this book three stars because it is Borges (who deserves all five) and because it is a useful thing to have all his stories in one place in English. I would have given it five if Hurley had not made such a colossal mess of it.

I now describe my pet turtle as monstrous.......2007-02-06

I have always been hesitant to read fiction originally written in any language except English. I'm fickle enough as it is without needing another person's biases and tendencies interfering with my own... and so it was with great trepidation that I bought Hurley's collection.

The stories in summation: marvelous. Hurley's work? I'll never be able to read these Borges stories again without Hurley's translation heavily influencing, and that is an endorsement. I suspect that for most people their first experience of Borges will always be their most memorable, and their preferred. I don't think there are many "On first reading Chapman's Homer" instances: that initial shock of strange and monstrous (perhaps my favorite Borgesian adjective) is evident through any kind of translation so long as it is basically competent. Whatever arguments others may have with Hurley's, they can at least admit that his is that.

But I feel there's more: a playful lilt to the language, one that isn't overly scholarly or mechanical. Hurley's introduction briefly talks about the particular style Borges would become famous for: a laconic, matter-of-fact myth disguised as mere sentences, with the employment of words normally alien to each other. Hurley serves this style well, and his presentation of the most memorable lines of each story were the ones that stayed with me even after readings of several different versions. I'm not exaggerating when I say that I sat down with four different versions of "The Library of Babel" and compared them sentence by sentence. I was living in a bookstore at the time, stuck on an island in the middle of the Aegean and co-habitating with an Englishman who held Irby's version as the superior. I listened politely, and compared, and found that even after ouzo and attempts at persuasion it was my original experience that resonated. Reading Irby's left in me a strange longing for Hurley's words. I remember this line in particular:

"They were urged on by the delirium of trying to reach the books in the Crimson Hexagon: books whose format is smaller than usual, all-powerful, illustrated and magical." (Irby)

"They were spurred on by the holy zeal to reach - someday, through unrelenting effort - the books of the Crimson Hexagon - books smaller than natural books, books omnipotent, illustrated, and magical." (Hurley)

It was that "someday, through unrelenting effort" which stuck with me, and its absence in Irby doomed the entire enterprise. Is this a lack of Irby's, or my own bias towards the translation I first read? I'm not sure, but in almost every way I preferred Hurley.

There seems to be a distinct wave of anti-Hurley sentiment, and it's of the "I read a review that said it, but I'll assume that opinion as my own" variety. I eventually found that the Irby-devoted Englishman hadn't even bothered to read the Hurley version. Don't make his mistake of dismissal-by-proxy: try it for yourself.

Some Of The Greatest Short Stories Ever Written.......2007-01-29

Borges masterfully weaves philisophical fragments between strands of reality and fantasy. If his words were not translated into English, the rest of the world would be learning Spanish.

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The master of making great literature of great literature

The Aleph and Other Stories 1933-1969
Jorge Luis Borges , and Norman Thomas di Giovanni
Manufacturer: Plume
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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The master of making great literature of great literature .......2005-01-11

There is no Borges like Borges and Borges is his only Borges. In these tales one becomes acquainted with a mysterious mixture of concepts and conjectures, of footnotes and findings which combine to move the mind and soul to pure love of reading.The title story alone ' The Aleph' contains in it a hint of containing everything, and yet the finding of it leads us not only to the Kabbalah but to a certain very specific cellar in the imagination of Borges. All the games and tricks of mind cannot conceal from us how wisely and wonderingly this great man has read and written.
Who reads this book touches the work of one of the great literary geniuses of mankind. The pleasure is all the reader's.

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Borges is the original Neo (The Matrix)
An ingenious labyrinthine narrative....
An Antti Keisala Comment: Encyclopaedias, Or, Change The Way We Live
So much more
Sublime Ideas

Ficciones (English Translation)
Jorge Luis Borges
Manufacturer: Grove Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0802130305

Amazon.com

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

Book Description

The seventeen pieces in Ficciones demonstrate the gargantuan powers of imagination, intelligence, and style of one of the greatest writers of this or any other century. Borges sends us on a journey into a compelling, bizarre, and profoundly resonant realm; we enter the fearful sphere of Pascal's abyss, the surreal and literal labyrinth of books, and the iconography of eternal return. More playful and approachable than the fictions themselves are Borges's Prologues, brief elucidations that offer the uninitiated a passageway into the whirlwind of Borges's genius and mirror the precision and potency of his intellect and inventiveness, his piercing irony, his skepticism, and his obsession with fantasy. For to enter the worlds in Ficciones is to enter the mind of Jorge Luis Borges, wherein lie Heaven, Hell, and everything in between.

Customer Reviews:

Borges is the original Neo (The Matrix).......2007-06-26

Transport the Wachowski brothers to the 1930's and ask them to express their philosophy by way of short stories. You might get something in the same ballpark as Ficciones. The diversity and genius of Borges' work is so unique that if you were to know all the languages in the world and had no word limit, it would still be hard to do a review that does justice. Ironically, this is exactly the kind of challenge that Borges would stand up to. I will attempt to review this work by enlisting adjectives that come to mind.

Surreal, mystic, recursive, sophistic, heretical, philosophical, religious, profound, imaginative, ingenious, circular, open-ended, unorthodox, personal, hallucinational, original, universal, self-referential, concise, contextual, complex, ironic.

Here are a few examples of the complexity of Borges' mind at work.

Borges attributes certain imaginary books and volumes of books to some of the authors that he is most influenced by. In reality, these books are projections of Borges' fertile mind and no more. In the process of critiquing imaginary works of art (let's call this meta-art), he creates an instance of the meta-art in the mind of the reader. It's like me talking to you about the eating habits of a third person you haven't met, and actually does not exist! Borges never fails to leave you with a lasting impression of a meta-art that resonates with your senses. On second thoughts, this is obvious because the meta-art is as much a figment of your imagination as it is Borges'. Every meta-art is a reflection of your own creative mind, while Borges is simply holding a mirror. And talking about mirrors, here's a quote from Borges as attributed by him to the meta-art in his first short story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius": "The earth we inhabit is an error, an incompetent parody. Mirrors and paternity are abominable because they multiply and affirm it." And with this we come full circle just like you would in most of Borges' stories.

Borges is fascinated with the idea of god and provides several unorthodox notions of god that might be as appealing to scientists as they would to priests. This is done more so by illustration than by elucidation. In fact, subtle self-references and recursions are an integral part of the entire work. The stories embody the concept that Borges sets out to illustrate, and always come full circle at the end such that appreciating the story is equivalent to appreciating the concept. Whether it is the wizard of "The Circular Ruins", the librarian of "The Library of Babel", the spy of "The Garden of Forking Paths", the teenage boy of "Funes the Memorious", or the playwright of "The Secret Miracle"; the self-referential nature of the work is haunting. Each story leaves you wondering how Borges could convey so much with so little words [This also speaks volumes about the quality of English translation]. Then again, the very topic of brevity and excessiveness is discussed in one of the reviews of a fictional book. It is like Borges does not let anything go. Yet again, the very topic of an all-encompassing book is discussed in the context of a fictional book that aspires to BE god.

There was not a single story of the seventeen that was not profound. There is no chance that you would not re-read this book after reading it once.

An ingenious labyrinthine narrative...........2007-06-20

Borges never fails to please, to challenge, to entertain, and more importantly make one's brain shift into high gear!
If you are looking for an easy read, don't expect to find it in Ficciones.

However, if you are looking for a little cerebral cortex arousal; grab this book and find a cozy spot...you won't be disappointed!

Reading with his head instead of his heart, Borges looks to fill his mind with all the minutia and information he can possibly hold and release it back in his works with finely crafted and fascinatingly playful philosophical stories.

The sparse, objective writing of Ficciones is a far cry from his earlier lyrical style, of which he says: "In those days, I sought dusk, the outskirts, and unhappiness; now, mornings, the center, and serenity."

Thankfully in the newer center, we are treated to 17 extraordinary stories that are teasingly succinct, yet brimming with imaginative and aesthetic prose!

The scarcity of words requires that the reader pay attention to them all or miss much of the wisdom and subtleness that define the delicate and ingenious style that is this fine master of fiction...Jorge Luis Borges!

An Antti Keisala Comment: Encyclopaedias, Or, Change The Way We Live.......2007-04-12

Borges is one of the great literary giants of the 20th century, a statement that in itself appears as a graveyard of a word; that his influence is comparable to that of Joyce, Proust and Beckett. I would another name to that list, that of Georges Perec, a French novelist most famous for his works "Void" and "Life, A User's Manual".

I am no authority in much of anything, so I'd advice you find and read as much Borges as you can, but I've found that this collection is a fitting place whence to start and end endeavours of life. Literature works as a way of shaping not only our imagination but expounding our sense of self; this is a phenomenon that does not exclude anyone: most of the time it is merely unconscious as we hone endless miles through the seas of matter, of influence. Reading the great masters not only takes us to the root of what has been shaping and influencing the most intelligent and worthy art created, this reading gives us tools of becoming a self-conscious human being.

But read these stories for fun if you're not a self-confessed pretentious bohemian like me. I do, too, yet for me the other half of the fun is to dwell in the experience and shape an abstractly spatial being of it, place it into my mind as a station between different poles of my being. I theorize because I don't know any better. I keep returning to this book time and again, and to his poems, in themselves undertakings of a genius mind to create a new world, a function which any work of art should consciously yet as lucidly as possible promote. Each of the stories is a labyrinth for the mind, a whole microcosm of wordplays, mirrors, riddles, puzzles, mazes, doubles, self-reflection, catalogues and everything from between. A whole literary life being constructed in these short stories, much in the same way as a word-to-word memorization of a Cervantes. As with that book, everything that we experience in fiction, that feels the same has changed forever.

With best regards,
AK

So much more.......2007-04-04

My knowledge of Borges is small; before purchasing Ficciones I had only read two or three of his short stories. Enough, however, to know that it would be well worth the short time it takes to read each of these stories.

Borges had an unusual and amazing way of compressing the most stimulating, fascinating material into a small number of pages. You may read one of his stories in ten-fifteen minutes and contemplate it for a week (or more) and remember it for life. And still, you may well want to reread it many times; it has happened more than once that upon finishing a Borges short I immediately wanted to go back and start from the beginning.

The strange thoughts on infinity and the nature of existence are presented in a way that stimulates thought in a humble yet intruiging way. Ideas that may be well recognized and used in other fiction (in some cases overused) have some other element, some different approach, so that even if the premise is not "new" the experience certainly is. How this can be done, and in so few words no less, is beyond me.

This was certainly one of my very best buys and I know that this book will be well worn by my reading alone, not to mention that of the many people I will lend it to with my best recommendations. These short stories will bring beauty and excitement of the mind to many an otherwise boring, mundane day.

Sublime Ideas.......2007-03-23

Borges is an ideas man. And he can write as well. I love his concepts even more than his writing. Some of his prose reminds me of Somerset Maughn and I wonder if that is the translator or himself. Some of the stories are ones that were common in his era and he's added a twist of lemon (Both Maughn and Borges have done the 'scar on the face' story.

A firm favourite, always. I like stories that twist your brain slightly to the left.

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Borges first book of short stories

A Universal History of Infamy
Jorge Luis Borges
Manufacturer: E P Dutton
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings (New Directions Paperbook)

ASIN: 0525226702

Customer Reviews:

Borges first book of short stories.......2006-06-01

Borges first book of short stories is as good and entertaining as anything he wrote. It is probably not the first thing to read by him, though, simply because here he is still "testing" out his style. Do not misunderstand me. These stories have a style of its own, perfectly matching its kind and atmsphere. Only, it is not The Lybrary of Babel or The South...
The book is composed of seven caricaturesque and tragic stories of real but not very well known historical characters (all of them linked to some crime or other); six brief pieces written by Borges as if he were someone else, or taken from imaginary books; and one story (Man on a pink corner) that is considered his first "all by himself" short-story, a crime situated in the 1900's slums of Buenos Aires with a twisted end and unique in Borges' ouvre for his use of slang and street language. Fun to read.

The Invention of Morel (New York Review Books Classics)

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Excellent read!
A great recommendation.
Amazing Amazon information
Scifi novel of ideas
Some Great Ideas Poorly Executed

The Invention of Morel (New York Review Books Classics)
Adolfo Bioy Casares
Manufacturer: NYRB Classics
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1590170571
Release Date: 2003-08-31

Book Description

Jorge Luis Borges declared The Invention of Morel a masterpiece of plotting, comparable to The Turn of The Screw and Journey to the Center of the Earth. Set on a mysterious island, Bioy's novella is a story of suspense and exploration, as well as a wonderfully unlikely romance, in which every detail is at once crystal clear and deeply mysterious.

Inspired by Bioy Casares's fascination with the movie star Louise Brooks, The Invention of Morel has gone on to live a secret life of its own. Greatly admired by Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, and Octavio Paz, the novella helped to usher in Latin American fiction's now famous postwar boom. As the model for Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet's Last Year in Marienbad, it also changed the history of film.

Customer Reviews:

Excellent read!.......2006-04-25

If you want something to think about, how do you really feel about immortality?

A great recommendation........2006-03-28

I am a big fan of the short stories by Jorge Luis Borges. As such, Amazon kept suggesting I would enjoy this book by Casares. From time to time Amazon's system can really make annoying recommendations (I like Hamlet, so for a month, I had 300 plays by Shakespeare on my recommended page).

At first glance I thought this was a simple, he-likes-Spanish-language-authors-so-lets-recommend-another recommendation. But the similarity goes deeper. If you like Borges, I believe you will find that this books shares a similar ethos. There is a haunting quality to the protagonist's lonliness and longing.

So if you like Borges, I think you will be pleasantly surprised by Adolfo Bioy Casares and THE INVENTION OF MOREL.

Amazing Amazon information.......2005-11-01

Concordances, funny phrases, surprise pages but:

The illustrator is not Levine.
The illustrator is Borges de Torre.
Levine is the author of the Introduction.

One would expect that booksellers and book reviewers can read and write... However, some reviews found in the web claim, incorrectly, that Levine is either the translator or that she revised Simms's translation. Others list the author as Casares rather than as Bioy Casares. Sure ABC is laughing while rolling in his tomb: notice his parents humour in naming him Adolf so his initials would be ABC, as known to his friends. What better for a writer?

Scifi novel of ideas.......2005-01-01

Praised by many writers, this is a novel akin to films like "The Outsiders" or "The Sixth Sense" in that it centers around a fantastic explanation for the odd happenings over the course of the story. The explanation is so verbose and unnecessarily detailed for the function of plot alone that it purposefully strays into philosophy and how we perceive the world and interact with others. Insightful aphorisms dot the narration. The major fault I find with novels of this sort (and I believe many of the European writers are kin, like Kundera and Calvino) is that they fail to tie their mechanical plot symmetries to lifelike characters. Instead their characters talk in robotlike voices, vaguely imitating real people without the unique inflections of lifelike individuals. These authors have the imagination but not the mimetic skill to make fiction come to life. So reading them is like watching a puppet play, interesting for the plot convolutions but ultimately emotionally detached.

Some Great Ideas Poorly Executed.......2004-07-30

As in H.G. Well's The Island of Dr. Moreau, a man finds himself on an island not as abandoned as it looks - a scientist has been at work on this island as well. A thought provoking work falling somewhere between science fiction and magic realism, The Invention of Morel tackles our image based culture and our obsessions with figures who we repeatedly see, but never know. Can something of the soul be captured on film? Can we lose our souls through devotion to an image? Does the eternal now of a captured moment bestow immortality? And how real is that captured moment anyway? All good stuff this; however, this book at times also greatly disappoints. Despite its brevity, it is prone to dragging and on occasion is too obvious to master the suspense which Bioy Casares has attempted to create. Bioy Casares' technique (original in 1940 and highly praised by Borges in the volume's prologue) has been made disappointingly obvious to a new generation of readers raised on such programs as the Twilight Zone and who are more than familiar with meta-worlds and technologically created simulacrum. The novel greatly improves when these devices are dispensed. The criminal madness and paranoia of the novel's narrator also creates the unfortunate effect of either discounting his observations and insights or, if accepted, implicating the reader as a fellow paranoid fugitive trapped in a world of empty images. Yes, we may be trapped in such a world, but we are hardly as histrionic about it.

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There is no Book Borges has read that he himself
The Book of Sand
Utopia of a great wirter
ONE OF THE BEST SHORT STORY WRITERS OUT THERE, PERIOD!
Borges hits his private bullseye yet again

The Book of Sand
Jorge Luis Borges
Manufacturer: Plume
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0525475400

Customer Reviews:

There is no Book Borges has read that he himself .......2004-12-23

There is no book Borges has read that he himself has not written. In essence he is Literature and all he ever does is read himself to himself.But because he likes games and because the world has a certain intractability it is not enough for him to lose himself in such fantasies. Instead he must sit down and sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph write these masterpieces. And so he has here written a number of small masterworks each of which gives more temptation to thought than do whole libraries of many other writers. In the story for instance 'The Other' in which two Borges' one a young man and another an aging Borges meet the conservation lingers upon who is dreaming who, and whether the real Borges is either of them. We cannot know , but as readers we can take tremendous pleasure and interest in the work of this maker of ficciones and poemes who is always rereading and rewriting himself .
These small pieces all done after Borges was seventy and already blind open the mind and the eyes to one of the great worlds of modern literature. Who reads this book reads a hombre and a very great writer indeed.

The Book of Sand.......2004-12-19

The Book of Sand has thirteen stories - an accidental or fatal number, the author tells us, but not magical - and they all, more or less, deal with the same theme. While, in each and every story, there is a mystery, an enigma, a puzzle that may or may not be solved, the answer is always the same. Borges wants us to look beyond the artifices of our lives, beyond the linguistic, economic, political and religious restrictions we have given ourselves, and see the world for what it actually is.

One of the - many and varied - literary techniques that Borges uses is that of the literary reference. Always, the narrator uses an obscure reference to better make a point, or to expand the depth of a scene or image, using Tacitus, Sigurd and Brynhild, Ibsen, more. Yet, nestled quietly in between real authors and works are fictional creations, authors that are clever combinations of existing writers, works with titles that are pure fancy. The point that Borges is making is, I believe, that, with the passing of time and the simultaneously corrupting and enhancing efforts of language and culture, it does not matter if these works ever existed or not. To be affected by them it enough, to make a point or drive home an idea is enough. Four hundred years on, invoking the 'fighting windmills' phrase, does it matter if Cervantes ever really existed? Does it matter if I have or have not read the exploits of the man from La Mancha? In Borges world, the answer is no.

In one story, 'Utopia of a Tired Man', Eudoro Acevedo is transplanted from his home in the 20th century, to a place many thousands of years into the future. He meets a man, who explains the fall and rise again of mankind, who reveals the future history until 'now', when everything is different. He explains:

'The planet was populated by collective ghosts - Canada, Brazil, the Swiss Congo, and the Common Market. Almost no one knew anything of the history that preceded those platonic entities, but, of course, they knew every last detail of the most recent congress of pedagogies, or of imminent breakdowns in diplomatic relations, or of statements issued by Presidents...These things were read to be forgotten, for, only hours later, other trivialities would blot them out.'

This lengthy quote is perhaps Borges' most blatant and clear attack on the culture in which he lived. He quite obviously has a love of nature and literature and life, and bemoans the seeming lack of interest that most other people display. While the rest of the story is an interesting look at the future, it is clearly fanciful, and not an ideal world for Borges. Rather, it was written to make us think, something we just don't do enough.

The stories, composed when Borges was over 70, are for the most part an exercise in memory. A narrator of one - Ulrike - will remember a fleeting love. Another story has a group of men conversing on the problem of knowledge, which inspires an old man, 'a bit lost in metaphysics', to share a story of his youth. This is fairly typical for Borges, but is especially poignant here. The characters are remembering sad or strange or horrifying times, and nearly every single narrator mentions needing to share the tale before they die. Borges, at seventy, probably shared this opinion.

I have not taken the time to summarise Borges' short stories, for to do so would be to lose the point. Borges is capable of compressing a vast myriad of ideas and thoughts into a seven page short story, and to further reduce such themes and suggestions would be to lose them. Instead, I have commented upon what they meant to me, and what, I believe, they meant to him. Perhaps I am wrong, perhaps not, but that is the genius of Borges. He is infinitely interpretable, and should be: For each of us, there is an interpretation that fits, and for each of us, it is the right one.

Utopia of a great wirter.......2003-08-08

The review's title is, of course, a paraphrase of one of the best stories in this collection, one written when Borges was already old and wiser than ever. His wisdom is a disenchanted one, but then again he was never an exactly cheerful writer. His scope is infinite, as he deals not only with far distant lands but also with entirely imaginary ones. One of the most peculiar characteristics of Borges, acutely present in this slim volume, is his constant mixing up of reality with fantasy, of different epochs, and of true and imaginary identities.

The best example of this is the first tale, "The Other", an encounter between the young and the old Borges. Both are sitting on a bench by a river, but the young one is in Geneva in the twenties, while the old is in Cambridge, Mass., in 1969. Their conversation is friendly but distant, and it is simply impossible to read it without imagining what you would say to your younger self if you had a chance to talk to him. All the stories are good -vintage Borges-, but some of my favorites are: "Utopia of a Tired Man", a chilling encounter with a man from the distant future; "The Night of Gifts", a gaucho story of learning about sex and death in a single night; "There are more things" (English title in the original), an homage to H.P. Lovecraft; "The Book of Sand", about an infinite book.

This mature collection is a strong sample of Borges's best qualities: concision, brevity, high-octanage imagination, philosophical profundity without pretentiousness.

ONE OF THE BEST SHORT STORY WRITERS OUT THERE, PERIOD!.......2001-03-11

Speculative fiction writer Harlan Ellison was the one who introduced me to Jorge Luis Borges. In one of his introductions to his story collections, he was saying how he felt unfit to sweep up Borges' shadow, or something like that. He went on further to say that it was a pity that Borges didn't get the Noble Prize for Literature. I agree. As you can probably tell, I'm a HUGE Harlan Ellison fan, but I like Borges just as much. Anyway, this was the first book by Borges that I read, and I was MOST IMPRESSED. Here's what I remember of it: There's a short story in there somewhere where Borges says something to the extent that--the printing press was a bad invention. What! An author, whose very livelyhood depends on the modern methods of printing said THAT?! You'll have to read the story to see his explanation, but I was impressed with it. The Congress is supposed to be one of Borges' favorite stories. Personally, I didn't understand it that well, but I'm not saying that I hate it. My favorite story of the bunch? The Book of Sand. A very well written short story about a book with as many pages as there are grains of sand. The ending reminded me of the ending to Raiders of the Lost Ark in a way. If you like Ellison, Tolkien, Spanish history, literature, etc. you will like Borges a lot!

Borges hits his private bullseye yet again.......2000-01-06

I don't know much about Jorge Luis Borges the man; I'm not an expert on him as a writer either. However, I do know that nobody can write a certain kind of story better than he. His specialty is to describe, in short, succinct sentences of utmost clarity, situations of eerie strangeness, earthy gaucho confrontations, or encounters with arcane religious figures. THE BOOK OF SAND is another volume of such stories that range over many centuries and thousands of miles of geography. Some stories appear to be ancient legends, others to be autobiographical, but all, I would say, are total figments of a superb imagination. If I knew more about the writer, I might know if he had a kind of tongue-in-cheek humor or not. In a few places, just a few, some sentences have the ring of earnest or forced whimsy--a sort of wrong note in a string sonata. But, if intentional, then I have misjudged. "The Night of the Gifts" is a classic gaucho tale combined with the element of coming of age. "Utopia of a Tired Man" is a gem, which would probably grow on readers as they get older, but which at any age packs a punch in its mere seven pages. If you have ever read Borges, you will certainly like this collection. If you haven't, this might be a good place to begin, a vintage selection of the work of one of the 20th century's great writers.

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A True Lover of Books
What a great and most interesting writer
Something for everyone and some things for no one
not for the weak of mind
Mandarin

Borges: Selected Non-Fictions
Jorge Luis Borges
Manufacturer: Penguin
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0140290117
Release Date: 2000-10-31

Amazon.com

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

Book Description

This unique volume presents a Borges almost entirely unknown to American readers: his extraordinary non--fiction prose. Borges' unlimited curiosity and almost superhuman erudition become, in his essays, reviews, lectures, and political and cultural notes, a vortex for seemingly the entire universe: Dante and Ellery Queen; Shakespeare and the Kabbalah; the history of angels and the history of the tango; the Buddha, Bette Davis, and the Dionne Quints.

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism
Chosen International Book of the Year by George Steiner in the Times Literary Supplement

Customer Reviews:

A True Lover of Books.......2007-07-03

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!

What a great and most interesting writer .......2006-05-08

Eliot Weinberger has done a real service to the world of literature by selecting, and translating these pieces. They show the range of interest, the incredible ability to make inventive creative cross- connections of one of Modern Literature's true masters, Borges.
Borges covers worlds in his writing, worlds of Literature , worlds of the Argentinean society he and some of his ancestors grew up in, worlds given in a universal encycopediac reading, which seems to cover all continents and all cultures.
Borges greatest work is considered to be his ' Ficciones'. But his signature is present in all , in a single page of a book- review or a philosphical meditation.
For him worlds mingle and combine, and are retranslated in such a way as to reappear as Literature.
He also in this work reveals himself to be a decent and courageous opponent of Fascism.
He confounds and surprises us at times with these strange mixings of things, but the poetic and parable- like element is so strong in this work that it engages us, and forces us to question our own small pictures of reality.
What a great and interesting writer. What a pleasure to have this work to enrich our minds with.

Something for everyone and some things for no one.......2005-08-11

Because Borges lived and worked in Argentina, few have heard of him in the English-speaking world. Those that have are probably most familiar with his fiction stories. This book of non-fiction essays shows the vast knowledge and wide variation of interests of Borges. Therefore, this collection really does have something for everyone. Unfortunately, there are also many essays that are unreadable, some annoying repititions, and some essays are just plain dull.

So, what does Borges write about? He covers some metaphysical ground on the nature of time and infinity. He defines heaven as an infinite library, and then goes into the nature of infinity. On the more mundane end, he reviews movies and gives capsule biographies of authors - King Kong, Citizen Kane, and more obscure (and not necessarily Hollywood) films. He writes on contemporary (at the time) politics - Nazi Germany, the curators of the national library, etc. He gets intensely personal - there is one essay on the progression of his blindness. But if there is a main theme that permeates these pieces, it's his love of literature in all languages - Spanish, English (old and modern), German. He has an abiding love of the Greek classics (Homer, Virgil) and great admiration for Joyce, Poe, and Chesterton.

Unfortunately, those of us with a less classical education cannot keep up to everything that Borges says - I, for one, will never have the time to learn ancient Greek! - which makes certain essays difficult. There are other essays (especially early on) that are simply unintellegible (this may be the fault of the translators, especially since there are times when two or three essays cover the same ground with increasing degrees of murkiness). But it always happened that a real gem would appear just when I was getting frustrated with a series of uninteresting essays.

On the balance, about a third of the essays are not interesting (or badly translated, or repetitions), a third are interesting if not spectacular, and the final third have at least one moment of sheer brilliance. It's well worth buying, but it's unlikely you'll read it from cover to cover without taking a break - I took many breaks to read other things, and it took me over 1.5 years to complete the whole book. But you know what? - on the balance, I like his non-fiction better than his fiction

not for the weak of mind.......2005-07-20

I read first one of his books titled "Ficciones" which really struck me because I never imagined a writer such book. It was fantastic so I proceeded to read this one.
This book just blew me away. I wonder how came up with all these ideas. I never get tired of reading his books. Sometimes I get a little bit dizzy because his ideas and concepts are hard to comprehend.
This book is like to read math theorems. If you like theorems, get this book. It breaks all of them.

Mandarin.......2004-08-31

Kafka knew the pathetic result of procrastination. Resultantly he ordered Max Brod to destroy his work. Two ideas govern Kafka's work, Borges maintains, subordination and infinity. His works contain infinite hierarchies. Kipling and Nietzsche shadow both Jack London and Ernest Hemingway who were both men of action.

Borges blocks out a personal library wonderfully and amusingly. He compares Kierkegaard to Hamlet! Useful notes appear at the back of the book. The volume contains 161 pieces. The introduction of Eliot Weinberger notes that Borges was a master of concision. Borges characterizes James Joyce as a millionaire of words and styles.

As a young man he postulated that all literature is autobiographical. He charges the belief in the inferiority of translations is a superstition. For reason of causality, temporal succession, texts always seem right. Rereading makes them better, more inevitable. The English have an apetite for adventure and legality Borge asserts. A detective narrative encompasses both passions. Borges writes of Croce, Dreiser, S.S. VanDine, Spengler, V. Woolf, T.S. Eliot, and many other writers. He finds Aldous Huxley's fame excessive. He claims for Huxley an intolerable lucidity.

Novelists present a memory of reality. Borges casts MOBY DICK as the infinite novel. One of the pieces is called "The History of the Tango." Borges proclaims the tango is sexual and violent. It has a compensatory function. Swift and Flaubert were fascinated by madness. The concepts espoused by Carlyle are an obvious Presbyterian legacy. Emerson professed a fantastic philosophy, monism. The Germans were very moved by Defoe's ROBINSON CRUSOE and produced countless imitations.

Gibbon's DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE has been a recognized masterpiece for two hundred years. Swedenborg anticipated the nebular theory of Laplace and Kant. He would have liked to talk to Sir Isaac Newton. Borges describes his blindness, an hereditary affliction of his father and grandmother too. He explains that the blind live in a world that is inconvenient. Milton, the historian Prescott, and James Joyce were blind.

This is an appropriate selection of prose works of an incredibly bright mind.

The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld

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Too good to be true
If you liked the movie then you'll LOVE this book
Gangs of New York
A classic, ruined by the film
An Example of Nativist Bigotry

The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld
Herbert Asbury
Manufacturer: Thunder's Mouth Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1560252758

Book Description

The Gangs of New York has long been hand-passed among its cult readership. It is a tour through a now unrecognizable city of abysmal poverty and habitual violence cobbled, as Luc Sante has written, “from legend, memory, police records, the self-aggrandizements of aging crooks, popular journalism, and solid historical research.” Asbury presents the definitive work on this subject, an illumination of the gangs of old New York that ultimately gave rise to the modern Mafia and its depiction in films like The Godfather. “A universal history of infamy [that] contains all the confusion and cruelty of the barbarian cosmologies....”—Jorge Luis Borges “The tale is one of blood, excitement and debauchery.”—The New York Times Book Review “The Gangs of New York is one of the essential works of the city....”—Luc Sante, The New York Review of Books

Customer Reviews:

Too good to be true.......2007-05-09

Herbert Asbury has developed in this book a delightfully readable (and read-out-loudable) history of the dark underbelly of New York City--the picaresque and downright nasty underground of gambling tongs, gang warfare and thorough political corruption.

I of course came to this book only recently, after having seen the Scorsese film of the same name. It is in fact quite wonderful to see the liberties Scorsese took to make a challenging film and not just a recapping of this oral-style history. Familiar names and events and places appear in the mist, but in a whole new context. This book will let you know that the incredible Scorsese movie merely scratches the surface of the NYC underworld from the Civil War era to the start of the 20th dentury, if this book is to be believed.

It is this last point that gives me some pause about this book. As I said before, this book is eminently readable and enjoyable. The webs of rivalry and alliance, of rumbles that go on for hours, riots that go on for days, tales of violence and retribution and a host of characters whose corruption and indulgence o'ershadow even the prohibition days of Chicago. Asbury freely admits when some of his tales are mere folklore, stories that criminals pass along to each other as legends, drastically overexaggerrated to confer the level of respect of awe that a gang leader or significant change of the balance of power has earned.

But sometimes it's hard to believe the level of reliable research that could have gone into so many other ta1es. The histories of particular criminals are detailed down to their dismemberment by cannon fire in the Civil War, or their miserable ends to cowardly ambush or the breaking of spirits after a particularly bad loss of business or to a mightier opponent, or to their incarceration, and the mug shots are wonderfully stylish, but it is hard to stomach easily the thoroughness of the information, unless Asbury was a devotee of the Five Corners and other such areas of ill-repute in its heyday. No doubt there was prodigious information provided by police records and other data, but perhaps this is a book to be taken more as a work of social anthropology than history--an examination of the underworld culture of NYC in this time period rather than a necessarily accurate historical document. One part bragging, another part horror, and a wonderful gaze at the debaucheries of the ale houses and gambling establishments down Asbury's nose in a way that seems sometimes sincere, sometimes a little over the top for the sake of appearances, this book is worth the read, especially to spread stories to others...just don't accept it readily as 'fact.'

If you liked the movie then you'll LOVE this book.......2006-12-14

I enjoyed the movie, but I truly loved this book. The book is better than the movie,for sure. Worth the price. Easy to read. I wasn't able to put it down!

Gangs of New York.......2006-11-29

This is an interesting history of gangs in New York City from the mid 1800's to I believe somewhere around the early 1920's. Talks about the many street battles and colorful characters, some of which seem to border on being folklore. These guys were legitimate hand to hand tough guys, not like the later weasely mafia types that would have somebody else shoot you in the back. These guys would fight it out themselves in the streets, in fact some of the guys talked about in this book were among the top bare knuckle boxers of their day and are featured prominently in a history of bare knuckle boxing book that I have.

A classic, ruined by the film.......2006-11-18

An account of the gangsters of NYC from the earliest days. There is some amazing untold history here. One which really struck me was the stories of the draft riots in NYC of the civil war. Apparently there was a $300 draft exemption whereby the well to do could get out of being turned into lunch meat in the civil war. It didn't go over well with the working class Irish in the city, who revolted (about 1/10 of the population was actively involved in the several days of riots) and made a huge mess of the place. Lots of interesting tidbits about river pirates, "the dead rabbit gang" (they marched under the banner of an impaled rabbit; "rabbit" incidentally, had numerous double entendres in those days which no longer exist), Monk Eastman, Dopey Benny, the Gopher gang, Bill the Butcher, Lupo the Wolf and other notorious gangsters from the beginning of NYC until the 1920s. This stuff makes the Mafia look like nice orderly guys.

The book is written in the yellow journalistic style of its day, which I personally find charming and a refreshing change from the bland melange of moralizing pieties we get as writing on such subjects now a days. Others may disagree with my tastes, but it is unquestionable this is an artifact of its era.

I read this some years before the film came out, and am in retrospect very happy indeed that I did so. The film has nothing to do with the book, other than taking a few characters and props from the book, and bloating them into a ridiculous Hollywood costume abomination. The book is a treasure for people who are interested in gangs and underworlds of previous generations. Far more than today, the gangs provided the social infrastructure of lower class societies in those days. The fact that only a few artifacts of these eras survive makes books like this quite wonderful time capsules.

An Example of Nativist Bigotry.......2006-11-14

A writer for the Irish Echo said this book should have been titled "The Protocols of the Elders of Erin." It was written around the time Al Smith was running for president and appealed to the nativist, anti-Catholic prejudices of upstate New York and America at that time. While there really were gangs in that era, most of New York's immigrants were busy building hospitals and schools like St. Vincent's, Fordham, St. John's, Manhattan and Manhattanville. The vast majority of the city's population including its immigrants didn't riot in 1863. In fact New York City's 200,000 soldiers and sailors, more than half of whom were immigrants, won over 100+ Medals of Honor during America's Civil War.

It's a tribute to the persistence of prejudice that this book isn't more widely recognized as the nasty practical joke that it is.

Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (New Directions Paperbook, 186)

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Writings of a great reader
Enjoy Borges
The place to start with Borges
Timeless literature
Satisfying estrangement for restless, unsold minds

Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (New Directions Paperbook, 186)
Jorge Luis Borges
Manufacturer: New Directions Publishing Corporation
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0811200124

Amazon.com

If Jorge Luis Borges had been a computer scientist, he probably would have invented hypertext and the World Wide Web.

Instead, being a librarian and one of the world's most widely read people, he became the leading practitioner of a densely layered imaginistic writing style that has been imitated throughout this century, but has no peer (although Umberto Eco sometimes comes close, especially in Name of the Rose).

Borges's stories are redolent with an intelligence, wealth of invention, and a tight, almost mathematically formal style that challenge with mysteries and paradoxes revealed only slowly after several readings. Highly recommended to anyone who wants their imagination and intellect to be aswarm with philosophical plots, compelling conundrums, and a wealth of real and imagined literary references derived from an infinitely imaginary library.

Customer Reviews:

Writings of a great reader.......2007-09-09

In "How To Read a Book" Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren describe the fourth level of reading. Synoptical reading challenges the reader who, having carefully and thoroughly understood several individual works, strives to hear the conversation of their ensemble. "Labyrinths" brings us the dreamlike reflections of Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges's profoundly synoptical reading. Borges heard the conversation of writers across cultures, centuries, languages, genres. Then he came back to outline over and over the one nearly infinite and unattainable truth in these stories, essays, and parables.

Yet Borges's writings remain humble and personal. With the voice of a shy, erudite uncle, Borges recounts magical reveries that came to him deep in the stacks of some dim basement of the library. Throughout the text the reader feels at once the quiet loneliness of the bookworm, the presence of the immortal, and the terrible portents in the twilight rustling of leaves.

Enjoy Borges.......2007-01-10

A nice light book for travel if you do not need all his works in one volume.

The place to start with Borges.......2006-09-18

First, a memory: at the age of 19, I walked into a college elective course on Latin American literature, and was presented with a syllabus which included several works by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, Carlos Fuentes, Manuel Puig, Julio Cortazar, and Jorge Luis Borges. We were to begin with Borges, which became a life-changing discovery.

Since then, Borges has come to stand alongside Vladimir Nabokov as my favorite writer; they are two people whose writing I couldn't imagine not knowing. And LABYRINTHS is the place to begin - it's where I started, and once a year or so, it's the collection I most readily return to.

Other reviewers have done an excellent job of summing up his style, so instead of rehashing, I'll zero in on some favorites: "Death And The Compass," which blends Borges' vast knowledge of global histories and religions with his love of pulp and genre conventions; the end results are a metaphysical mystery like no others. Or "The Sect Of The Phoenix," which - in the most simplistic analysis - is a birds-and-bees discourse undertaken with unusual originality, and enhanced with anthropological allegories.

Other high-water marks include "A New Refutation Of Time," "The Garden Of Forking Paths," the brief "Borges And I" and "Pierre Menard, Author Of The Quixote." I would note that there's not a false moment to be found here, and after dozens of re-readings, I still enjoy finding new secrets hidden within these crystalline fictions, parables and essays.

Anyone with a love of literature should get to know Borges.

-David Alston

Timeless literature.......2006-07-29

This is a very fine collection, which in its condensed form manages to distill the essence of Borges' writing. The book contains selected fictions and essays of the great Argentine writer. A brief preface by Andre Maurois serves as a useful introduction to Borges.

In the short fictions and the essays that follow, the reader gets to freely partake in the world of Borges; all of his great themes and motifs are here - labyrinths, mirrors ("mirrors and copulations are abominable, because they increase the number of men"), time distortion (he was intrigued by Zeno's paradox since his childhood days), dreams in which characters are actors in others' dreams, infinite libraries that contain exhaustive sets of linguistic permutations...

Borges' writing style is precise and taut, almost scientific; one does not find extended, florid passages in his prose. The short fictions are not so much about poetic description (though Borges also wrote poetry) - instead the beauty of the writing lies in its ideas and their wonderful intelligence. Every word seems to have its specific function - this is doubly true because toward mid-life Borges lost his eyesight. He composed his wonderful thoughts and stories in his head and then had them dictated. For the average reader this means that to read Borges requires some effort and the full capture of one's attention - these are not writings that you breeze through, read once and then forget about. The enjoyment lies in the contemplation. Borges was a genuine `man of letters', probably one of the most widely read and erudite people in the recent history of literary discourse. He was especially fond of Berkeley and Schopenhauer and the philosophy of idealism is a topic that he found immensely interesting (this is evident in many of his stories). Today, the writings of Borges are not only treasures to lovers of literature - he is also highly regarded among some contemporary philosophers and scientists. Dan Dennett has written that while Borges is not traditionally considered a philosopher (he once defined philosophy as "that organization of the essential perplexities of man") in his brief meditations, he has given to philosophy some of the most fascinating thought-experiments. Dennett makes extensive use of `The Library of Babel' in particular. Oliver Sacks has often quoted from and referred to `Funes the Memorious' in his discussions on mnemonists.

"Labyrinths" is not by any means a complete collection of Borges' work - in fact, some of my favorite Borges pieces are not included here (`The South', `The Other Death'. `The Aleph' to name a few) but it is still an excellent resource. The translations are of high quality and for a reader not familiar with Borges this makes the perfect first book to buy.

Borges was truly a giant of South American and for that matter, world literature. Italo Calvino was right to be thoroughly exasperated that Borges never received the Nobel; he famously said that having given the Nobel to Marquez before Borges was tantamount to giving it to the son before the father. This is timeless literature, by which I mean that it belongs to a rare class of books which do not have an `expiry date' - one can keep returning to them, over and over, throughout life, reading and re-reading and never exhausting. I often imagine Borges as a kind of eternal figure - one thinks of him still inhabiting his beloved libraries, blind to the world and dreaming of labyrinths and mirrors that reflect infinity.

Satisfying estrangement for restless, unsold minds.......2005-10-17

I imagine in my mind what it would be like to have coffee with Luis Borges on a Sunday afternoon. Borges would be wearing a suit and have little cakes on hand, cane leaning on his armrest, as if nothing out of the ordinary were about to occur.

Labyrinths is a useful first book to kick off a lifetime investigation into Borges' writings. Borges is truly original as an author as much for his intent as for his achieving it. Not quite Magic Realist, not quite Existentialist nor Kafkan: no one is Borges' equal in taking established assumptions and turning them into curious, elaborate, eruditely-supported flashing crossroads that defy simplification.

Even the most unassuming essays like "The Fearful Sphere of Pascal," a subtle historical resketching, are characteristically erudite, yet sticky and complicate the subject irresistibly from your first reading onward. The prickly thorns reach out for your existing education on the subject and are designed to flesh out the glaring inconsistencies you will have read on the subject.

The Garden of Forking Paths is an example of prime Borges storytelling at work. The story itself is a ruse. The first reading-through is not the time you are affected most by Borges, but rather only AFTER you have put the book down, when the Borges' physics of Being begin to gnaw at your world of compact, necessary daily conveniences, even in 2005 when we really ought to be intimately familiar with his universe by now. I think ultimately Borges sets tiny mind bombs set to detonate at exactly the time you seek to superimpose a Newtonian universe upon one of his stories, and ultimately, later, when you seek to superimpose order upon your own human experience. The entrance seems the same, but it has clearly moved by the time you exit the story. You become part of the puzzle, and that is the bedazzling signature of Borges, and his unassailable virtue. Everything solid in the universe of daily lived experience becomes compost and peacefully unsettled, as it originally was, before we came along to fix it up like morticians just before the funeral.

Average customer rating:

The poet Borges less
This book is a treasure.
Worth the time, very translatable poet
Borges shines, translations are uneven
Translated?

Borges: Selected Poems
Jorge Luis Borges
Manufacturer: Penguin (Non-Classics)
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0140587217
Release Date: 2000-04-03

Amazon.com

During his life, Jorge Luis Borges wore many hats. He was, variously, a poet, an essayist, a short-story writer, a librarian, and, for a short time, a poultry inspector. Born in Argentina in 1899, he lived for several years in Europe before eventually returning home to Buenos Aires in the early 1920s. It was here that Borges started his career as a writer. At the age of 24, he published his first volume of poetry, and though he would go on to garner considerable acclaim as an essayist and crafter of fiction, he always considered himself first and foremost a poet. This bilingual edition of Selected Poems, edited by Alexander Coleman, gathers together 200 poems from different periods of Borges's life, including some that will be appearing in English for the first time.

Whether he was writing fiction, essays, or poetry, there were certain themes and subjects that Borges returned to time and again. His home town became a favorite topic--in his first collection, Fervor de Buenos Aires, he wrote: "My soul is in the streets / of Buenos Aires," a sentiment that remained constant throughout his life. This collection reveals other preoccupations as well--with history in all its permutations, Borges's own ancestry, and his fascination with metaphysics, mazes, mirror images, and the blurry line between parallel realities:

The celibate white cat surveys himself
in the mirror's clear-eyed glass,
not suspecting that the whiteness facing him
and those gold eyes that he's not seen before
in ramblings through the house are his own likeness.
Who is to tell him the cat observing him
is only the mirror's way of dreaming?

This companion volume to Andrew Hurley's new translation of Collected Fictions boasts a stellar cast of translators, including W.S. Merwin, Mark Strand, and John Updike among others. Admirers of Borges will find Selected Poems a fitting memorial to the great man; and for those have never had the pleasure of reading him before, this book is a wonderful introduction. --Alix Wilber

Book Description

An unparalleled and long-overdue volume of poetry by "the most important Spanish writer since Cervantes"(Mario Vargas Llosa).

Though universally acclaimed for his dazzling fictions, Jorge Luis Borges always considered himself first and foremost a poet. This new bilingual selection brings together some two hundred poems--the largest collection of Borges' poetry ever assembled in English, including scores of poems never previously translated. Edited by Alexander Coleman, the selection draws from a lifetime's work--from Borges' first published volume of verse, Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923), to his final work, Los conjurados, published just a year before his death in 1986. Throughout this unique collection the brilliance of the Spanish originals is matched by luminous English versions by a remarkable cast of translators, including Robert Fitzgerald, Stephen Kessler, W. S. Merwin, Alastair Reid, Mark Strand, Charles Tomlinson, and John Updike.

"A surfeit of riches. . . . Jorge Luis Borges' poetry alone would be enough to underwrite his immense reputation."-- San Francisco Chronicle

Exquisitely packaged edition with French flaps and rough front, quality paper stock.

Customer Reviews:

The poet Borges less.......2004-12-13

This review is about a single question. Why if Borges considered himself a poet above all, and if this book contains as it does contain most of his major themes are his real readers and his real fame the readers of his stories essays and short prose-pieces ? Why is the most loved Borges not found in the poems when the poems too do at times like the stories tell stories?
Perhaps it is because the language of poetry is more dense and ambigious and breaks the flow of the story. Perhaps it is because on the nonetheless more extended palette of the story a more extensive picture can be painted. Perhaps it is because too the element of mystery so great in Borges work comes to us in a stronger way in a narrative telling? Or perhaps too Borges whether he likes it or not is in his lists and his recollections really more a figure of prose than of poetry. And perhaps and this the real paradox Borges poetry is too more prose- like than poetic in many ways. Perhaps his way of going on in such intellectual questioning fashion renders his poetry more mind- like and less in deep lyric feeling than the deepest poetry means?
I ask this as prelude to saying a few words about these poems most of which I have read, and few of which I remember.And this too is part of it. The Borges name is connected with those tales from The Aleph to Funes to Borges and I . It is less connected with any of the poems
And all of this review seems now to me somehow unfair. Borges is a great writer and his words mean more than anything written about them. Reading these poems will give so much pleasure , so much material for reflection, so many characters, stories, moods, ideas, dreams, passages of life, labyrinths, ships, coffee cups, imitations, duels in the sun and duels in the darkness, light as a metaphor and light as light, darkness as darkness and darkness as sight, worlds within and more worlds within and more worlds within and without and words as literature true literature literature of the tradition that the maker Borges makes and remakes and makes and remakes a poem.

This book is a treasure. .......2004-11-02

It is strange reviewing it. It's like reviewing some sacred book...
The whole World is here. And more... Here is Argentina with its familiar (to Borges) streets; here is a poem about chess, the Moon, tigers. Men. Here is Iceland in all its beauty and past; in a way no one else can ever portray it. Beautiful poems about art, God, history, mirrors, death, life, war, Shinto, Love, time, eternity, blindness, mortality, emotion, thoughts... everything and nothing...
Through this precious book we may perceive all of this through Borges' blind, ever watching, tired eyes.
I love to be lost in all those words...

Worth the time, very translatable poet.......2004-05-13

Borges possesses a very universal mind, as anyone who has read him knows. For this reason his poetry is also relatively translatable. It contains almost every important poem, with conjectures being his most famous. The translation provided is fairly good, although there are several instances of misjudgement, or that is my opinion anyway. For instance, one work title ¨El enemigo generoso¨ (the generous enemy) is translated into english as ¨The generous friend¨. While I certainly can appreciate the irony of this translation and its potential irony, i think borges, as an incredible mind, should be left to decide these matters for himself. Unless the cover first lists the translators'names. Nonetheless Borges'poetry is overshadowed by his shortstories (Ficciones and El Aleph), and I recommend all to read this book. Great diversity, and a very original mind

Borges shines, translations are uneven.......2004-02-16

Borges was fascinated by English. As a kid, he grew up speaking it with his English grandmother and he spent the rest of his life ransacking the treasure-chest of English and American literature. In a famous prose-poem published in 1960, "Borges and I", he could cite Robert Louis Stevenson's prose as one his favorite things (alongside the taste of coffee and the strumming of a guitar). And even after he lost his eyesight in mid-age, most of the books he went on reading in his mind were in English.

Consequently, he sounds good in translation. It's tough to make Neruda or Lorca or even a lot of novelists writing in Spanish sound clear and convincing in English. Lorca, for example, wrote in a distinctively Andalusian idiom, and nobody who has never read his poetry in the original can understand how stilted he sounds in English. Borges, by contrast, had a more universal intellect and the strands of his writing span many non-Hispanic cultures. His reading in many different literatures left a deep imprint on him linguistically and helps explain why his work translates so well into other languages. While it's true that much of his poetry has a distinctly Argentine "flavor", it has many other flavors, as well. Depending on the poem, Borges can evoke Quevedo, Leopoldo Lugones, "Beowulf", the Icelandic Prose Edda, Whitman, Omar Khayyam, or Ralph Waldo Emerson. And yet the English influence is present in virtually all of his work.

Thirteen translators are featured in this anthology and the quality varies. Barnstone and Merwin are, as usual, impeccably accurate and 1000% unadventurous. Robert Fitzgerald shows yet again that his last name must be some kind of cosmic byword for quality (F. Scott, Edward, Ella, now Robert...). His version of "Odyssey, Book Twenty-Three" is breathtakingly tight and sweeping, actually more of a rendition than a word-for-word translation. Unlike Barnstone's somewhat stilted versions of Borges' sonnets, Fitzgerald manages to stick to the original rhyme-scheme without sounding forced. Unfortunately, he only did five poems in this book. ¡Qué lastima!

Alistair Reid did most of the work here. Reid is a perfect example of a fine translator who did some really great stuff back in the '60s, then apparently revised it to make stuffy literalists like Barnstone happy. For example, he took an excellent translation of "Limits" (which appeared in a 1967 book called "A Personal Anthology", which basically launched Borges's reputation in the United States) and altered it to make the words stick more closely to the original Spanish word order. It's still a good translation and all, but not as good as the first one. Other than that, though, I don't have any bones to pick with Reid.

Translated?.......2001-06-07

Although in the beginning I ignored the Spanish, the English should serve as little more than a crutch for those who study Spanish. Heck, I'm a lowly second-year student and as I'm plugging away at the book, I'm amazed at how great the translations are on their own -- and how little they show Borges' style to an English audience. The poems are great in either language -- but if you have a knowledge of Spanish, you'd be best off buying a completely Spanish volume if you could find it for less.

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