Postby ich1990 » Sat Oct 24, 2009 6:25 pm
“Ficciones” by Jorge Luis Borges
I would like to preface this review by thanking bigsleepj and the_wolfs_howl for routinely mentioning how awesome Borges is, thereby bringing to my attention his writings which I may have otherwise overlooked.
Borges' writing style is unlike anything I have ever read before. It is supremely intellectual, yet intensely creative as well. His stories are almost a perfect blend of thought and feeling, and if I read his stories for any lengthy period of time I find those combined forces push me firmly beyond reality. One minute I will be sitting on a couch reading, the next I will be wandering down some corridor in an infinite library, ruminating on a thousand philosophic subtleties. These otherworldly feelings are often so strong that I have to stop reading and wait a half an hour to allow myself to return fully to the real world. That is powerful writing, especially considering these are short stories, not multi-volume epics.
Not all of his stories in this collection affected me similarly, however. Some of the more cerebral literary explorations, like “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius ” and “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote”, I found merely fascinating. These experiences (good though they were) where all but overwhelmed by stories such as the aforementioned “The Library of Babel”, the astounding “The Circular Ruins”, and the profound “The Garden of Forking Paths” --any one of of which would have made me a Borges fan-for-life by its own merit. Even his (for lack of a better word) heretical “Three Versions of Judas” is more poetic and, well, romantic, than it is antagonistic towards the Faith.
While I had intended to pick up Borges' “Labyrinths”, it was sadly unavailable throughout the entire chain of libraries that I frequent (certainly an abominable fact). This volume, a seventeen story compilation of the collections “The Garden of Forking Paths” and “Artifices”, nonetheless served as a fine introduction to Borges' short fiction, and has gone a very long way towards making Borges one of my favorite authors ever. I only hope that his other writings are this good. 10/10
Where an
Eidolon, named night, on a black throne reigns upright.