Ficciones

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He explains, “Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe that in the future he will be.

The Secret Miracle” ― A Jewish playwright is arrested by the Nazis and sentenced to die by firing squad.

In 1941, Borges's second collection of fiction, El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (English: The Garden of Forking Paths) was published. By stressing the weightiness of Borges's stories, and the red herrings that distracted me sometimes, I may have given the impression that the stories are long. And only read the last few days apart giving me a chance to fully think about about them, this worked so much better, but still left me feeling a bit dumbfounded.

Dicho lo anterior, y dejando un poco de lado la parte objetiva, esta recopilación de cuentos me ha parecido algo muy diferente a lo que suelo leer, y la sorpresa que me llevé no fue la más grata en términos generales. The Circular Ruins, The Library of Babel, The Garden of Forking Paths and The Secret Miracle being alright and scant few others like An Examination of Herbert Quain and The End only fair. I met Arkadiusz Juhász when he threw a crust of bread at my head and laughed in that way that he does. I cannot imagine the universe without the interjection of Edgar Allan Poe“ --Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote.Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is a story that gives us imaginary countries and worlds that get into encyclopedias and take on a life of their own.

There’s a twist to this tale, echoing the Irishman’s portentous comment that “[w]hat one man does is something done, in some measure, by all men. In the same year, Grove Press published the entirety of the book in English using the same title as in the original language. I will take some time, I will read it once again in the next few weeks and most likely I will change the rating of this book. By this point, I have bought a new copy of Ficciones, and read it with thoughts of George in the back of my mind.The sand in the hour glass is flowing faster than you think, and there will be times when it inexplicably speeds up. I also enjoyed the struggle for freedom expressed in several novels, Tlön, Orbis Tertius, and The Lottery in Babylon. It is only made larger by the penumbra, the symmetry, the mirrors, the years, my ignorance, the solitude.

As a first-time Borges reader I hoped and even expected that Kerrigan’s introduction would yield some nugget of advice, a clue into how to approach Borges’ chef d’oeuvre. George is across town, watching his girlfriend get dressed for the day, scratching his head, itching to open the book in his bedside table. Another school declares that the whole of time has already happened and that our life is a vague memory or dim reflection, doubless false and fragmented, of an irrevocable process” --Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. FICTIONS is perhaps the single most mysterious and extraordinary collection of short stories written this century.

These stories and mock essays are a challenging mixture of philosophy, magical realism, fantasy, ruminations on the nature of life, perception and more. John Barth“The economy of his prose, the tact of his imagery, the courage of his thought are there to be admired and emulated.