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Rating: When I read Borges, I feel the same wonder as when listening to a physicist talk about infinite spaces, stars that are born and die, laws that govern the movement of celestial bodies; it's all so complicated, yet he makes it seem so simple, as if it were all a fairy tale. This is the sensation I get when reading his stories, which discuss history and historical figures, philosophies from around the world, cities, myths, time, memory, books, science fiction, chance, religions, and much, much more.
Borges did not write novels; he wrote short stories, hundreds of brief tales published in about a dozen collections. This review appears under the collection titled “Ficciones,” which is dearest to me, but I could have used the same words to review “El Aleph,” “The Book of Sand,” "Book of Dreams," etc. Yes, because everything Borges wrote is simply magic loaned to literature. It is no coincidence that with him, magical realism was discussed for the first time, a movement later epitomized by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
In an increasingly fast-paced world, reading Borges' stories is like having a coffee on a terrace caressed by the sea breeze, a moment of escape in which to lose oneself in the meanderings of history and philosophy. The erudite Borges knew how to take the great literary/philosophical work that man has written over millennia, absorb it, mix it, and offer it back in the form of short stories.
I don't think it makes sense to describe one by one the stories contained in “Ficciones” or other collections; each is a small gem, enlightening and controversial, not always immediately understandable, but surely carrying a great meaning. If you haven't done so yet, try at least once in your life to read Borges.
"The man, this imperfect librarian, can be the work of chance or malevolent demiurges; the universe, with its elegant provision of shelves, enigmatic volumes, tireless ladders for the traveler, and latrines for the seated librarian, can only be the work of a god"
From The Library of Babel, Ficciones
"Then I reflected that everything happens to everyone precisely, precisely now. Centuries and centuries, and only in the present do the events occur; countless men in the air, on the earth and the sea, and everything that really happens, happens to me"
From The Garden of Forking Paths, Ficciones
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Other reviews
By macaco
"Better to pretend these books already exist, and present a summary, a commentary."
"Ficciones is a watershed between what he read and what he will read, a concentrate of imagination, shaper of a new precious literary material."
