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Rating: The Aleph is a letter derived from the Hebrew alphabet whose symbol comes in turn from the Phoenician one, and it is used in mathematics to indicate the cardinality of numbers (Georg Cantor), that is, the number of sets in a finite set. The Aleph, for Borges, is the beginning, the whole, the end; The Aleph, for the fortunate readers of these scant 200 pages, is a series of fantastic tales centered on the themes of life, death, time, infinity, and destiny, constantly mixed in a literary-philosophical game unmatched for its imagination and elegance.
Published in 1949, the work unfolds in 17 stories that exhaustively portray the issues faced by the Argentine writer, as immediately evident in the introductory episode, "The Immortal." Historical context, characters, and events are, in this story as in the following ones, purely invented, reinvented, so much so that the author draws from characters and places that sometimes really existed, reassigning them at will in what becomes the enigmatic space-time game typical of the Argentine master. Indebted to classical literature and many modern authors, as he customarily admits ("All books are copied", cit.), he introduces with this first step the themes close to him, narrating in the first person the mysterious events that transport the protagonist from Thebes to the city of the Immortals through the fiery path of the desert. A goal as inconceivable as the aforementioned city of the Immortals becomes the spontaneous theater for staging the nightmares and visions of the writer, who hypothesizes a place without time and without history (or, better said, concerning all of history in its entirety), where one questions the effect that an endless life would provoke. The inhabitants of such a community are no one and are all men (to support the theses on Borges' infinity and time that devours everything), and the narrative turns into a pretext to philosophically talk about human existence; the last handful of words of this writing summarizes Borges' thoughts on the circumstances and practices that guide reality: "I have been Homer; soon, I will be no one, like Ulysses; soon, I will be everyone: I will be dead." With "The Immortal" opens a cycle of narrations perpetually bordering on the fantastic, portrayed with cultural and stylistic imagination, as the erudition, which appears automatic in the written word, is at the same time juxtaposed with popular episodes or a more accessible language, a device that allows maintaining a discursive level always on the edge between reality and dream, between memory and mythology.
As one delves into the mosaic of episodes offered, more and more of that "ordered chaos" is discovered, that peculiar page and word management of Borges: "The Dead Man," the second fragment of the collection, outlines the fate of Benjamin Otalora, an Argentine outlaw, who escapes his enemies as well as the reader, in a succession of circumstances that divert any certainty about the real existence (once again and as throughout the volume) of characters, places, and events. The cycle of stories continues and borders on what, according to the author in the epilogue, is the account of a dream called "The Theologians." Cultural epicenter of the collection, the harmonious dialogue with the classical-Hellenic tradition becomes, already from the first lines, a sort of cataloging of anecdotes, dates, and illustrious characters of the time, sinuously positioned and reinterpreted in Borges' oneiric meanderings. The continuation sees three stories succeed, in order, titled "Story of the Warrior and the Captive," "Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz," and "Emma Zunz," which might seem at a first approach as material in the opposite direction to the fantastic and imaginary tangle that pervades the other stories of "The Aleph".
And now? Yes, up to now the review has been detailed, orderly, organized based on the succession of stories. But is this the true way to approach Borges, to delve into the inner undergrowth whose doors swing open at the first letter of the first word of the first page? If you have appreciated the review so far, this book is not for you. Borges is not for you. Believe me, I'm not using a trivial gimmick to give that touch of originality to my page (for what purpose?), I'm just trying to make you visualize the crossroads your mind reaches once this descriptively spewed drivel has been read by me. Do not misunderstand the approach to the cold, sterile, greedy square prose that belongs to me above to the elegant mathematical space-time vision fostered by Our man's imagination. Borges is not for everyone, and even more so, this book. Borges is probably, certainly, not even for me. I cannot aspire to that much. But who can say to acquire the word of this blind writer simply by reading him? It is inevitable to think of this work as a devilish philosophical material or a powerful perpetual-effect alkaloid, something that will have strong repercussions on our conscience and psyche. An entity that, once the manuscript is taken in hand, will settle in us and will not come out. It will have an impact on all the choices we make, will change our perception of life, of light, of the Aleph. I do not want to go further, procrastinating arduously concepts that cannot even be explained results in an elegiac practice. Already speaking in these terms of a book that perhaps does not even exist seems like a crazy solipsism.
Does this seem more convincing to you? This swerve with a consequent spin is more in line with the reactions generated at your meeting with Borges? Then you are once again, totally off track. Like me.
And is this last one any better?
And so on, cyclically.
This book cannot be understood, still less reviewed.
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