Labyrinths

JL Borges is, in my view, the greatest literary mind of the 20th Century.

This is a book of stories, philosophical essays and parables, but even when he is writing fiction, his favoured form is that of the mock critical essay about a non-existent book or writer.

What I especially love about him is his wit, subtle and easily missed since it often takes the shape of philosophical rumination when he is actually debunking something held very highly. My natural mode of expression is irony, and Borges’s irony is inimitable.      

Shortly after college, I was at a house party, and I headed into one of the hosts’ bedrooms to escape the ruckus. This book was sitting on their desk, and the cover looked intriguing, so I picked it up and started reading. I must have been there for an hour or more, reading story after story, while the party raged outside the door. 

Reading Borges felt like the discovery of the wellspring from whence everything else I loved had sprung. Here was fiction written in the earliest moments of the data revolution, fearlessly pursuing infinity and somehow capturing it so… show more.

Maybe the weirdest and most beautiful collection of stories in my house full of books.

In “The Circular Ruins,” a man dreams up another man, only to realize that he, too, is a dream. “The Library of Babel” imagines a world containing every possible book, most of which are nonsense but some of which, if only you could find them, contain the most profound truths ever written. “Funes the Memorious” imagines a boy paralyzed by a perfect memory, one that retains every single detail of every event ever experienced.

Every sentence of these stories is bizarre and fascinating, with a… show more.

Borges was the first proper writer I met, aged 16, when living in Buenos Aires.

In 1974, I climbed the stairs to his flat in Avenida Maipú and spent the morning reading to him – Anglo-Saxon verse, a Kipling poem, a page of Chesterton – and a line from Hamlet that he wanted me to check, “There’s nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.”

The blind Borges remembered the quote as not containing the word “either”. He thought for a moment, then said: “My version is better. Memory has made it better.”

Labyrinths contains his best stories,… show more.

Borges writes only short fiction—and his collection of stories Labyrinths made a huge impression on me. The stories have a clean, almost mathematical style, and are often based on a single, bizarre concept. For instance: just suppose there existed a library in which the books represent all the possible combinations of the letters of the alphabet—so some books consist of nonsense, others consist of the complete works of Shakespeare, or even Shakespeare’s works differing by one letter from the original. In my book, I include an inset story about a man called Mr. N, who spends fifteen years of… show more.

Labyrinths is the most uncanny short story collection I’ve ever read. No other writing I know compares to it. Borges builds each story from a philosophical concept. 

For example:

What if the tree that fell in the forest really didn’t exist?

What if life was deliberately random?

What if you could only think of one thing?

What if you could remember everything?

Sound boring? No way. Just the opposite, because these mind-boggling ideas play out in the everyday world, the world of groceries, love letters, collies, fountain pens. 

No matter how often I do, each time I read a Borges… show more.

This is fiction by the famous South American writer. It is a collection of short stories playing around with our notions of reality. It is good to read but also an introduction to the problem of what we think of as real.  In order to understand the problem and get somewhere with it, you have to detach the mind from everyday reality so as to make yourself puzzled about how that reality exists. Borges is an entertaining way of getting away from the everyday.