The Aleph
Book description
Borges' stories have a deceptively simple, almost laconic style. In maddeningly ingenious stories that play with the very form of the short story, Borges returns again and again to his themes: dreams, labyrinths, mirrors, infinite libraries, the manipulations of chance, gaucho knife-fighters, transparent tigers and the elusive nature of identity…
Why read it?
1 author picked The Aleph as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
Borges has the confidence and courage to write without any concessions to genre or previously understood conceptions of normality, he scares nothing off the reader and does not know where they stand with him.
I believe he is obsessed with ideas pertaining to eternity, and the illusionary nature of space and time, which stand behind his otherwise bizarre and sometimes confusing plots, that often, superficially, resemble detective stories or fragmentary memoirs. Wring that is in service to ideas is often poorer for it, but Borges dramatises philosophy in a way that is as readable as it is original.
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