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Loading... Ficcionesby Jorge Luis Borges
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. 1040 Ficciones, by Jorge Luis Borges translated from the Spanish by Emece Editores (read 10 Jan 1970) In the final issue of Time in the Sixties there appeared a list of 20 Notable Books of the Sixties. Three of the ten Fiction items I have already read: Catch-22, Pale Fire, and Herzog. (The complete list is reproduced in my review here on LibraryThing of The First Circle, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.] Now I have read this book which is on the list. It is a book of short stories. The stories are odd, and I am sure I got little from them. The book is obsessed by time, with snatches of brilliance. But intelligent discussion by me of this book is not possible. My reading of it was too superficial. (  )Schmerguls | Jun 21, 2009 |   I read this in a bilingual (Spanish - French) edition, but I found the Spanish to be at advanced level, a bit too hard for the intermediate speaker I am. What can I say... Borges has created (a) very special world. The stories show a lot of thought about the process of writing (many deal with texts that don't actually exist, or might not exist). I was not able to predict how any of the stories would go. (  )umkaaaa | May 5, 2009 | I love this collection of short stories. I teach many of these to my junior and senior classes. (  )brokensnowpea | Feb 10, 2009 | Borges’ writing style is powerful. In some sense, I’m glad I struggled through Borges just to get a feel for his different style. But unlike other'’s powerfully written stories, Borges’ well-written stories are weird. I seriously can’t think of any other word to describe them. I overall did not like them, and I don't intend to read more Borges. More detailed review on my blog rebeccareid | Feb 8, 2009 | Reviewing a book by a 'master' of literature always feels like a dangerous undertaking, so I am going to call this a response instead. I read Borges for a class called Philosophy in Literature. While I'm not a total Philistine in literary matters, I would be lying if I said I caught half of Borges' references without having to look things up. Once I -did- look them up, my reading became much more enjoyable. Borges is utter nonsense unless you can figure out how to catch somehow the things he is throwing at you, and although I am sure that I've let the lion's share of the meaning in his work slip through my fingers on my first reading, what I did catch was delightful. Borges is playful to the extreme. The stories in which he shines are those where he takes some strange idea and runs with it straight through. My favorite in the anthology has to be "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote." The premise stripped bare of Borges' elaboration is idiotic, but the story is a great one none the less. I can hardly understand it. While I read Ficciones I was constantly torn between crying out, "This is so stupid!" and "Oh god, this is genius!" at the exact same time. I'm inclined to think that his greatest stories are both. There are also a few stories in Ficciones that are not nearly as interesting as the others. Perhaps if epic shorts like "Funes, the Memorious" had never been written, a story like "The Form of the Sword" would still be great fiction, but when compared to their neighbors, there are a few stories that do not incite nearly as much masochistic mental glee as the others. Regardless, Borges is a master of imagination, and for that I tip my hat to him. ( )bokai | Jan 27, 2009 | 0.045 seconds to build listing  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 0141183845, Paperback)Although Jorge Luis Borges published his first book in 1923--doling out his own money for a limited edition of Fervor de Buenos Aires--he remained in Argentinian obscurity for almost three decades. In 1951, however, Ficciones appeared in French, followed soon after by an English translation. This collection, which included the cream of the author's short fictions, made it clear that Borges was a world-class (if highly unclassifiable) artist--a brilliant, lyrical miniaturist, who could pose the great questions of existence on the head of pin. And by 1961, when he shared the French Prix Formentor with Samuel Beckett, he seemed suddenly to tower over a half-dozen literary cultures, the very exemplar of modernism with a human face.By the time of his death in 1986, Borges had been granted old master status by almost everybody (except, alas, the gentlemen of the Swedish Academy). Yet his work remained dispersed among a half-dozen different collections, some of them increasingly hard to find. Andrew Hurley has done readers a great service, then, by collecting all the stories in a single, meticulously translated volume. It's a pleasure to be reminded that Borges's style--poetic, dreamlike, and compounded of innumerable small surprises--was already in place by 1935, when he published A Universal History of Iniquity: "The earth we inhabit is an error, an incompetent parody. Mirrors and paternity are abominable because they multiply and affirm it." (Incidentally, the thrifty author later recycled the second of these aphorisms in his classic bit of bookish metaphysics, "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Teris.") The glories of his middle period, of course, have hardly aged a day. "The Garden of the Forking Paths" remains the best deconstruction of the detective story ever written, even in the post-Auster era, and "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" puts the so-called death of the author in pointed, hilarious perspective. But Hurley's omnibus also brings home exactly how consistent Borges remained in his concerns. As late as 1975, in "Avelino Arredondo," he was still asking (and occasionally even answering) the same riddles about time and its human repository, memory: "For the man in prison, or the blind man, time flows downstream as though down a slight decline. As he reached the midpoint of his reclusion, Arredondo more than once achieved that virtually timeless time. In the first patio there was a wellhead, and at the bottom, a cistern where a toad lived; it never occurred to Arredondo that it was the toad's time, bordering on eternity, that he sought." Throughout, Hurley's translation is crisp and assured (although this reader will always have a soft spot for "Funes, the Memorious" rather than "Funes, His Memory.") And thanks to his efforts, Borgesians will find no better--and no more pleasurable--rebuttal of the author's description of himself as "a shy sort of man who could not bring himself to write short stories." --James Marcus (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:12 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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