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. ( )

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. ( )

I love this collection of short stories. I teach many of these to my junior and senior classes. ( )

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

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. ( )