Although I have read many of the stories comprised in this book many times over the last few years, I only just recently finished the last few I had never gotten to. What can I say about Borges that doesn’t go without saying? He’s brilliant; each of his stories is a universe unto itself. For me, this book is overall a labyrinth of entertaining and incredibly thought-provoking mind games. Borges has his obsessions that slip into plot and text continuously: the infinite, identity, reality, and metaphysics in general. For years I have been wanting to do an in-depth study on him and his work in terms of science fiction for one of my English classes, but I have yet to get around to that. Someday I should--he is the ultimate fantasist, but his style is wholly alien to that which is generally associated with sf and fantasy. I am not going to ramble, and I’m not even going to attempt to describe these stories, because I know I would find it impossible to do so in any kind of accurate or worthy way. What I will say is that this is one of my favorite books, I will go back to it time and time again, and although I don’t necessarily think Borges is for everyone, those that have the time and interest to work through him (he can be difficult) should go to a library and get this book now.

Dare I say that I was slightly disappointed by this collection, after the revelation of Ficciones last year? It seems heretical to say it, but this is the situation I find myself in.

I think one of the key issues is that Labyrinths is a selection of Borges' works, by a number of translators. As a result, it somehow lost some of the intensity of the coherent collection. With the density of Borges' prose even a unified collection like Ficciones can be overwhelming, but at least has threads holding the disparate stories together. Clearly all Borges' fiction has recurring themes, but I found this selection less intellectually and emotionally satisfying than my previous read.

Nonetheless, Borges is an undoubted genius in my eyes, and while I would personally recommend reading one of his personal selections first, this is a well-respected collection and translation which has introduced many a reader to the delights of his work. ( )

Enjoy Borges: A nice light book for travel if you do not need all his works in one volume.

The sorts of bizarre little stories I'd rejoice over if I found them in isolation, but all of them together was a bit much. Very intellectual, rational, a lot of work to read. Puzzle-box stories. Not just puzzles-- the puzzle-box idea conjures up something of the very abstract, esoteric flavour: pure intellect.I didn't quite solve the puzzles, though, at least I think I'm missing things. The first story, for example, with its initial discursion on stories hiding another layer of reality underneath them, perceptible to a very few readers: was it such a story itself? And yet its nature would seem to preclude another reality discernible by contradictions, as it is about the reinventing of the world into one of pure intellect that is contradictory to everything in this reality.That story took me incredibly long to read, almost an hour for 20 pages. I noticed a woman beside me on the bus glancing at its pages, with the made-up-latin story name at the top, and it occurred to me to wonder if she thought it was fiction or non-fiction I was reading.Other things: what was the rite practised by the followers of the Phoenix, the one that needs no description? And should I have been able to figure out what the 20-word sentence of brother Jerome was, that was quoted and caused his downfall and yet was not itself quoted in the story, at least not that I could find? I feel a desire to inventory all the sentences in that story that contain exactly 20 words, and compare their meanings.While puzzling through one other story, I found myself reading sentences backwards in hopes that they would mean better that way, although if there were such hidden messages, they were probably lost in translation. It is appropriate that I started reading the book one fourth in, proceeded to past the two-thirds mark, then returned to the introduction, the beginning and finally the end. ( )

The Modern Library edition of this book has a woodcut by Stephen Alcorn on the dustjacket depicting a labyrinth whose walls consist of upended, open books. A figure in fedora and overcoat (Borges or the reader?) stands in the foreground. The strikes me as a pretty accurate visualization of this enjoyable collection of stories and essays arising out of bits of philosophy, mythology and literature. ( )

http://culturalsnow.blogspot.com/2009...

I've written before about the difficulty of reconciling an artist's work and politics, and how it's sometimes necessary to draw a veil over some writers' more rabid asides.

For example, here's that old rogue Jorge Luis Borges, describing the return of the Gods in the parable 'Ragnarök':

"It all began with a suspicion (perhaps exaggerated) that the Gods did not know how to talk. Centuries of fell and fugitive life had atrophied the human element in them; the moon of Islam and the cross of Rome had been implacable with these outlaws. Very low foreheads, yellow teeth, stringy mulatto or Chinese moustaches and thick bestial lips showed the degeneracy of the Olympian lineage."

...which isn't exactly an extract from Der Stürmer, but still, it's not really the sort of thing we like to hear nowadays, is it? There's a number of possible responses to this sort of thing. You can excuse it through context: it's a dream sequence; maybe it was translated badly; it's postmodern irony, stupid. Or you can treat it with polite, strained embarrassment, as if JLB were a glum uncle who's had one too many gins and starts mumbling about the blacks and the poofs and how they ought to bring back flogging.

In any case, within the space of a few lines, Borges offers up a sentence of pure, audacious magnificence:

"We took out our heavy revolvers (all of a sudden there were revolvers in the dream) and joyfully killed the Gods."

Which is so glorious that it makes everything feel OK again. Doesn't it? ( )

A slightly difficult read. However, once you figure out what your key to Borges is, things begin to click into place. For me, I need to understand his references and the contexts in which Borges is using them. As always, reading the invitation and the introduction helped greatly. I also assume Borges writes with a sense of tongue-in-cheek humor. Even if this is not the case, it gives the stories a slightly different interpretation. ( )

Call this a "Borges Reader"--a wide-ranging cross-section of fiction, essays and commentaries. What a mind this man possessed; a true devotee of the printed word... ( )

Borges Labyrinths is about 3 quarters short stories, 1 quarter essays. The main themes of Borges' writings are "games with time and infinity", and he really is rather clever with them. As well as the wonderful aesthetic qualities that his works have, the quality is not just superficial, as most present the reader with something quite profound to think about too. A lot of what he has written has an unplaceable timelessness about it, this is stuff you will want to read more than once. ( )

A collection of short stories, essays and musings. Very clever and (mostly) interesting and enthralling. A few bits went over my head somewhat but altogether well worth the read. ( )

A very good collection of stories and essays and parables in a very nice edition by the Folio Society. I enjoyed it and plan to return to the stories to re-read them at some point in the future, as this was my first meeting with Borges.

Jorge Luis Borges is one of the greatest short story writers of the twentieth century, in this reviewer's humble opinion. This reviewer says this only as a disclaimer, as anything he says about Labyrinths is bound to be influenced by the reviewer's belief. The reviewer will stop being pretentious now and start referring to myself in the first-person.

Labyrinths is an English translation of Borges short stories, parables, essays, and a poem or two. Some of the more famous stories included are "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," "The Library of Babel," and "The Garden of Forking Paths."

Now for the actual reviewing: for those who have read stories by Borges before, his style is the same, with maybe a little more fantastical scenarios than usual. For those who haven't, Borges is usually labeled a "magic realist." He will often take a complete imaginary and fantastical situation, such as the Library of Babel, and treat it with the objectivity of a journalist. In many of his stories he even goes so far as to create fictional footnotes, which often refer to works created in another story.

The writing itself is spectacular. One word that keeps coming up in reviews I read is "metaphysical," and that's a very accurate summary of the major themes of the stories. "The Library of Babel" describes a (literally) universal Library, and its inhabitants search for the one book that will explain everything. A parable, "Borges and I," is written by someone named Borges who is having more and more trouble knowing where the divide between the "real" Borges and the Borges projected to the public is. Summarized, these may sound like pseudo-intellectual brain candy, and maybe they are. Like I said, I'm not an objective observer. But even if Labyrinths is junk food for the mind--and try as I might, I can't believe it is--there's nothing wrong with a fun book. I'd recommend this to anyone that is literate (in English or Spanish). ( )

http://tristram.squarespace.com/home/... ( )

This review will undoubtedly fail to capture what it is I have to say about this book as it's been a month since I finished it. Labyrinths is a collection of short stories and essays by Borges (who almost exclusively wrote short works). As such it can't be read straight through. I took about six months, reading stories occasionally, taking the time to let my brain find it's way out of the nested labyrinths Borges puts you in.

Borges is if anything an efficient writer. He writes in incredibly dense prose. His stories are often three to five pages long and filled with esoteric references to ancient China, Don Quixote, linguistics, mathematics, and the infinite. After reading Circular Ruins I had to sit and ponder. Borges forces you to think, forces you to delve. The Library of Babel is favorite of many in which he contemplates an infinite library with infinite knowledge and infinite lies. I enjoyed the The Secret Miracle in which an author, sentenced to execution by firing squad in WWII Prague, begs whatever God exists for the time to finish his final work. Through a private miracle he gains all the time he needs -- all the time between the firing of the shot and the moment lead hits bone. He finds the world stopped. He has years worth of time to write in his mind, to edit, to mull over just the right phrase, and as soon as he hits upon perfection of his work --- well, time snaps back into existence and his life is ended.

In reading this book, you have to be willing to be indulgent. Borges is trying at times. And one of the reasons you can't read it all at once is because he repeats himself. He has interesting ideas, but in the end you feel if you see the words "mirror" "labyrinth" or "enigma" one more time, you'd like to shoot him yourself. It reminds me of when I saw an entire wing of an art museum dedicated to a Magritte exhibition. His works are fascinating, but as you progressed through the rooms, you realized he really did like clouds, and apples, and bowlers.

Despite all this, there is an element of genius in Borges' work. At the end of an essay on self-reference in literature (such as Hamlet watching the pantomime of his own history in Hamlet) he writes this gem:
"Why does it disturb us that the map be included in the map and the thousand and one nights in the book of the Thousand and One Nights? Why does it disturb us that Don Quixote be a reader of the Quixote and Hamlet a spectator of Hamlet? I believe I have found the reason: these inversions suggest that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictitious. In 1833, Carlyle observed that the history of the universe is an infinite sacred book that all men write and read and try to understand, and in which they are also written."

That is my new picture of the universe. Read this, folks, but read it at your own pace. A little goes a long way, but you will be rewarded.

this is the man who made it possible for me to believe in synthetic worlds ( )

A book of tantalising and fascinating intellectual conceits. A reminder that one mark of genius is to make things look so simple... ( )

The first thing I thought upon reading this was Poe, and although the two authors, in sensibilities and in interests, are quite different, they are close in their sort of anomalous approach to literature. You do not read Poe for his style or his characters or to see something skillfully done. You read Poe (or at least I do) for his strange, fantastical, horrific ideas, for his imagination. Likewise, Borges is all about fantastical ideas: obscure societies, secrets, re-writing a book of the past as if it were the original, intellectuals dreaming up a new world, a person dreaming up a new person, and labyrinths. Many, many labyrinths. (As a side note for myself, there is a thesis in the school library on Borges' use of labyrinths which I must look up next time I get the chance.)

Like Poe, too, he is quite preoccupied with the line between truth and fiction and he goes to great lengths to blur it for the reader. He is precisely detailed, prefers first person, and likes to write as though his character is undergoing an investigation, with footnotes and catalogs. I thought the most interesting use of this was with Uqbar; the story which contains it seems rather strongly influenced by Poe's detective fiction.

He writes exclusively in short little bursts, rarely concerning himself with character studies and with little dialogue to be found. It suits what he's writing about, though, and I would hardly call it a flaw in his work - he writes well, just differently. What he is, I think, is fairly difficult, especially given his propensity towards making allusions (most of which I know went over my head), and certainly not just literary ones. Borges is probably just as influenced by philosophy as literature, judging by his content and by the fact he drops names constantly. He has an appreciation for the more obscure ones, too, which is fine by me; poor Averroes is so underrated. He also seems fascinated by mathematics, another element to his work which I didn't quite appreciate completely for lack of knowledge.

Borges uses those fantastical ideas mostly to present philosophical ones. They aren't arguments as such; this is fiction, after all. They strike me as metaphysical puzzles and curiosities - Zeno's Paradoxes. I'm not sure they're always to be pondered. Sometimes they are just to be wondered at. It took me a lot of time, at first, to get through the stories, because I thought I was missing a great deal by doing them so quickly - and to be sure, I think Borges merits re-visiting. But in hindsight I'm not sure you can respond to him sometimes any more than you can respond to Zeno. You hear the argument, your mind explodes quietly, and you're simply left with the thought "um.... next story." Other stories did merit a lot of consideration, however, and seemed so dense that I could hardly pick up on everything in them at once; it seems a shame to plow through them as I did. One day I'll return to them.

In the end I like him greatly, though this probably has a great deal to do with a bias towards what he is writing about. Particular favorites of mine were "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," "the Circular Ruins," "Library of Babylon," "The Theologians," "Averroes' Search," and "Theme of the Traitor and the Hero."

Hands down the best single collection of Borges’ work and one that belongs in every home. This basically introduced the English-speaking world to the mind of a man who changed how people thought about short stories. Reading it for the first time is somewhat akin to discovering the world is round after a lifetime of believing it to be flat. Each story is a wealth of ideas, like the mass consciousness of a lifelong bibliophile distilled into perfect concepts. No serious reader, regardless of his or her literary preferences, should go without reading it. Whether you enjoy Borges or not, his work is important. And if you do like it, it will open up worlds for you.

(This review originally appeared on zombieunderground.net) ( )

You get the feeling that Borges takes a month or so to craft every sentence that he writes. So, don't try to read this from cover to cover. Dip in and savour. You need ideal reading conditions - a cavernous library, the evening, mirrors, candles, a sonorious grandfather clock, a cabinet case of knives and possibly a tiger. This is a superb collection of short pieces but also get hold of "The Universal History of Infamy" and "Dr.Brodie's Report". Borges is like one of those artists who craft a model of the Eiffel Tower on a pinhead... and achieve perfection despite or maybe because of failing eyesight. ( )

Sometimes a little difficult to read, but that's part of the fun. Everything is totally original and thought-provoking. I've been pretty much reading one story at a time then putting the book away for a while and mulling over what I've read. ( )

http://rrreese.com/wordpress/?p=23 ( )