Fictions (1944)

A great collection of unpredictable inverted short stories. Not to be read when tired - each story requires focus and thinking. A lot of the literary references were over my head and I wasn't willing to invest the time in doing research, but I still very much enjoyed the book. ( )

Um conjunto de contos e pequenas histórias cheios de paradoxos, fantasia, referências, infinitos e labirintos.

Muito original, um q.b. de complicado de entender mas sem dúvida interessantíssimo.

( )

Borges is someone who's been floating through the background of a lot of other stuff that I like (Eco, Wolfe), so it was only a matter of time before I picked this up. It feels a little sacrilegious giving this something less than 5 stars, but...there were times where I felt like Borges was losing me entirely and reading this just wasn't enjoyable or engaging. For the most part, though, this is a fascinating tour through a weird shadowland of Borges's devising, and I'm curious to read more. ( )

Tlon: 8/10
Al-Mu'tasim: 4/10
Pierre Menard: 4/10
The Circular Ruins: 9/10
The Babylon Lottery: 8/10
Herbert Quain: 6/10
The Library of Babel: 7/10
The Garden of Forking Paths: 7/10
Funes, the Memorious: 5/10
The Form of the Sword: 8/10
Theme of the Traitor and the Hero: 7/10
The Death and the Compass: 8/10
The Secret Miracle: 7/10
Three Versions of Judas: 5/10
The End: 7/10
The Sect of the Phoenix: 5/10
The South: 7/10

Unfortunately I think I only understood a fraction of what was going on here. In my first foray with Borges, I dip my toes in the water, when each one of these stories have unimaginable depths and meanings that I only began to start understanding. I will have to spend a lot more time with this one. ( )

Jorge Luis Borges was one of those very rare creators who changed the face of an art form—in his case, the short story. His work has been paid the ultimate honor of being appropriated and imitated by innumerable writers on every continent of the world.

The seventeen brief masterpieces of FICCIONES explode the boundaries of genre, offering up labyrinthine libraries, a fictional encyclopedia entry that spawns an entire world, a review of a nonexistent writer’s attempt to re-create Don Quixote word for word, a man with the disabling inability to forget anything he has ever experienced, and other metaphysical puzzles. But the true measure of Borges’s greatness lies in the fact that his fictions—elaborately paradoxical, postmodern, and intellectually delicious as they are—managed to return the short story to the realm of the fabulous and the uncanny from which, as parable and fairy tale, it originally came.