Ficciones

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As we say one overdoes something until one perfects it, Borges has developed a much serene, subtler prose from the baroque style employing strained and startling metaphors from his early days, and mind you that quieter style has beauty of undertones which may take you to so many avenues in so little words. A better course of procedure is to pretend that these books already exist, and then to offer a résumé, a commentary. He runs from the station, down the road, into the next, he keeps running until he is sure I cannot catch him.

Borges has had so many imitators, some are quite good, such as the stories by his countryman, Julio Cortazar, in All Fires the Fire, which I reviewed here https://www. He has managed to turn language upon itself to reverse himself time after time with a sentence or a paragraph with relentless logic so that it comes up as a pleasant surprise. The Library of Babel, perhaps his best-known story combines almost all of the list in the previous paragraph. The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim” ― This allegorical story purports to be a review of the titular novel, about the years-long pilgrimage of a law student in India, who murders a man in a riot and falls among the lowest of society. It is used as a metaphor to represent a variety of things: the overwhelmingly complex nature of worlds and the systems that exist on them, human enterprises, the physical and mental aspects of humans, and abstract concepts such as time.No cabe la menor duda de que Borges era un genio de las letras, y uno de los mejores escritores en habla hispana que ha habido; de hecho, si alguien me preguntara hoy día si me siento orgulloso de ser hablante nativo del español, mi respuesta sería muy clara y concisa: "sí, entre otras cosas, porque puedo leer a García Márquez, a Rulfo y a Borges en su idioma original". And although he is Argentinian, it's as if the entire world is his playing field, or his chessboard to continue the mirror/game metaphor. I never really know how to review collections of short stories without the reviews becoming ponderously long.

By this point, I have bought a new copy of Ficciones, and read it with thoughts of George in the back of my mind. The Lottery in Babylon” ― In the city of Babylon, a lottery morphs into an game that takes over all aspects of life in Babylon. But just when I might abandon a story in confusion (as you might abandon this review), Borges offers an axiom that has the effect of a strong coffee, setting me back on solid ground, able to pay complete attention and avoid being slapped in the face by any further red herrings: destiny can be ruthless at one's slightest distraction. It was a fascinating first-acquaintance with Borges, an author who has been staying with me for a long time, a house-ghost, a little of this and a little of that, a glimpse into my subconscious and all legends and myths in one place. I also enjoyed "La lotería de Babilonia" ( The Lottery in Babylon), "El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan" ( The Garden of Forking Paths), "Funes el memorioso" ( Funes, His Memory), "La biblioteca de Babel" ( The Library of Babel), and.Most of the time I feel like I'm stuck as some shitty academic after-party listening to the drunken rambling of a self-indulgent lit professor trying to make himself believe that he is the smartest guy in the room. These pilgrims disputed in the narrow corridors, proffered dark curses, strangled each other on the divine stairways, flung the deceptive books into the air shafts, met their death cast down in a similar fashion by the inhabitants of remote regions. The prose style of Borges may come across as intellectual with its allusion to literature (which may be both existent or non- existent), philosophy, religion, theology, myth, culture, history of Latin America He deftly used parallelism, chiasmus, subtle repetitions-with-variations to shock the reader in a pleasant way.

Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe that in the future he will be” --Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote. Perhaps, someone opened it, hoping for something worth more than a book; its general shape could have been a DVD or a video game. An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain” ― This is another satirical review piece, purporting to review four (non-existent) works written by a (fictional) author.Su pluma, endiabladamente compleja e intelectualmente estimulante, siempre nos garantiza un enorme disfrute estético pero también un desafiante ejercicio de inteligencia.

Or indeed the 'story' might not 'begin' at all leaving the narrative to continue in the mode of an essay. There is a person in Borges’s universe who may reconstruct every dream, every day dream he had ever had. In any case, the countries Borges described became entirely new territories for me, places I have never visited or could never visit. This twenty page story (the longest in the book) is so abstruse and heavily laden with philosophical ideas and allusions that I found it almost completely impenetrable.If they were really serious about saving readers as a species, they would have us behind bars in book filled zoos, encouraging us to reproduce with one another. The Library of Babel” ― One of Borges’ most famous stories, “The Library of Babel” posits a universe in the form of a library made out of connected hexagonal rooms, each room filled with books and the barest necessities for life. Another school declares that the whole of time has already happened and that our life is a vague memory or dim reflection, doubless false and fragmented, of an irrevocable process” --Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. Esto, sin embargo, no es algo extraño que suceda ante una recopilación donde habrá cuentos que se convertirán en tus favoritos, y otros que no serán para nada de tu agrado. fact checking sites are once again refuting claims that 98 million Americans got cancer from the polio vaccine.