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A must read. A great selection of non-fiction material. If you know and like Borges you know you'll be pleased, if this is your first time reading Borges I guarantee that it won't be your last, you'll keep buying all his work. Borges wasn't a man, he was a library, a portal to knowledge and wisdom.Enjoy
All literary roads lead to Borges. With the Collected Fictions, this book is a testament to the literary critic/philosphical wanderer in us all. Well, Edgar Allan Poe, Dante, Icelandic Sagas, German Idealism, the Kabbala, Schopenhauer, Bergson, English Empiricism, Sufism, etc. You appreciate what he appreciates, loving the literature he has absorbed, finding your way through the complex interweaving of his passions: Romantic English Poetry, Shakespeare, H.G. To read Borges, you become Borges. His writings on Dante and Shakespeare, his reviews, his philosophical essays. And wouldn't it be wonderful, to learn about his opinions on modern writers. If only he lived today and had a website, to think of all the books he might recommend.
This book is for you if you're a gourmand of good writing, great thinking and the pleasure of exploring the vast expanding world of literature. He is the Librarian you might meet in heaven. You see yourself in his mirrors, you regard the books you read as the books he reads. Each essay is a delicate delicacy. He lived a long, rich life. If only he were still alive to guide the reading public. This book is rich, complex and wondrous. just read the book and become Borges becoming you.
Another personal highlight is the essay on Edward Fitzgerald. What I like most of all is that Borges is more interested the kinds of books people really enjoy reading, such as Bradbury, HG Wells, Lord Dunsany, and Kipling, rather than the fossilized academic "classics." One of my favorite features are the several recommended reading lists, in which Borges passes on his own most pleasurable reading experiences.
And I think this statement captures the unifying theme of this compendium. Borges claims in one of these articles that he was "more proud of the books he has read than the books he has written." I imagine I would feel the same way, had I written any books.
Each offers you new horizens for literary pursuit and further reading, and all are executed with Borges's renowned concision. Herein Borges will astonish and charm you with the breadth, variety, and whimsy of his literary taste.
The book is a compilation of critical essays, social commentary, reviews of the fledgling film art, and other oddities published in various media from throughout Borges's literary life. There is also a refreshing eclecticism in Borges's taste--for example, this book lead me to Mathematics and the Imagination, a fun popular math book.
This volume is not something one would read from cover to cover in several sittings, but rather a treasure trove to be mined from time to time, like the famous cave discovered by Ali Baba in that book so dear to Borges's heart.
But his signature is present in all , in a single page of a book- review or a philosphical meditation. Eliot Weinberger has done a real service to the world of literature by selecting, and translating these pieces. They show the range of interest, the incredible ability to make inventive creative cross- connections of one of Modern Literature's true masters, Borges.Borges covers worlds in his writing, worlds of Literature , worlds of the Argentinean society he and some of his ancestors grew up in, worlds given in a universal encycopediac reading, which seems to cover all continents and all cultures.Borges greatest work is considered to be his ' Ficciones'. For him worlds mingle and combine, and are retranslated in such a way as to reappear as Literature.He also in this work reveals himself to be a decent and courageous opponent of Fascism.He confounds and surprises us at times with these strange mixings of things, but the poetic and parable- like element is so strong in this work that it engages us, and forces us to question our own small pictures of reality.What a great and interesting writer. What a pleasure to have this work to enrich our minds with.
Those that have are probably most familiar with his fiction stories. He gets intensely personal - there is one essay on the progression of his blindness. He covers some metaphysical ground on the nature of time and infinity. - which makes certain essays difficult. Therefore, this collection really does have something for everyone. Unfortunately, there are also many essays that are unreadable, some annoying repititions, and some essays are just plain dull.So, what does Borges write about. Because Borges lived and worked in Argentina, few have heard of him in the English-speaking world. He has an abiding love of the Greek classics (Homer, Virgil) and great admiration for Joyce, Poe, and Chesterton.Unfortunately, those of us with a less classical education cannot keep up to everything that Borges says - I, for one, will never have the time to learn ancient Greek.
It's well worth buying, but it's unlikely you'll read it from cover to cover without taking a break - I took many breaks to read other things, and it took me over 1.5 years to complete the whole book. But if there is a main theme that permeates these pieces, it's his love of literature in all languages - Spanish, English (old and modern), German. But you know what. On the more mundane end, he reviews movies and gives capsule biographies of authors - King Kong, Citizen Kane, and more obscure (and not necessarily Hollywood) films. This book of non-fiction essays shows the vast knowledge and wide variation of interests of Borges. There are other essays (especially early on) that are simply unintellegible (this may be the fault of the translators, especially since there are times when two or three essays cover the same ground with increasing degrees of murkiness).
He defines heaven as an infinite library, and then goes into the nature of infinity. He writes on contemporary (at the time) politics - Nazi Germany, the curators of the national library, etc. But it always happened that a real gem would appear just when I was getting frustrated with a series of uninteresting essays.On the balance, about a third of the essays are not interesting (or badly translated, or repetitions), a third are interesting if not spectacular, and the final third have at least one moment of sheer brilliance. - on the balance, I like his non-fiction better than his fiction
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