Ficciones

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Touching on this idea in his introduction, Kerrigan zooms out even further: “Perhaps, after all, every man is one man; every book one book. The collection’s made up of seventeen stories packed with irony, metaphors, and allusions to works of literature from a vast array of places and times, but all the pieces have easy-to-understand concepts. These stories are often elusive, twisting out of your grasp or revealing unexpected depths just when you think you’ve got a handle on them. The ingenious playing with the boundaries of genre was underlined by playfulness, cleverly though, in both prose style and attitude.

There have been ingenious authors in past too but it had taken them hundreds of pages and the invention of an entirely new language to communicate what Borges has done in sparingly three or four pages. Or indeed the 'story' might not 'begin' at all leaving the narrative to continue in the mode of an essay. Several years later, in this story, Fierro is an aging man with some regrets for the life he has lived, and whose free and lawless gaucho way of life is passing. In fact, I truly enjoyed the quasi-logical extremes he went to in pursuit of intellectual entertainment, imaginative possibilities and hard won ah-ha moments.It’s this kind of thing that the man of many places (he lived in Argentina, Switzerland and Spain) and many languages (he translated Wilde, Shakespeare, Kafka, Poe, Hesse, Gide, Whitman and Woolf among others) would have resonate for its universality and unboundedness. The stories in Ficciones are divided into two parts: The first part, The Garden of Forking Paths ( El Jardín de senderos que se bifurcan) was originally published in 1941. The brain cells, by the way, were completely engaged by this tale, which was complex and layered enough to make me think, but didn’t lose me in a labyrinth of difficult-to-grasp ideas. In The Garden of Forking Paths, a Chinese spy for the Germans (against the British) can only pass on his secret information by killing someone.

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. The language and things derived from the language- religion, literature, metaphysics, myth- presuppose idealism. Standouts are "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote" - a man who dedicates much of his life to the recreation of Don Quixote word for word, a stunningly insightful satire. x 10 to the 1,834,097th power) than there are thought to be atoms in the observable universe (10 to the 80th power).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. One just has to sit back and enjoy spotting the playfulness; one learn that Borges’s ways were mysterious and sometimes may be incomprehensible to naïve men.

Leer a Borges es una experiencia que debemos vivir al menos una vez en la vida; yo había leído una mínima parte de su poesía, pero ahora que me acerco a su narrativa no me arrepiento de nada. Anthony Kerrigan somehow fails to inspire readerly confidence when he contextualizes Borges’ work as “a species of international literary metaphor” and remarks that Borges “does not shy away from senseless truth. Borges loved books and gives detailed descriptions of the characteristics of the fictional texts in his stories. This delay [in an execution] was due to a desire on the part of the authorities to act slowly and impersonally, in the manner of planets or vegetables. I deeply lament having lent, irretrievably, the first book he published, to a female acquaintance” --The Work of Herbert Quain.

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For the next twenty minutes he pads about his home barefooted, touching the counters, the walls, straightening the picture frames; he goes about ensuring that he is real, and he is not in some labyrinth, or trapped in a world of mirrors, a world with Fate, no Fate, a world of wizards, city bombings, a world where some men don’t exist at all. As a first-time Borges reader I hoped and even expected that Kerrigan’s introduction would yield some nugget of advice, a clue into how to approach Borges’ chef d’oeuvre. This detective story had enough philosophy in it to make it intriguing and give it more depth than a typical mystery, but not overload my brain cells, which are feeling like they’re now on a roll.There is something about ‘Majesty’, one of the oldest oak trees in England, and something else about Claudius’ death by mushrooms. This may not be the prettiest word cloud ever constructed, but I think it’s a fair representation of the Ficciones experience. These parallel or successive universes repeats themselves as a hand of card does after multiple runs. I liken this to the “total consciousness” that the Dalai Lama promised groundskeeper Karl Spackler in Caddyshack. No me gustaría decir que Borges no es para todos, Borges es de hecho para todos los lectores, para quien quiera aproximarse a su literatura y encontrarse ante una experiencia única y singular.