false 426504 33 Reading Jorge Luis Borges is an experience akin to having the top of one's head removed for repairs. First comes the unfamiliar breeze tickling your cerebral cortex; then disorientation, even mild discomfort; and finally, the sense that the world has been irrevocably altered--and in this case, rendered infinitely more complex. First published in 1945, his <I>Ficciones</I> compressed several centuries' worth of philosophy and poetry into 17 tiny, unclassifiable pieces of prose. He offered up diabolical tigers, imaginary encyclopedias, ontological detective stories, and scholarly commentaries on nonexistent books, and in the process exploded all previous notions of genre. Would any of David Foster Wallace's famous footnotes be possible without Borges? Or, for that matter, the syntactical games of Perec, the metafictional pastiche of Calvino? For good or for ill, the blind Argentinian paved the way for a generation's worth of postmodern monkey business--and fiction will never be simply "fiction" again.<p> Its enormous influence on writers aside, <I>Ficciones</I> has also--perhaps more importantly--changed the way that we <I>read</I>. Borges's Pierre Menard, for instance, undertakes the most audacious project imaginable: to create not a contemporary version of Cervantes's most famous work but the <I>Quixote</I> itself, word for word. This second text is "verbally identical" to the original, yet, because of its new associations, "infinitely richer"; every time we read, he suggests, we are in effect creating an entirely new text, simply by viewing it through the distorting lens of history. "A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships," Borges once wrote in an essay about George Bernard Shaw. "All men who repeat one line of Shakespeare are William Shakespeare," he tells us in "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius." In this spirit, Borges is not above impersonating, even quoting, himself. <p> It is hard, exactly, to say what all of this <I>means</I>, at least in any of the usual ways. Borges wrote not with an ideological agenda, but with a kind of radical philosophical playfulness. Labyrinths, libraries, lotteries, doubles, dreams, mirrors, heresiarchs: these are the tokens with which he plays his ontological games. In the end, ideas themselves are less important to him than their aesthetic and imaginative possibilities. Like the idealist philosophers of Tlön, Borges does not "seek for the truth or even for verisimilitude, but rather for the astounding"; for him as for them, "metaphysics is a branch of fantastic literature." <I>--Mary Park</I> 1007116 book 1944 Ficciones total:2584|5:1684|4:662|3:181|2:41|1:19| 2584 11700 3612 209 5 2 false false Fri Jun 27 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Sun Jun 29 19:01:02 -0700 2008 Sun Jun 29 19:34:14 -0700 2008 more...]]> 0 2 false false Wed Aug 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007 Sat Aug 25 21:37:40 -0700 2007 Sat Aug 25 21:37:40 -0700 2007 Ficciones takes time. It is Jorge Luis Borges' most well-known collection of short stories, and it is full of dense, imaginative pieces that are full of lots of stuff, and to get out of them what he has put into them, readers need to commit to reading slowly and carefully.

There ...more...]]> 4 1 false false Fri Feb 22 11:25:27 -0800 2008 Fri Feb 22 11:35:10 -0800 2008 more...]]> 5 1 false false Sat Feb 07 12:01:22 -0800 2009 Sat Feb 14 12:01:36 -0800 2009
For me, this collection, more than any other single text, directed my current interest in re...more...]]> 5 2 false false Fri Jan 09 06:50:14 -0800 2009 Fri Jan 09 06:58:39 -0800 2009 more...]]> 3 33 false false Sat Aug 08 12:59:54 -0700 2009 Sat Aug 08 13:04:12 -0700 2009
I woke up in the middle of the night last night, say about three-ish Eastern Standard Time, and my mind ricocheted off several topics of inquiry, ranging from the bleakly existential to the utterly ridiculous, before finally arriving at an odd contempl...more...]]> 5 1 false false Tue Jan 15 00:00:00 -0800 1991 Thu Apr 30 22:54:53 -0700 2009 Thu Apr 30 23:40:40 -0700 2009
As a writer, he truly embraces the patrimony of Western literature (and the Eastern literature accepted into it) and revels i...more...]]> 5 0 false false Sun Oct 11 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Sun Oct 04 21:44:28 -0700 2009 Sun Oct 04 21:44:28 -0700 2009 more...]]> 3 0 false false Thu Mar 19 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Sat Mar 14 11:34:11 -0700 2009 Sat Mar 21 12:12:05 -0700 2009 1 more...]]> 4 0 false false Sun Mar 01 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Wed Mar 11 16:52:54 -0700 2009 Wed Mar 11 16:59:20 -0700 2009
He is playing with creation, words, content, association--not only with the idea...more...]]> 5 0 false false Sun Jan 11 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Fri Jan 09 19:40:24 -0800 2009 Sun Jan 11 18:38:14 -0800 2009 more...]]> 3 0 false false Wed Apr 08 02:41:11 -0700 2009 Wed Apr 08 12:15:23 -0700 2009
“Ben tek düz çizgiden oluşma bir Yunan labirenti bilirim. O çizgi boyunca öyle çok feylesof yolunu yitirmiştir ki, sıradan bir dedektif haydi haydi yitirebilir. Bir dahaki gelişte Scarlach, ardıma düştüğünde, A...more...]]> 5 1 false false Fri Jul 01 00:00:00 -0700 2005 Mon Apr 16 00:23:50 -0700 2007 Mon Apr 16 00:26:23 -0700 2007 more...]]> 5 0 false false Sat Jan 03 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Sat Jan 03 10:12:21 -0800 2009 Sat Jan 03 10:17:27 -0800 2009 more...]]> 5 1 false false Fri Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 1988 Mon Dec 01 10:23:44 -0800 2008 Mon Dec 01 10:26:01 -0800 2008 15 more...]]> 5 2 false false Tue May 05 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Thu Apr 02 03:35:54 -0700 2009 Tue May 05 03:18:32 -0700 2009 more...]]> 5 1 false false Mon Sep 08 11:31:11 -0700 2008 Mon Sep 08 11:31:58 -0700 2008 5 1 false false Tue Oct 01 00:00:00 -0700 2002 Fri Aug 31 06:23:16 -0700 2007 Thu Sep 13 19:52:01 -0700 2007 -m
]]> 2 0 false false Tue Jan 27 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Mon Jan 26 21:26:28 -0800 2009 Mon Jan 26 21:48:40 -0800 2009 more...]]> 5 1 false false Tue Nov 18 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Sun Jun 29 11:59:58 -0700 2008 Wed Jan 28 05:47:56 -0800 2009