From the Bookshelf of On Paths Unknown…

Collected Fictions

Jorge Luis Borges

Start date: September 2, 2015

Discussion: JORGE LUIS BORGES

Find A Copy At

Group Discussions About This Book

Showing 2 of 9 topics — 357 comments total

JORGE LUIS BORGES

Jorge Luis Borges - convening thread
By Traveller · 65 posts · 62 views

last updated Nov 05, 2024 01:49AM

Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius - with spoilers
By Cecily · 110 posts · 65 views

last updated Jan 19, 2016 01:32AM

showing 1 of 1 topics view all »

What Members Thought

Apr 12, 2015 Cecily rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favourites, short-stories-and-novellas, magical-realism, read-only-cos-of-gr-friends, scifi-future-speculative-fict, aaabsolute-favourites, borges-and-borgesian

Fabulous

For the last year or so, I've been working at a film studios.

As I wander around the site, what I find most fascinating is not star-spotting (they tend to be shielded from prying eyes anyway) but the many and varied pre-production activities needed to make the magic of cinema a reality: building sets and props; puppet-people in motion-capture suits; food carts for the crews; the whir of industrial generators; cabling for light and sound; the making of costumes, weapons and jewellery. R ...more

164 likes · Like · see review

Mar 25, 2013 Mala rated it it was amazing

Shelves: all-time-favourites, classic-ever-enduring-appeal, brain-pain-group-read

You who read me—are you certain you understand my language?

Imagine you are watching a highly recommended, multiple awards winning, foreign-language film- it's everything you expected it to be, then, suddenly, the subtitles stop working- how annoying! But you are hooked; you can't stop watching– welcome to the Borgesian Labyrinth!

The 'Collected Fictions' consists of the following nine collections- 'A Universal History of Iniquity', 'Fictions', 'Artifices', 'The Aleph', 'The Maker', 'In Praise of ...more

48 likes · Like · see review

Dec 08, 2014 Jonfaith rated it really liked it

Fame is a form--perhaps the worst form--of incomprehension.

I can recall the first time I discovered the name Borges. That marks a near singular occasion. It was 1990 and I was thoroughly enjoying my Philosophy of Religion course and curious about nihilism. This engendered another retreat to the library and there on the opening page of some text was a quotation from this strange figure. It was a few minutes later when I had culled a number of texts from stacks. Like many a reader and a number of ...more

35 likes · Like · see review

May 06, 2008 Nate D rated it it was amazing

Shelves: stories, read-in-2010, post-modernism, favorites, argentina

Since this volume collects all of Borges' originally independent collections, I'll give each its own space here, as I read them:

A Universal History of Iniquity (1935): A series of short bio-pics -- artistically licensed (and sometimes dubiously accurate) recreations of historical lives and legends. Borges himself, in his introduction, characterizes them as the work of a writer incapable of writing outright fiction of his own (despite, in characteristic contradiction, the inclusion of one traditi Since this volume collects all of Borges' originally independent collections, I'll give each its own space here, as I read them:

A Universal History of Iniquity (1935): A series of short bio-pics -- artistically licensed (and sometimes dubiously accurate) recreations of historical lives and legends. Borges himself, in his introduction, characterizes them as the work of a writer incapable of writing outright fiction of his own (despite, in characteristic contradiction, the inclusion of one traditional short story afterall). Nothing particularly groundbreaking, but a good introduction to a lot Borges' tendencies: his conflations of real and imagined, his manipulated historical references and bibliographies, and his invocations of mythologized magic.

The Garden of Forking Paths (1941): Though it would later become the first half of the classic Ficciones, The Garden of Forking Paths was originally published independently, and sees the foundations laid by Borges' earlier collection spawning not only the palatial mass of his imagination, but endless spires, parapets and bridges springing upwards to be lost in the sun. Unsurprisingly, the collection is filled with fabricated publications. Where before Borges had modified actual stories he had read to suit his needs, here he has generated entire fictional bodies of work, finding it simpler and more direct to write literary criticism of notional books than to write the books themselves. The best, however, may the purely fantastic constructions: "Circular Ruins" and its contemplation of creativity and subjective reality, "The Lottery in Babylon" and its microcosm of universal mysteries of causality, and, best of all, "The Library of Babel", the infinity and chaos of the universe made slightly more manageable by reducing it to a precisely defined set: an endless library and its endless books. Dazzling, and perhaps still unmatched in fiction in their elegant reductions of huge and unwieldy conceptual problems.

Artifices (1944): The second half of Ficciones proceeds with a similar flair to the first, though with less of the cryptic, conceptual mythologizing of "The Library of Babel" and "The Lottery in Babylon" and more pseudo-scholarly discourse (along with the usual mystery stories and Uruguayan frontier tales). For a return to the full consuming brilliance of those former works, we must continue to...

The Aleph (1949): ...which opens with another instant favorite, "The Immortal", which both reveals Borges to be none other than Homer himself, while out Lovecrafting Lovecraft's horrible, maddening architectures and geometries. How Borges manages to combine such meglomaniacal scale with such subtlely is beyond me.

All the rest: less constantly perfect, but still frequently wonderful. Probably my favorite collection of stories, ever. ...more

5 likes · Like · see review

Mar 24, 2012 Kamakana rated it it was amazing

Shelves: xlong-over-400, all-five-star, lit-collections, translation, read-twice-or-more, aaa-top-translation, short-stories, literature, zz1998, magicalrealism

.???... 90s?: i do not know if these are simply works in Ficciones and Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings, but it also contains others i think, so i put it also in favorites... i have heard translation is often weak but as i know no Spanish...

241222: ...more

4 likes · Like · see review

Sep 19, 2015 Saski rated it really liked it

Initial reaction, surprise that I enjoyed it, as I had not all that much enjoyed the other two.

More later...

Merged review:

I loved it, but I have a kind sick sense of justice, especially where aggrieved women are concerned.

My favorite line is "He was quite religious; he believed he had a secret pact with the Lord--in return for prayers and devotions he was exempted from doing good works."

How convenient! ...more

3 likes · Like · see review