What Are You Reading / Reviews - January 2018

[James]

Jorge Luis Borges, El Aleph [1949; augmented 1952] 212 pages [in Spanish]

This is another major collection of Borges' stories; again, they are illustrations of ideas, although none of the stories really stood out to me as many of those in Ficciones did. I read the collection mainly for the story "El Zahir", which was on a reading list for a course a friend was taking. This particular story postulates that certain objects at a particular time function as objects of obsession, which in a sense contain or refer to everything else in the world. The fact that the particular "zahir" of the story was a coin (called a "zahir") invites an economic reading about obsession with money -- not in the sense of greed, but in the sense of fetishizing the means of exchange as really equivalent to everything it is exchanged for, as objectivized value. Whether this is what Borges actually intended by the story I don't know. The title story, "El Aleph", also deals with the idea of a single object which reflects everything else in the world. I was reminded of Leibniz' concept of the "pre-established harmony" in the monad, which I think was one of the influences on the story, and of its more contemporary version in Whitehead, which probably wasn't (although Borges elsewhere alludes to contemporary philosophers such as Russell, I don't remember any specific allusion to Whitehead).

[Book Concierge]

The Longest Night – Andria Williams – 4****
A young military couple, Nat and Paul Collier vs his supervisor at the nuclear power plant where Paul works, and MSgt Reynolds’ mean-spirited wife, Jeannie. Add a handsome local cowboy and a reactor with problems that are being ignored and it’s only a question of which will blow first: the reactor, Paul’s career, or Paul and Nat’s marriage. Great character-based novel with a gripping story line. I was engaged and interested from beginning to end.
LINK to my review