Ficciones
| Author | Borges, Jorge Luis |
| Published | 1944 |
| Status | read |
| Rating | 5/5 |
This has long been one of my favorite books. You’ll see it cycle into and out of current state because I often reread it.
None of these stories are inaccessible, Borges delivers convolution directly. His symbolism is simple, his language beautiful without being obtuse.
“Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote” will change how you read literature and the world around you, and yet contains no revelations, only a truth you always knew existed (perspective, interaction between consumer and producer) expressed in a thoughtful manner.
“The Garden of Forking Paths” is similar. You’ve encountered this concept before in literature or cosmology or who-knows-what, but it’s unoriginal, written in a beautiful and illustrative manner.
“The Library of Babel” gives you that same feeling of clarity through abstraction you get when you extend some variables of an equation to infinity to observe the effects on other variables.
“The South” is one of the tightest short stories I’ve ever read, and one of his earlier efforts, to boot. A very parsimonious, eerie exploration of freedom and regret and illness.
