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Summary: The Ghost of Stories
Review: The story ''Ibn-Hakam al-Bokhari, Murdered in His Labyrinth,'' roughly in the middle of this marvelous new collection of stories by Jorge Luis Borges, is as good a place as any to start an appreciation of one of the most remarkable writers of our century. A king flees the ghost of his vizier, whom he has killed, taking refuge in a labyrinth he builds on the moors of Cornwall. But the ghost, or what seems to be a ghost, catches up with him, and the king is murdered within his own hiding place. Many of the familiar elements of his work are here: arcane knowledge, characters that emerge from some combination of mythology and scholarship, images of labyrinths, a lightly satirical Homeric tone, blood and vengeance, the blending of murder and metaphysics, and an interplay of appearances and apparitions in which reality and illusion are almost indistinguishable. Only Borges created literature out of that mixture, though one can guess at some of his diverse sources of inspiration: Edgar Allan Poe and Franz Kafka, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Miguel de Cervantes, with a liberal dusting of Omar Khayyam, the cabala and Islamic theology, and a great deal of esoteric reading. Reading Borges's work chronologically, as this collection is arranged, is to be reminded of the strangeness of his art. Borges was attracted to fantasy writing, as in his story ''The Aleph,'' but a very recherche fantasy writing grounded in arcane lore. "There is no intellectual exercise that is not ultimately pointless,'' Borges writes, a statement produced in full knowledge that he is fashioning an intellectual exercise about an intellectual exercise. It is a typically enigmatic touch from a writer who endlessly teases himself and his readers...
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Summary: Enter the labyrinth
Review: Let me start by saying that I don't know the Spanish language, and am not able to judge the translation. What I can say is that I have read translations in two other languages and one other one in English and don't consider this in any way the inferior one. What is most important, is that this one volume offers what may be the ultimate collection of short stories. I has been said of Beethoven's fifth Symphony that seldom so much has been said with so few notes. Well, many of the stories in this volume surpass good old Ludwig by far. Philosophers, scientist, journalists, all of them need endless pages to convey those concepts, that require not more than a few of Borges' lines. Cantor may be seen as the person that allowed mankind to come to grips with infinity, but Borges is the one to describe it most vividly. Buy it. Read it, and keep rereading it to the end of your time.
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Summary: Who are these reviewers anyway?
Review: What I want to know is what qualifications do all these guys have who wrote in saying Hurley's translations are inferior? Since when is knowing Spanish a qualification for judging the value of a translation? I'm sure none of these guys who decided off the top of their heads that these translations are weak know a third as much about the Spanish language as Hurley does. Just because something doesn't read to your particular, highly questionable tastes, doesn't make it a bad translation. Did they ever translate something themselves? What are their credentials? At the very least, they should put some credentials forward before commenting on the quality of the translation. As far as I'm concerned, and I'm only speaking as a layman here, I've read many different translations of Borges, and Hurley's, though slightly more complicated than the others, are IN NO WAY INFERIOR. And for a super price you get ALL of Borges' ficciones in one book.
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Summary: Borges as Symbol
Review: I lay on the grass by the poolside at the Brunswick City Baths. I'd done my laps and was now enjoying the vigorous exhaustion that is the reward. It was one of those Melbourne summer days when the atmosphere seems to have evaporated, leaving the earth wholly exposed to the sun's withering energy. A harsh, resplendent scene lay before me. Water, bodies, trees, buildings; all stood sharp-edged and brilliantly surfaced, blasted of mystery and vagueness. I fetched a volume of Borges from my bag and began to read Funes the Memorious. Once you've read a couple of Borges's stories, you know what's coming; and after a page or so I began musing, somewhat complacently; "hmm, here we go again...take an idea and exhaust it...just like the library, the lottery, the garden...in this case, a chap who remembers everything...so, to him, everything is particular, an instance, nothing general or representative...no doubt he'll disintegrate under the weight of infinite impressions". And in fact, that's more or less what happens. One doesn't read Borges as one reads, say, a detective story (a genre Borges loved, and employed for his own peculiar purposes) -to "see what happens", for the "thrill of the unexpected". Reading Borges, we are somewhat in the position of 5th century Athenians witnessing a tragedy, or a Christian audience at a nativity play. What "happens" is already known, is inevitable, predestined (by history, by literature, by cultural inheritance, by previous readings and auditions, by the logic of ideas). The interest is in the treatment, the beauty in the exposition. We're told Borges writes well. The translations read well enough. The signs are there of a rigorous, self-conscious stylist - all those semicolons and precise, (no doubt) laboriously chosen adjectives. The prose never flows; there's nothing "inspired" about it - no rapturous rhapsodies or long lilting cadences. Never does Borges "let himself go". Every sentence is nuanced, qualified, harnessed (inhibited, why not say it?) by a ferociously fastidious syntactical awareness. (I am not forgetting that Borges admired Whitman and translated Faulkner. I am forgetting the early poetry.) Oh, I know the objections. "It's all whim and vanity...just a formalistic game, a play with combinations, random aesthetics...emotionally, morally, humanly cold, empty...socially irresponsible...life's not like that", etc. I have no desire to defend Borges against any of this. I no longer look for life in books. I no longer look for life. I was alive reading Borges among the gleaming bodies, the shrieking children, the intolerable white sun of noon. The truth was that I read very little. The boy who forgets nothing was interesting, but no more than the day itself and the mere fact of being. "To propose lucidity to men in a lowly romantic era"; such was the "noble mission" Borges admired in Valéry, and inherited from him. And what Borges found in Valéry, I find in Borges: "the symbol of a man who, in an age that worships the chaotic idols of blood, earth and passion, preferred always the lucid pleasures of thought and the secret adventures of order". One can't long tolerate the white sun of noon.
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Summary: modern magic
Review: Reading these stories is a remarkable experience. It brings back the feeling I had as a child on opening a thick book of fairy tales to enter that enchanted world of dark forests, hidden castles, solitary woodcutters, questing simpletons, sleeping princesses, wolves, bears, and magic.
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Summary: The grammar of the fantastic, a formidable achievement
Review: True, the translation could be better. I found myself re-writing in my head alternative sentences. But that is exactly what Borges would have wanted his readers to do. A dream master, JLB guides us into worlds that guess at other worlds and leads us to our own discoveries. I can't count the times I had to put the book down to allow myself to ponder on what I was reading. Some of his stories border the essay, and that uncertainty makes the plot more believable and profound. Like with any book, recreate it in your mind, and be part of a Borges dream.
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Summary: A trove of mythological stories defying space and time.
Review: Some earlier reviewers complained about the quality of the translation of this collection of stories by Andrew Hurley, especially when compared to the collaboration between Jorge Luis Borges, (JLB, as he liked to sign), and Norman Thomas di Giovanni in preparing Labyrinths. (I suggest you read all reviews in the order they were written.) As one reasonably familiar with JLB's oeuvre, (a word JLB disliked), I state unequivocally that paying six dollars more for four times the number of stories in Labyrinths is a great bargain. Beyond nickels and dimes, it is precisely because the works of JLB were erstwhile translated into English in bits and pieces that his recognition as a gifted writer took so long in coming. (Jean-Pierre Berne's two-volume French translation, Oeuvres completes, is highly recommended.) American-born writer, editor, translator and collaborator, di Giovanni, was JLB's personal assistant in Buenos Aires from 1968 to 1972. I shall now illustrate specifically how his style of translation differed from that of Hurley with the story "The Gospel According to Saint Mark." In characterizing the Gutre family when they first met Espinosa, di Giovanni wrote "They were barely articulate," (in English, that is), while Hurley scribed "They rarely spoke." While the former sentence explains why "the Gutres, who knew so much about things in the country, did not know how to explain them," (page 398 in this book), the latter indicated an aloofness if not suspicion of Espinosa from their first meeting which addresses the irony of the ending. In depicting their eagerness to have St. Mark read to them after dinner, Hurley wrote "In the following days, the Gutres would wolf down the spitted beef and canned sardines in order to arrive sooner at the Gospel" while di Giovanni essayed "The Gutres took to bolting their barbecued meat and their sardines so as not to delay the Gospel." Where di Giovanni deciphered JLB's allusions to Herbert Spencer, W. H. Hudson and Charles I, Hurley explicated the origin of Baltasar Espinosa, the whereabouts of Ramos Mejia and the theme of the novel, Don Segundo Sombra. Take your pick. Finally, JLB habitually changed texts from edition to edition, especially in his poetry. It is then problematic to determine the faithfulness of the translations. Rest assured that, though rhyme and rhythm are compromised in any translation, in Hurley's rendering, the brilliance and magic of each story is preserved down to, say, the symbolism of the goldfinch at the conclusion of the illustrative yarn, "The Gospel According to Saint Mark."
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Summary: What fun there is to read.
Review: This collection by an excellent storyteller brings us to the final, yet often forgetton question of fiction - what's the use in reading? When so many books lead us nowhere and give us nothing to share with the author, here is a writer who shows us there's something to make belive that makes reading worthwhile. These are personal stories for sure, stories written from Borges' heart. Yet what a gift, what a heart! They share our fears, our questions of existence, our wishes and the joy of being alive declared so cleanly. What a wonderful soul Borges presented us, and what fun there is to be had in storytelling. Read them all. Treasure the later ones.
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Summary: All Borges! All the Time!
Review: I've been working my way gradually through this volume, reading one story at a time. Okay, I cheated and read handfuls of one pagers. Sure, there's some not-so-impressive pieces here, but there is also "The Aleph", "Blue Tigers", "Death and the Compass", "Guayaquil", "The Library of Babel", "The Mirror and the Mask", "The Rose of Paracelsus", "The Shape of the Sword", "Three Versions of Judas", "The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths", and, of course, "The Lottery in Babylon." Some are simple narratives, clever tales. Others are speculations about delicate ideas (a one sided disk, a single point through which one can see everything in its entirety, a society where everybody's actions may or may not be determined by chance). At his best, he creates interesting people, not the least of which is the character of himself, to see witness these phenomenom. Be careful, though, of a volume that contains stories like "The Dead Man", "The Other Death", "The Duel", "The Other Duel", and "The Other". In some ways, the risk is having the entire translation of a collected volume all done by one man. I haven't read the originals (my Spanish is seriously lacking), but I feel that, while his translation of any one particular pience may be adequate, having the entire work translated by Hurley lent the entire volume a lingering sameness. It was difficult to detect a maturity of voice, or any serious change in style, over the 40+ years of stories here. Maybe this was part of the magic of Borges, but I doubt it.
Rating: 
Summary: Didn't Speak To Me
Review: So I thought it was time I finally checked out some Borges, I mean, he's supposed to be the man, right? Thus, dipped into this book, reading about 15 or so of the stories before packing it in. They kind of drifted over me leaving no great impression. They all felt very similar in style and tone, and I couldn't see reading another 50 of the same kind of stories. The only two I recall are "The Lottery in Babylon" and "The Zahir." Obviously Borges can write and tell a story, just not in a way that appeals to me.
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