Rating: 
Summary: Ficciones - Unique, Remarkable and Exciting.
Review: Imagine removing a blindfold. You are in some American city, but which one? For many cities the street layouts, the buildings, the commercial enterprises are so similar that few clues would be available. But New York, Boston, and San Francisco would be immediately recognizable. The works of Jorge Luis Borges, Umberto Eco, Franz Kafka, and Edgar Allen Poe stand apart from other great writers. They each offer a uniquely fascinating perspective, an unusual style combined with a remarkable command of language. I first encountered Ficciones quite a few years ago. I was not familiar with Jorge Luis Borges and not prepared for this remarkable discovery. I still have that book, a little paperback priced at $2.45. I return to it again and again, always to find myself surprised by Borges. (I now have all of Borges works that have been translated to English.) Borges assumes that his reader is literate. He makes allusions to a wide range of works, occasionally mentioning entirely mythical books that somehow should exist. His volcabulary is immense, but his writing is clear, entertaining, and unpredictable. It is said that Borges has seemingly read everything - and not in translation, but in the original Latin, German, French, English, and Spanish. To better appreciate Dante, he taught himself 13th century Italian. The poetry, essays, and short stories of Borges are already recognized as classic works of the 20th century. Ficciones, a collection of short stories from 1941-1944, is a particularly good introduction. Take a look at some other reader reviews, but not too many. Borges is best as a surprise, like a fine wine that is unexpectedly encountered.
Rating:
Summary: Metaphysical Angst
Review: After years of running into this name, "Borges," I felt as though I were falling short of my expectations as a reader to ignore this man and his colossal reputation. Ficciones seemed to be his most widely read and critically acclaimed book, and so I inevitably found myself reading it. To try to capture the essence of Borges in a handful of words is like trying to capture the Lochness Monster on film: impossible, but frequently attempted. With that understanding in mind, here's my assessment: All of Borges's stories are very different, and yet they all share a common sensibility, one of understated but very deeply felt anguish. This is not the anguish of an ordinary writer feeling sorry for himself and his fate. This anguish is deep, metaphysical. You get the sense that Borges views life and his fellow human beings at a distance, and yet is able to see more and understand more from this distance. He does not attempt to explain; he simply wants to impart his sense of awe, wonder, and inevitability. The subject matter varies widely: an infinite library, a scholarly review of the life's work of a fictional writer, a boy with a perfect memory. Some of his stories are Kafka-esqe in a nightmarish sense, while others have the intellectual playfulness of an M.C. Escher drawing: what you thought was 'up' is really 'down,' and yet once you see the big picture you realize that this is the only way it can be. The endings are as inevitable as death, and yet you rarely see them coming. I'm not so sure that Borges wrote his stories with a specific point or message, although many of them seem to have one. I believe that most of these stories are simply meant to inspire thought and contemplation of the very issues that Borges had been thinking of when he wrote them. One could do a lot worse than to see things through the eyes of this great thinker. My only complaint is that his stories are not as accessible as they could be, and his scholarly manner may be problematical for some. But the most effective pills are often the hardest to swallow...
Rating:
Summary: Vision and Foundation
Review: I should begin this review by saying that this is the only work by Borges I have read. I am very familiar with modern and contemporary literature, and through my exposure to others have repeatedly heard reference to Borges. I now know why he is so frequently cited and why the blurb on the paperback version's back cover says "without Borges, the modern Latin American novel simply wouldn't exist." I think Borges would likely challenge that assertion, but at the least Borges has an extraordinarily precociousness about him. He is postmodern in every sense of the term without the pretension that often accompanies a postmodern sensibility. In Ficciones we are exposed to the possibility that nihilism is the ultimate reality. In other postmodern works, this idea is presently mordantly, the author reverently succumbing to their own notion of nothingness. In Ficciones the possibility that nothing really exists also has a corollary: the possibility that anything exists. It is this sense of limitless possibility that predominates the first half of this collection of short fictions. In my opinion the first half of this book, entitled The Garden of Forking Paths is far more engaging than the second, Artifices. In Part I, we are told some of Borges's most noted tales, including The Library of Babel in which everything that can exist is recorded and stored in an eternal grid of rooms. I have heard Borges's work described as labyrinthine, but I think that term both simplifies and obscures his fictions. To say it simplifies his work is to say that it reduces his stories to puzzles, or mazes for which there may or may not be any solution. In my reading of Borges the idea of a solution to a riddle presupposes that a singular answer is available. To Borges, there is an infinite array of solutions to an infinite array of problems. What he does, because he must in order to address such rampant chaos, is create boxes which neatly contain a microscopic summary of the spread of problems at hand. This is what I believe people refer to when they say he is labyrinthine (not to mention he often writes about labyrinths and puzzles). The themes of recursion and simultaneity dominate Part I. Everything exists at once. Time is an illusion. Yet he uses the conceit of a library to attempt to order it. This is futile and he knows it, so he situates the narrator of that tale in a task of recursively searching for and ultimately never finding a definitive explanation to anything. Part II is more narrative-driven and does include some very good stories, particularly "Funes, the Memorius", "The Secret Miracle" and "Three Versions of Judas". These tales put into motion the intellectual conceits introduced in Part I. Borges is not nearly as impenetrable as I was led to believe. I am not saying that it's easy either. Although this book is short, it took me about 3 days to finish because the stories are so compact. It takes time for the ideas to unravel. In Ficciones, Borges makes Einstein's physics into readable literature. He was postmodern before modernism was finished. This thin volume is a must for anyone with a passion for 20th century literature.
Rating:
Summary: if you don't like him you don't understand him, period
Review: let's set a few things straight. borges is not encouraging the reader to negate existence by calling it's reality and importance into question. anyone who sees his work as nothing more than a tedious conceptual game or pretentious intellectual posturing does not understand it, plain and simple. borges is more akin to a william blake than to a jean paul sartre, even if some of his work has the courage to face the darker side of life and it's ambiguity (god forbid that someone should be courageous enough to confront what's actually there.) like the decadents, borges celebrates the subjectivity of the individual and the imagination, and he exalts more of existence than he depreciates. i'm willing to admit that his stuff can be a little too ambiguous at times, but if you stop being so neurotically analytical and just try to enjoy the breathtaking aesthetic mastery of it all, then maybe you'll recognize borges as what he is, one of the most important writers to ever live. this is the kind of stuff that will change your whole outlook on life and the world, and is therefore not just good but great. if you dismiss borges you'll have to dismiss kafka, gogol, schulz, and about a billion other literary geniuses who use *allegorical fiction* (repeat after me, a-l-l-e-g-o-r-y) to speculate on the nature of ultimate reality and the meaningfulness or meaninglessness of existence. when it comes right down to it, you're a pretty shallow person if you think of all books that require thinking or individual interpretation as 'pretentious' or 'too cerebral'. don't ask readers of borges why they like him or what they get out of him, ask yourself why you really care about anything else than the meaning of your life? because when you think about it, nothing else matters. sure, it is important to be able to enjoy yourself and kick back every now and then without intellectualizing everything, but i think it's safe to say that people who live uncritically and turn into what kierkegaard called 'chattering social nonentities' are simply wasting their lives under the pretense of being 'healthy minded', or 'normal', or whatever. the beauty of borges is that from the start he drops all the false pretensions almost everyone has to 'truth' or 'reality', all those relative fictions that we cling to so desperately. for anyone who cares about anything that's actually relevant, you have to read borges before you buy the farm and preferably soon. for the rest of you, just go watch 'friends' or read harry potter or something, but don't write reviews.
Rating:
Summary: IT IS A WORLDWIDE MARVEL
Review: If you haven't ever read Jorge Luis Borges, then please, begin by this book. It is so stunning, and amazing, that I can't tell you how it is. PLEASE, BUY AND READ THIS BOOK. YOU'LL NEVER WANT YOUR MONEY BACK!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Rating: 
Summary: stretch it out
Review: There is no intellectual exercise that is not ultimately pointless.
-Jorge Luis Borges Borge's gnosticism--his sense that the ultimate God is beyond good and evil, and infinitely remote
from creation--is deeply felt. But the sense of dread that informs his work is metaphysical rather
than religious in nature : at its base are vertiginous glimpses of the collapse of all structures of
understanding including language itself, flashing intimations that the very self that speaks has no
real existence.
-J. M. Coetzee, Borge's Dark Mirror (NY Review of Books) A modern author who spends his life writing two chapters of Don Quijote, not rewriting mind you, but writing the original, a wizard who dreams a son into existence only to realize that he himself is but the emanation of another's dream, an infinite library, a man accepting a challenge to a knife fight which he can not possibly win, these are just some of the elements that Jorge Luis Borges draws upon in his stories. These labyrinthine fictions loop back upon themselves and upon reality in order first to undermine the claims of reason and ultimately to call into question existence itself. Borges was one of the great conservative authors of the 20th Century--his support for things like the Bay of Pigs invasion and his anti-Peronism are widely considered to have cost him the oh-so-politically-correct Nobel Prize--but his was a very particular conservatism, the conservatism of anti-Reason, of which the other great exemplar was Leo Tolstoy. On first reading War and Peace, I couldn't understand how a supposedly great writer had made such an incomprehensible hash of the battle scenes, but in his great essay, The Fox and the Hedgehog, Isaiah Berlin makes the compelling case that Tolstoy was thereby attempting to show just how unsusceptible events are to the application of human reason. Borges similarly challenges the central place of reason in the modern age, suggesting that existence is simply incomprehensible, absurd, unyielding to human understanding or planning. With this understanding of how subjective our interpretation of life is at the forefront of his work, Borges then proceeds to craft brief, tightly controlled, imaginative, stories which seem to play with the idea that the writer is the god of the literary world that he creates. Of course, this too is a paradox. Like the Existentialists, he is hoist on the petard of his own ideology. If intellectual exercises are pointless, and his writings are nothing if not intellectual exercises, why devote his life to a pointless exercise? Likewise, one wonders why anyone would produce such carefully constructed stories if all of existence is so essentially dubious. The awkward answer can be nothing but faith. God may be a distant figure to Borges, a non-existent one to the Existentialists, but the very act of continuing to write beautiful stories to argue their point of view, indicates that at some level they do find a purpose to life and do trust in the capacity of their own voices to influence other people and the future. Borges shares a fascination with suicide or at least the acceptance of death with the Existentialists, but like them, he kept on going. Their actions speak louder than their words. Perhaps because of this central paradox in his work, I found it a little difficult to read the whole set of stories straight through. I got a sense that the author didst protest too much. If everything is mere illusion, why'd he bother to write all of this & why am I reading it? On the other hand, if you read them one at a time and let each roll around in your head, you really get a chance to savor their playfulness and ingenuity and to ponder the questions they raise. I certainly recommend them, but suggest that they are best when read over a longer period of time. Don't get stuck on an airplane with just this book. GRADE : B
Rating:
Summary: An exquisite collection!
Review: Ficciones is exactly what the title states. It is a collection of fiction. There are detective stories, Book reviews of imaginary novels, short stories, and science fiction stories. You may wonder why such an ecle.ctic collection is housed in one novel. The author writes in such a broad range not because he wants to show case his talent (which is of abundance) but because he wants the reader to think of the POSSIBILITIES. Borges expands our minds and shows us that not everyone needs to write a 400 page book to showcase an idea. He takes less than 20 pages to show what possibilities can be achieved and what directions any number of literary genres can turn to. If you wish to use your imaginatin, then open this book and Enjoy
Rating:
Summary: Un clasico de Borges
Review: Junto con el Aleph, Ficciones es el libro que me convirtió en un fanático de Borges. En realidad, en este pequeño volumen quedan resumidas todas las genialidades, búsquedas, acertijos, historias, bromas, erudiciones de Borges. Para alguien que nunca ha leído a Borges es sin dudas un buen comienzo para empezar a enamorarse de uno de los mas grandes escritores de nuestra lengua. Para aquellos que ya somos sus lectores, leer y releer Ficciones es un placer inagotable. ESte libro es sencillamente una maravilla
Rating:
Summary: A brainiac's delight
Review: Borges is not quite like any other author I’ve ever read. Some of his influences appear to have been Swift (in his brilliant, mock high-serious parodies of scholarly writings) and E.T.A. Hoffman (in the often arcane subject matter of his stories, and in their sheer weirdness). He shares with his contemporary, Nabokov, great stylistic elegance and a love of intellectual puzzles. And he’s clearly influenced the work of a host of artists, writers, and thinkers: the Foucault of “What Is An Author?,” Stanley Fish’s reader response theories, the paintings of Remedios Varo, the novels of Auster and Pynchon, even the recent film “Memento,” all bear unmistakable traces of his influence. Perhaps the writer Borges most resembles is Kafka – he and Kafka were masters of the short story, managing in a few taut pages to pack a dazzling breadth and depth of ideas, effects, and implications. Most significantly of all, both Borges and Kafka are in many ways sui generis. So you really must READ Borges (who, shockingly, never won the Nobel Prize) to get a full measure of his originality. His stories are mysterious, elliptical, hauntingly beautiful. The best of them are capable of expanding the boundaries of consciousness by forcing the reader to question the nature of knowledge, of time, of identity, of reality itself... If you’ve never read Borges before, “Ficciones” is an excellent place to start, as it includes many of his most memorable stories, such as “Pierre Menard, Author of the ‘Quixote,’” “The Library of Babylon,” and “Funes the Memorious.” They contain images that will haunt your dreams.
Rating:
Summary: Habra Foucault Leido Borges?
Review: Es un consuelo y, sin embargo, un profundo alivio manantial de pensar que el hombre es solamente una nueva invencion, una figura sin haber cumplido todovia dos siglos en existencia, una nueva arruga en nuestro conocimiento, y volvera ha desaparecer una vez que nuestro conocimiento haya sido discubierto." Foucault, en The Order of Things. Ademas del obvio, esta claro que Foucault haya leido Borges poco mas o menos completamentecomensando The Order of Things con: "Este libro primeramente provino de pasajes de Borges, sale de la risa que desmenuza mientras leiya el pasaje, todos los mojones familiares de mi pensamiento - nuestro pensar, el pensamiento que lleva la stampa de nuestra edad y nuestra geografia - destrosando toda orden superficial y todo los planos con que acostumbramos a domar la profusion salvaje de cosas que existen y continuan mucho despues para estorbar y amenazar el colapso de la eterna diferencia entre el Mismo y el Otro." Foucault se referia al "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins" por Jorge Luis Borges. Sin embargo hubiese estado mejor leyendo fuera de las paginas de Ficciones. Borges nos advierte no leer tanto sobre las cosas pero simplemente gozar o sentir gusto y alegria. En su intempestivo clasico de diez y siete piezas, se manifesta Borges a su mejor. En esta seleccion y precisamente en "The Library of Babel", Borges juega con el mundo en realidad y en vano y nos enseÔa la naturaleza precaria de esa distincion. El dirige su obra a una epistemologia que queda fuera del centro enseÔandonos la naturalesa tentativa del mundo en realidad. No tiene clasificacion del universo que es arbitrario o conjectural. Aqui es donde empiesa el enlaze con Foucault ..... Semejante a Kafka en ciertos pasajes, el llama attencion a estas zonas imaginarias y vemos que toda sabiduria, seÔas y simbolos tanto como conocimiento interior, es solo ficcion o fabricacion - fundado en construciones de palabra a palabra sea o no sea ficcion. El labirinto que es el "Library of Babel" con su forma repettitiva y topografica, y la entretexualidad que es el hex«gono carnesÍ. "I have squandered and consumed my years in adventures of this type. To me, it does not seem unlikely that on some shelf of the universe lies a total book." Borges, "The Library of Babel". Yo pienso que lo hemos allado aqui, en Ficciones. Todas cosas desde "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis, Tertius" a "The South", nos obsequian a una mezcla de surrealismo mundial y semillas de la desmantelacion Francesa. Si Foucault ha leido Borges, el ha reconocido la contribucion de Borges en su estudio de poder y la edficada naturaleza de "The Order of Things". Ficciones no es facil leer pero es muy recompensable. A mi me impresiono la extension de los temas y propuse hacer muchas investigaciones para alcansar lo que you sentia, a mi parecer, un trabajo poco mas o menos impenetrable. Sin embargo, a pesar de la naturalesa de un trabajocompareciente a un laberinto, como Kafka, con un poco de exfuerso llegamos a ver el humor y realizamos que ambos no quedan infinitamente incomprendible. Miguel Llora y Barrios
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