OGWiseman Recommends!
The first Borges story I ever read (with a link to the full text) and why you should read it.
Jorge Luis Borges was born in 1899 in Buenos Aires. He spent his later childhood in Europe, first in Switzerland and then everywhere, picking up multiple languages with fluency, and reading widely. He returned to Argentina in his early 20s and began to publish strange, surrealist fiction in local outlets.
Twenty years later, he had honed his style into a slightly less surrealist but still very strange voice, and started to write short story masterpieces. Twenty years after that, he was internationally famous in translation and exerting profound influence over the entire genre of Sci fi/Fantasy writing.
There are some bands that are popular with everyone. But then there are some bands that aren’t widely popular, but are extremely popular with musicians, and so become influential out of proportion to their albums sold. (Musical Examples: Fugazi, The Stooges, Rakim)
That’s the story of Borges. He certainly sold books, but the true measure of his reach is the myriad classics that would not exist if Borges had not inspired their authors.
I first encountered Borges in college, when I picked up his most popular collection, “Fictions”. As has always been my habit with short story collections, I looked at the table of contents, picked which story’s title I liked the most, and started with that one. My favorite title was “The Library of Babel”.
When I started that story, something strange came over me. I had a feeling that I’ve not had often in my reading life; a sudden knowledge that I was going to drop whatever else I was doing and read this entire book, cover-to-cover, stopping only to eat or sleep. And that’s what I did.
Since then I have become a Borges completist. His “collected works” run to over 1200 pages, and I read every single one. I’ve read interviews and biographies and essays and reviews and criticism. But it all started here, with this story:
https://sites.evergreen.edu/politicalshakespeares/wp-content/uploads/sites/226/2015/12/Borges-The-Library-of-Babel.pdf
I’m not going to do spoilers, so feel free to read the rest of this first, or stop and read the story, whichever you prefer. It’s 8 pages long, should take less than 30 minutes, and perhaps way less if you’re a fast reader.
When reading Borges, the most important maxim is: Don’t worry if it doesn’t make sense right away!
His stories are philosophical objects—artifacts of possible worlds. Trying to identify a protagonist or figure out who we should be “rooting for” is a category mistake.
In “The Library of Babel”, we explore the idea of a library that contains every possible combination of words that could conceivably exist. There is a narrator, but don’t mistake it for an autobiography. The point is to contemplate the story as metaphor, allegory, and limiting principle of a possible reality.
Enjoy! And if you like that one and want to explore more Borges, the next two stories I recommend reading are “The Lottery in Babylon” and “Funes the Memorious”. Here are links to both:
https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Borges_FunesTheMemorious.pdf
https://img.fireden.net/tg/image/1455/94/1455942113878.pdf
Thanks for reading. I will be back next Sunday with another story. Have a great week!