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Summary:
If Jorge Luis Borges had been a computer scientist, he probably would have invented hypertext and the World Wide Web.
Instead, being a librarian and one of the world's most widely read people, he became the leading practitioner of a densely layered imaginistic writing style that has been imitated throughout this century, but has no peer (although Umberto Eco sometimes comes close, especially in Name of the Rose).
Borges's stories are redolent with an intelligence, wealth of invention, and a tight, almost mathematically formal style that challenge with mysteries and paradoxes revealed only slowly after several readings. Highly recommended to anyone who wants their imagination and intellect to be aswarm with philosophical plots, compelling conundrums, and a wealth of real and imagined literary references derived from an infinitely imaginary library.
Customer Reviews:
Average Customer Rating:
Amazingly interesting read
Customer Rating:
This collection of stories is far more interesting and evocative than I was expecting, an excellent read from start to finish.
Liar, poet, seer, mystic, mythmaker...storyteller
Customer Rating:
It strikes me that, for the most part, the reviewers who didn't like this book were expecting another sort of book entirely. *Labyrinths* isn't sci-fi, or detective fiction, or adventure...though it makes liberal use of these genre conventions. Instead, *Labyrinths* is a collection of speculative fiction and short essays at the highest level of imaginative inquiry. They are stories that don't portray reality so much as set out to discover what reality is. Borges is chronicler, creator, and often a character himself in these labyrinths--and, in each of these pieces, he hopes to illuminate at least a few feet down some of the seemingly endless corridors of the gloriously malignant maze that is human consciousness.
Time, identity, space, immortality, imagination, dreams, fiction, and memory--these are just some of the repeated concerns that Borges treats in this collection. Some of these stories, while intricate, erudite, and elegantly written, have more or less conventional plot arcs from beginning to end. Others are far more elliptical. All of them are relatively short, which helps, because all of them are dense with a truly breathtaking breadth of learning from the most disparate sources. Reading Borges in these stories and essays one feels as if he were simultaneously reading dozens of other authors whose ideas are frequently cited, or who provide the jumping off place for Borges' own explorations into unknown territory.
Maddeningly, for the literal minded, I guess, Borges also makes up sources, giving his stories a mock-nonfiction tone, ala H.P. Lovecraft's work or the Blair Witch movies. Not only does this device deepen one's immersion in the tale, but, in true pataphysical fashion, the citation of an "artificial" authority to lend credence to a work of fiction ends up challenging our sense of reality itself and leaves us asking if maybe what we imagine as "real" is actually the "true reality."
These are stories primarily of ideas--and Borges seems to have no lack of them. As absurd as these ideas often are--i.e. a contemporary author writing from scratch, without copying, the entire Don Quixote by becoming Cervantes to how we never would have suspected how many writers stretching back into antiquity were Kafkaesque until Kafka came along--they usually possess a kernel of startling truth with wide-ranging, usually philosophical, implications. Borges has that special way of looking at life that enables him to see things from angles that no one else could--until he points them out. At which point you wonder how you could ever have missed it.
As with any collection, there are some stories here you'll like more than others, and some not at all. But for the intelligent reader sensitive to Borges' project and preoccupations, there will be at least two or three pieces in *Labyrinths* you're guaranteed not to forget. This is an inspiring and thought-provoking collection for those readers who ask such questions as "what is a story?" and "who really writes it?" These are not, as the titles of the collection clearly implies ((and implicitly warns)), straightforward tales. They are labyrinths indeed--but for those who don't mind traveling without ever arriving they may be just your ticket to a strange sort of illumination.
Some of the Best English Translations of His Work
Customer Rating:
I speak both Spanish and English (and lived Argentina) and I can say that these English translations, particularly those of Yates, are some of the best I have come across. (Yates was Borges's first English translator and the translator of another remarkable but little known Argentine writer, Edgar Brau.) Yates stays true to the original, gracefully rendering the complex subtleties of Borges's style, unlike some other translators of his work.
Like a Science Textbook, Man! Gimme a Break!
Customer Rating:
Borges was a hep cat, man, I'll concede that & seems to read a bit but his stories read like friggin' medical textbooks! Fine for scientists & other geeks of that type but a bit dull for the average reader. My favorite story was `Garden of Forking Paths,' which is the clearest story & easiest to understand. The `Secret of the Sect of the Phoenix' I'm assuming deals with Freemasonry though Borges claims it was homosexuality. But then he claimed a lot of weird things. Borges is like digesting an overdose of fiber, long, arduous, excruciating at times, & in the end stinky, heavy, & a little too black.
Soporific Erudition. Fantastic, Fasionable Tripe.
Customer Rating:
If you like the concept of "art for art's sake", imaginative-abortive creations, then Borges is your man. If not--
These are not short stories: they are abstracts for metaphysical tomes, and all the much more dense for it. Jabberwocky. Speculative philosophy died and found its way into these stories; each very Romantic and "magically realistic". These are fairy tales for adults. Borges, "The Brother Grimm" meets "Dick Tracy". --It's surprising to see reviewers showing affection for both Borges and Nabokov, since the latter's judgment on him was harsh. "Indulgent twaddle for literary wh0res" would be a very generous approximation of these stories' contents. A truly perverse mixture of Teutonic affectation, Latin propensity for covert subconscious introduction of Catholic liturgy into every aspect of life and thought in the form of a fascination with morbidity, and plain old gloomy English boorishness. Borges contracted the vices of two continents without assimilating any of the individual virtues possessed thereby. He was a journalist who wrote fiction with the corresponding appetite for the fantastic, and the scavanger's instinct for 'news' corresponding to the personal qualities demanded and cultivated by the profession.
That said, Borges was by far the finest Theosophical thinker of the last century . . . well learned and it shows . . . some power of imagination required to deliver all those clever little asides only those in command of the literature of six nations can fathom . . . a man of the people and ivory tower intellectual as well . . . none can compare . . .
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