I recently received Jorge Luis Borges collection of short stories “Labrynths” as an Xmas gift, and have become insanely interested in his writing (especially “The Library of Babel” and “The Circular Ruins”). In addition, I recently read a short story on the internet located here http://home.earthlink.net/~jackson02124/resurrection.htm
I was wondering if anybody could give me some more information related to these two things such as the name of the genres, books to read, etc… I’ve heard names like urban fantasy and magic realism thrown around, but I’m not sure if they apply here.
I’m not sure exactly what to ask really, so any information at all will help. Thanks.
Borges is one of my favorites, too. I discovered him by complete accident, and he completely changed the way I look at fiction. There’s never been anyone quite like him. Borges never thought of himself as a “scholar” of any particular literary style, time, or genre. He preferred to know a little about everything rather than to know everything about a little, so to speak; one of his favorite things to read was the encyclopedia.
He also broke conventions of fiction by writing, well, the way he wanted to write. He had no interest in putting months or years of work into a novel, so instead he’d write a fake “review” of a nonexistent novel, or compress a 700 page tale into a short “fiction” of 7 pages. He could do more with those 7 pages than most authors could do with the 700.
I’ve heard him labeled as a magic realist, but his work is also frequently described as “metafiction” . . . sort of fiction about fiction, or about the act of artistic creation. He came from a literary perspective where the lines between “genres” were blurred or ignored.
You can find his entire Collected Fictions on amazon, etc., and that should keep you busy for a while. I’d also recommend trying Italo Calvino; his short works are similar to Borges, and his sort-of-novel, Invisible Cities, is another of my favorite books.
I’m sure others can provide more detailed info . . . I’m just a fan, after all, not a scholar.
Another Borges-fan here. I find his stories quite haunting; at odd moments I may find myself thinking of them.
I can second Winston Bongo’s suggestion as well, although I prefer Calvino’s When on a winternight a traveller. Invisible cities got a bit hard to get through after a while, as did The castle of the crossing life-stories (I’m not sure whether I’ve got the titles right, I read these in Dutch and translate them off the cuff).
I’ve only read a couple of things by him…a story about a fictional world that some scholars made an encyclopedia about, and another involving extremely heavy small metal cones. I enjoyed both of them a lot.
As an aside, Paul Theroux’s book “THe Old Patagonian Express” features short interviews and meetings with Borges as Theroux passed through Argentina.
It may be interesting to you to read a little of how a compemporary writer interacted with the old master, and how Borges rated his own work.
They both shared a strong appreciation of the works of Kipling and Poe. Theroux read extracts of their work (and others) to the near-blind Borges during their meetings. Fascinating background.
In Spanish, I have always heard the likes of Borges and Bioy Cásares referred to as “literatura fantástica” – which does NOT mean the same thing as the English genres of SF or fantasy, but seems to me not so much a genre as an idiom. As you may have noticed, there are Borges pieces that contain no imaginary worlds or abnormal phenomena except inside the protagonists’s mind.
As time moved on Borges turned to a strong interest in philologies and into even more writing about writing itself, which can be seen in some the abovementioned fictitious book reviews like Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote and in many of the poems in El Elogio de la Sombra (In Praise of the Darkness; a bilingual edition existed, dunno if still in print). He also did a lot of straight literary criticism – once listened to him do a lecture on Whitman.
There is debate in some circles as as to whether his non-Nobel status was in mostly due to his being unique, but hardly world- or even society- changing(*) (but then how do you explain some of the obscure awardees in the past century), mostly for his loudly proclaiming his disdain for the NP for many years, or for being un-PC before there was even PC (a strong anti-Peronist and even anti-nationalist in Argentina, yet did not reject an award from Chile at the time of the Pinochet dictatorship; a believer in the “universal” [Western] canon who after the 1930s did precious little “Latino”-centric work-- but who respected and was familiar with Asian, Islamic, and Norse cultures.)
The “Collected Fictions” was published by Penguin Books in 1998 (OnLine Boolstore link), which looks like a good deal. If you were interested in the Labyrinths collection the other ones most akin to it would be Ficciones and The Aleph ; there is some overlap in these.
(*Like Winston Bongo, I had my approach to reading and writing blown wide open by exposure to Borges; but I can also see that he doesn’t “speak” to many – and wasn’t even trying to)
I’m a major Borges fan also, though I’d never heard of him until I read the Library of Babel as a 30 something library student.
My other favorites are “The Immortals” and any of his other works dealing with mythology. (He was often pigeonholed as a Sci-Fi author [literary plankton to most mid 20th century critics] for much of his life.)
He was largely silenced by the Perons and had to work as a rabbit and poultry inspector in the Buenos Aires meat markets to make ends meet while Evita was singing, but upon their removal he was made Director of the National Library (the Argentine equivalent of Librarian of Congress). Unfortunately he was totally blind by this time, prompting his comment “what irony to give me 4 million books and darkness” (paraphrase- the original might be slightly different). He was at least the third blind person to hold the position strangely enough, but you notice the obsession with color that fills many of his books and the frustration at available information you can’t access.
There’s some debate as to his sexuality (though I don’t think it makes any different) due to the oddness of his marriages. The first was to a woman he purportedly fell in love with when she was a married teenager and he was a 30ish scholar- they married when she was a middle aged widow 30-something years later but divorced soon after. On his deathbed he married his longtime secretary and companion, Maria Kodama (an Argentine of Japanese ancestry who was 50 years his junior), though it’s generally believed this was a white marriage done to show his appreciation and protect his literary legacy. There have been several lawsuits between her and his great-nephews/nieces over his literary estate (which generates more revenue now than it did for most of his life).
I always like to trot out this bit of trivia when Borges’ name comes up:
The first story of his to appear in English was in the August 1948 issue of none other than Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. The “Garden of Forking Paths” was translated by sf & mystery author and linguist Anthony Boucher.
Although EQMM regularly published stories by “mainstream” authors, as long as they were vaguely connected to crime in some way, it’s unclear whether this first English appearance helped bring Borges’ name to the American public or ghettoized him for a time until books of his stories started reaching bookstores.
