Ficciones

 

I’ve been broadening my scope of reading lately. In some cases, this is merely done by reading what I already own. It’s a trend on YouTube these days. Perhaps it’s not a new trend; I expect there have been video essays on doing just that for as long as there has been YouTube. It’s good advice. And we should all take it. Otherwise, books that once excited us enough to purchase them might never be read; if you, like me, are not as quick a reader as we’d like to be, and other, newer (or older) titles distract us from doing what we ought.

Despite this desire, despite this promise to myself that I ought to do just that, and despite my declaration here that I will do just that, old habits die hard. Every so often (too often, truth be told), I’m seduced by what I’ve seen or read and do just what I vowed I would not do: I buy more books.

I recently was seduced into buying and reading a short book, Steven L. Peck’s 2009 psychological horror novella, A Short Stay in Hell, recently discussed in this blog. I learned, even as I heard of it, that it was inspired by, or perhaps adapted from, Jorges Luis Borges’ short story, “The Library of Babel.” Naturally, easily seduced me, had his interest piqued. Inspired how? Adapted how? Enquiring minds want to know…. “I must read this short story,” I told myself. Of course I did.

Thus, I bought another book: his Ficciones.

I, I must admit, cannot remember whether I’d ever heard of Borges. I might have. I must have. He’s considered a master postmodern short story writer. He was also a poet, an essayist, a translator. But hitherto I’d never read anything he’d written. That said, I’ve read what I read, and one cannot read everything. That also said, I decided I ought to, considering how thrilled I was with Peck’s disturbing novella. Imagine, I thought, how good its source inspiration is.

Oddly enough, Borges was not well known outside of France or South America (he was Argentine) until 1961, when he was introduced to the English-speaking world by Samuel Beckett. The success of García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude helped Borges’ sales, I would imagine. Latin America authors had become all the rage, if at least for a time.

Ficciones stories were published between 1941 and 1946, some of which were collected in the anthology Labyrinths, in 1962, and here, in this collection (for the first time in English) the same year.

What are they about? They are hard to describe. They, each, are themselves labyrinths. Some are about books that never existed. Some of these are satires of book reviews of these books that never existed. Others are misdirection, tales told by unreliable narrators. They are about secret societies, conspiracies, and civilizations purported to be, but are merely elaborate hoaxes. Thus… lies (?). Most are perplexing; all are masterfully presented.

The best of them might not be “The Library of Babel,” but it was the I was most drawn to. (It was fun to learn that Borges was himself a librarian when he wrote it.) That might be because of both Peck’s adaptation, and YouTube videos extolling its virtues, the virtues of Borges, or all of the above.

I did not find Ficciones, for the most part, an easy read. Indeed, most stories were a struggle. I grappled with Borges’ complex thoughts and sentences; because of this, I only read one story per day. Luckily, most are quite short. So, I was able to reread a number of the most labyrinthian immediately afterwards. I would not have done so if I did not find them thought-provoking. That said, I might have abandoned the book if they were not easier the second time around. Some were straightforward, not requiring rereading at all. A few remained as indecipherable as on first reading. Regardless my failure, most were rewarding, in one way or another.

I likely will not read more Borges, however. Regardless how philosophical they are (and they are), despite Beckett’s heralding him, no matter Karl Ove Knausgaard declaring "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," the first story of the collection, "the best short story ever written," I found them a little too postmodern for my taste. Not that I dislike postmodern, as a rule. Sometimes, though, postmodern novels can be more work than they are worth. I note that philosophy majors adore Borges. Perhaps they divine reference and meaning lost on me. Perhaps it was the translation.

Perhaps I’m just a little too thick for Borges.