The following is cross-posted from Librarything.com.
Reviewing a book by a 'master' of literature always feels like a dangerous undertaking, so I am going to call this a response instead.
I read Borges for a class called Philosophy in Literature. While I'm not a total Philistine in literary matters, I would be lying if I said I caught half of Borges' references without having to look things up. Once I -did- look them up, my reading became much more enjoyable. Borges is utter nonsense unless you can figure out how to catch somehow the things he is throwing at you, and although I am sure that I've let the lion's share of the meaning in his work slip through my fingers on my first reading, what I did catch was delightful.
Borges is playful to the extreme. The stories in which he shines are those where he takes some strange idea and runs with it straight through. My favorite in the anthology has to be "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote." The premise stripped bare of Borges' elaboration is idiotic, but the story is a great one none the less. I can hardly understand it.
While I read Ficciones I was constantly torn between crying out, "This is so stupid!" and "Oh god, this is genius!" at the exact same time. I'm inclined to think that his greatest stories are both.
There are also a few stories in Ficciones that are not nearly as interesting as the others. Perhaps if epic shorts like "Funes, the Memorious" had never been written, a story like "The Form of the Sword" would still be great fiction, but when compared to their neighbors, there are a few stories that do not incite nearly as much masochistic mental glee as the others.
Regardless, Borges is a master of imagination, and for that I tip my hat to him.
I've got three books vying for the next to-read. One, T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets is required reading for class, so the chance that it will win out is high. I'm still slipping in chapters of Foundation and Empire here and there anyway.
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