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Cecily's Reviews > The Garden of Forking Paths
The Garden of Forking Paths
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Cecily's review
bookshelves: magical-realism, scifi-future-speculative-fict, short-stories-and-novellas, south-america, borges-and-borgesian
May 14, 2015
bookshelves: magical-realism, scifi-future-speculative-fict, short-stories-and-novellas, south-america, borges-and-borgesian
Read 2 times. Last read May 14, 2015 to May 19, 2015.
�The basest of art’s temptations: the temptation to be a genius� (from The Approach to Al-Mu’tasm). In this collection, Borges proves that he succumbed. And I’m very glad he did.
I have the Collected Fictions (with copious translator's notes), but am splitting my review of that into its components, listed in publication order: Collected Fictions - all reviews. This is the second, published in 1941, and this is where Borges starts to blow my mind.
Some of these stories are initially rather opaque, but they’re also short and SO worthwhile: with many, I read once to get a feel for what it was about, then immediately reread it to connect with it in context.
� The first time is gloriously disorienting, almost as it’s in a subtly different dialect from my own; it creates a hypnotic desire to understand.
� The second time, a switch has been flipped, I have the key to the kingdom, and the ideas slot into place, whilst retaining a pleasing degree of elusiveness.
“There is no intellectual exercise that is not ultimately pointless� (from Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, below). I don’t think Borges himself believed that, and these remarkable stories are a justification of such exercises.
The descriptions of individual stories below include minor spoilers; major ones are hidden with spoiler tags. If in doubt, scroll down to the Quotes section at the end.
Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius 6*
This is the longest and has its own review, here.
The Approach to Al-Mu’tasm 6*
A review of a non-existent book (unless someone has since written it), that even notes the differences between the first and second editions. This piece allegedly had one of Borges� friends try to order a copy from a bookshop.
The book is described as the “first detective novel written by a native of Bombay� and is an epic, sweeping across India, with a huge cast, but an “uncomfortable amalgam� of overwrought Islamic allegorical poems and European detective fiction.
The story though, is a recursive meditation on the duality of good and evil. “The object of the pilgrimage was itself a pilgrimage.�
A law student rejects his Islamic faith and end up among the poor, where he “perceives some mitigation of the evil: a moment of tenderness, of exaltation, of silence, in one of the abominable men�. He divines that the goodness must be a reflection from an external source, and sets off to find ever purer connections, via a series of connected rooms: “the insatiable search for a soul by means of the delicate glimmerings or reflections this soul has left in others�.
Each of us is like a stone cast in a lake: those nearest us are most affected, but even far away, there are ripples of who and what and how we are.
Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote
Every reader reads a different book. Even the same reader reads a different book on each encounter.
A self-referential exploration of the paradoxes of original composition, and the “new technique� of deliberate anachronism and fallacious attribution�. The last of those is a recurring habit of Borges himself, including in this story, which purports to be about a real writer.
This is a short essay about the great, but unfinished work, of a writer, who “did not want to compose another Quixote� but �the Quixote� by combining the don and Sancho into a single character and by, in some sense, becoming Cervantes. His tactic is to “learn Spanish, return to Catholicism, fight against the Moor and the Turk� and forget everything that happened after Cervantes published.
Menard’s other writings are listed, but it’s made clear that Quixote is his only important work, “perhaps the most significant writing of our time�, even though, over the course of his life, he only manages to write just over two chapters! A futile quest, perhaps, like Don Quixote’s own?
It becomes stranger as the reviewer describes Menard’s work as being “word for word� the same as Cervantes�, but also “more subtle� and “almost infinitely richer�, and yet different as well, because it “overlooks � or banishes � local colour� and many other incidents. So is it the same, or different? Is the Emperor naked or clothed?
Don Quixote is the obvious book on which to base this story: it was a favourite of JLB’s, mentioned in many of his stories (including "Parable of Cervantes and the Quixote", which is in Dreamtigers). More importantly, Cervantes did something similar to this story. Part two of DQ was written after what would now be called fan-fic. In part two, DQ himself treats part one as true, criticises the unofficial sequel, and responds to the resulting pressure of fame.
䲹Դ’s If on a Winter's Night a Traveler has Borgesian nods, including a writer following a similar path the Menard. See my review HERE.
Douglas Adams like this story. He wrote "You should read Jorge Luis Borges’s short story ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote�. It’s only six pages long, and you’ll be wanting to drop me a postcard to thank me for pointing it out to you." It’s in the foreword to P G Wodehouse’s Sunset at Blandings and quoted again in his own (posthumous) The Salmon of Doubt.
The Circular Ruins 6*
A circular story about dreaming reality. Pinocchio meets Inception and The Matrix, in Plato’s cave or Wonderland?
A man arrives at a temple to “dead, incinerated gods�; it is abandoned and he came with a strange purpose. “The goal that led him on was not impossible, though it was clearly supernatural: He wanted to dream a man� to dream him completely, in painstaking detail, and impose him upon reality.� I misread the final phrase, and thought reality would be imposed about the man conjured by dreams. Both ideas are relevant.
It’s a strange and difficult task: “molding the incoherent and dizzying stuff that dreams are made of is the most difficult work a man can undertake� much more difficult than weaving a rope of sand or minting coins of the faceless wind�.
I’ve never quite had a lucid dream, but this describes something tantalisingly like it: “in the dreaming man’s dream, the dreamed man awoke�. Pinocchio wanted to be a real boy, and the dreaming man wants the same for his “son�. He gradually accustoms him to reality, and erases his early memory because he “feared that his son� [would] somehow discover that he was a mere simulacrum� the projection of another man’s dream� � and what could be worse than that? Seriously, what could be worse? (view spoiler)
The Lottery in Babylon 6*
This opens with disorienting paradoxes about the narrator who has led a life of opposites, but also “known that thing the Greeks knew not � uncertainty�. The language and ideas were even more reminiscent of Kafka than some of the other pieces (is Qaphqa, a sacred latrine(!) where informers can leave messages, a pun?).
“The Lottery is an intensification of chance into the order of the universe� chance should intervene in every .�
We are all subject to the whims of fate, nature versus nurture, chaos and order, faith, justice, and chance. But in Babylon, actual lotteries are involved � to an absurd and alarming degree. Conventional ones lost their appeal, “they had not moral force�, so unlucky draws were added to the positive wins. But gradually the people needed a more powerful hit than that. The Company that runs it becomes increasingly powerful (and secretive - the Lottery is drawn in a labyrinth) as every aspect of life, and indeed the draw, is decided by draw.
Although “the number of drawings is infinite�, an infinite amount of time is not required, but rather, “infinitely subdivisible time�.
Does the Company exist � now or in the past � and does it matter?
The Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain
Here, Borges is name-dropping philosophers and writing an amusingly catty review of life and works of a fictitious author, starting by noting the “necrological pieties� in the very short obituary in the Times Literary Supplement. He goes on to say that his first book, The God of the Labyrinth, was good except for “somewhat careless plotting and the hollow, frigid stiltedness of certain descriptions of the sea�! Fortunately Borges was able to salvage one of Quain’s works and turn it into the far superior The Circle of Ruins (see above) � so recursion, about a circle. Neat.
The Library of Babel 6*
This has its own review, here.
The Garden of Forking Paths
This has its own review, here.
Quotes
� “No one saw him step from the boat in the unanimous night.�
� “The mirror hovered, shadowing us.�
� “In life� he was afflicted with unreality, as so many Englishmen are.�
� “Those close English friendships� that begin by excluding confidences and soon eliminate conversation.�
� “The aesthetic act must contain some element of surprise, shock, astonishment.�
� “To speak is to commit tautologies.�
� “He who is to perform a horrendous act should imagine to himself that it is already done, should impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.�
� “A keen and vaguely syllabic song, blurred by leaves and distance, came and went on the gentle gusts of breeze.�
� He “did not believe in a uniform and absolute time; he believed in an infinite series of times.�
I have the Collected Fictions (with copious translator's notes), but am splitting my review of that into its components, listed in publication order: Collected Fictions - all reviews. This is the second, published in 1941, and this is where Borges starts to blow my mind.
Some of these stories are initially rather opaque, but they’re also short and SO worthwhile: with many, I read once to get a feel for what it was about, then immediately reread it to connect with it in context.
� The first time is gloriously disorienting, almost as it’s in a subtly different dialect from my own; it creates a hypnotic desire to understand.
� The second time, a switch has been flipped, I have the key to the kingdom, and the ideas slot into place, whilst retaining a pleasing degree of elusiveness.
“There is no intellectual exercise that is not ultimately pointless� (from Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, below). I don’t think Borges himself believed that, and these remarkable stories are a justification of such exercises.
The descriptions of individual stories below include minor spoilers; major ones are hidden with spoiler tags. If in doubt, scroll down to the Quotes section at the end.
Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius 6*
This is the longest and has its own review, here.
The Approach to Al-Mu’tasm 6*
A review of a non-existent book (unless someone has since written it), that even notes the differences between the first and second editions. This piece allegedly had one of Borges� friends try to order a copy from a bookshop.
The book is described as the “first detective novel written by a native of Bombay� and is an epic, sweeping across India, with a huge cast, but an “uncomfortable amalgam� of overwrought Islamic allegorical poems and European detective fiction.
The story though, is a recursive meditation on the duality of good and evil. “The object of the pilgrimage was itself a pilgrimage.�
A law student rejects his Islamic faith and end up among the poor, where he “perceives some mitigation of the evil: a moment of tenderness, of exaltation, of silence, in one of the abominable men�. He divines that the goodness must be a reflection from an external source, and sets off to find ever purer connections, via a series of connected rooms: “the insatiable search for a soul by means of the delicate glimmerings or reflections this soul has left in others�.
Each of us is like a stone cast in a lake: those nearest us are most affected, but even far away, there are ripples of who and what and how we are.
Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote
Every reader reads a different book. Even the same reader reads a different book on each encounter.
A self-referential exploration of the paradoxes of original composition, and the “new technique� of deliberate anachronism and fallacious attribution�. The last of those is a recurring habit of Borges himself, including in this story, which purports to be about a real writer.
This is a short essay about the great, but unfinished work, of a writer, who “did not want to compose another Quixote� but �the Quixote� by combining the don and Sancho into a single character and by, in some sense, becoming Cervantes. His tactic is to “learn Spanish, return to Catholicism, fight against the Moor and the Turk� and forget everything that happened after Cervantes published.
Menard’s other writings are listed, but it’s made clear that Quixote is his only important work, “perhaps the most significant writing of our time�, even though, over the course of his life, he only manages to write just over two chapters! A futile quest, perhaps, like Don Quixote’s own?
It becomes stranger as the reviewer describes Menard’s work as being “word for word� the same as Cervantes�, but also “more subtle� and “almost infinitely richer�, and yet different as well, because it “overlooks � or banishes � local colour� and many other incidents. So is it the same, or different? Is the Emperor naked or clothed?
Don Quixote is the obvious book on which to base this story: it was a favourite of JLB’s, mentioned in many of his stories (including "Parable of Cervantes and the Quixote", which is in Dreamtigers). More importantly, Cervantes did something similar to this story. Part two of DQ was written after what would now be called fan-fic. In part two, DQ himself treats part one as true, criticises the unofficial sequel, and responds to the resulting pressure of fame.
䲹Դ’s If on a Winter's Night a Traveler has Borgesian nods, including a writer following a similar path the Menard. See my review HERE.
Douglas Adams like this story. He wrote "You should read Jorge Luis Borges’s short story ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote�. It’s only six pages long, and you’ll be wanting to drop me a postcard to thank me for pointing it out to you." It’s in the foreword to P G Wodehouse’s Sunset at Blandings and quoted again in his own (posthumous) The Salmon of Doubt.
The Circular Ruins 6*
A circular story about dreaming reality. Pinocchio meets Inception and The Matrix, in Plato’s cave or Wonderland?
A man arrives at a temple to “dead, incinerated gods�; it is abandoned and he came with a strange purpose. “The goal that led him on was not impossible, though it was clearly supernatural: He wanted to dream a man� to dream him completely, in painstaking detail, and impose him upon reality.� I misread the final phrase, and thought reality would be imposed about the man conjured by dreams. Both ideas are relevant.
It’s a strange and difficult task: “molding the incoherent and dizzying stuff that dreams are made of is the most difficult work a man can undertake� much more difficult than weaving a rope of sand or minting coins of the faceless wind�.
I’ve never quite had a lucid dream, but this describes something tantalisingly like it: “in the dreaming man’s dream, the dreamed man awoke�. Pinocchio wanted to be a real boy, and the dreaming man wants the same for his “son�. He gradually accustoms him to reality, and erases his early memory because he “feared that his son� [would] somehow discover that he was a mere simulacrum� the projection of another man’s dream� � and what could be worse than that? Seriously, what could be worse? (view spoiler)
The Lottery in Babylon 6*
This opens with disorienting paradoxes about the narrator who has led a life of opposites, but also “known that thing the Greeks knew not � uncertainty�. The language and ideas were even more reminiscent of Kafka than some of the other pieces (is Qaphqa, a sacred latrine(!) where informers can leave messages, a pun?).
“The Lottery is an intensification of chance into the order of the universe� chance should intervene in every .�
We are all subject to the whims of fate, nature versus nurture, chaos and order, faith, justice, and chance. But in Babylon, actual lotteries are involved � to an absurd and alarming degree. Conventional ones lost their appeal, “they had not moral force�, so unlucky draws were added to the positive wins. But gradually the people needed a more powerful hit than that. The Company that runs it becomes increasingly powerful (and secretive - the Lottery is drawn in a labyrinth) as every aspect of life, and indeed the draw, is decided by draw.
Although “the number of drawings is infinite�, an infinite amount of time is not required, but rather, “infinitely subdivisible time�.
Does the Company exist � now or in the past � and does it matter?
The Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain
Here, Borges is name-dropping philosophers and writing an amusingly catty review of life and works of a fictitious author, starting by noting the “necrological pieties� in the very short obituary in the Times Literary Supplement. He goes on to say that his first book, The God of the Labyrinth, was good except for “somewhat careless plotting and the hollow, frigid stiltedness of certain descriptions of the sea�! Fortunately Borges was able to salvage one of Quain’s works and turn it into the far superior The Circle of Ruins (see above) � so recursion, about a circle. Neat.
The Library of Babel 6*
This has its own review, here.
The Garden of Forking Paths
This has its own review, here.
Quotes
� “No one saw him step from the boat in the unanimous night.�
� “The mirror hovered, shadowing us.�
� “In life� he was afflicted with unreality, as so many Englishmen are.�
� “Those close English friendships� that begin by excluding confidences and soon eliminate conversation.�
� “The aesthetic act must contain some element of surprise, shock, astonishment.�
� “To speak is to commit tautologies.�
� “He who is to perform a horrendous act should imagine to himself that it is already done, should impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.�
� “A keen and vaguely syllabic song, blurred by leaves and distance, came and went on the gentle gusts of breeze.�
� He “did not believe in a uniform and absolute time; he believed in an infinite series of times.�
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Reading Progress
2015
–
Started Reading
(Paperback Edition)
2015
–
Finished Reading
(Paperback Edition)
May 14, 2015
–
Started Reading
May 14, 2015
– Shelved
May 14, 2015
– Shelved as:
to-read
May 15, 2015
–
0.0%
"Dense and disorienting; demanding and deserving full and repeated concentration. Wonderful."
May 19, 2015
– Shelved as:
magical-realism
May 19, 2015
– Shelved as:
scifi-future-speculative-fict
May 19, 2015
– Shelved as:
short-stories-and-novellas
May 19, 2015
– Shelved as:
south-america
May 19, 2015
–
Finished Reading
June 23, 2015
– Shelved as:
borges-and-borgesian
June 30, 2021
– Shelved
(Paperback Edition)
June 30, 2021
– Shelved as:
borges-and-borge...
(Paperback Edition)
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Carol She's So Novel꧁꧂
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May 19, 2015 01:23PM
I need to have my morning coffee before I read here. I had the title as something quite different! ;)
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It sounds very Chinese, doesn't it? The final story has the same title as the collection, and does relate to China.
Errr... different again! :D
What were you thinking of?
See you caught a lot of points I didn't, specially in second story. A great review.
Thanks, Sidharth. I think part of the power of Borges is that every time any of us read his works, we'll see something new. I'm a bit Borged out for a bit, so I'm not investigating friend reviews yet, but I know I'll enjoy it when I do.
The book is described as the “first detective novel written by a native of Bombay� and is an epic, sweeping across India, with a huge case, but an “uncomfortable amalgam� of overwrought Islamic allegorical poems and European detective fiction. Come to think of it, the imaginary book is typically Borgesian: a fusion of crime/detective elements and dense, literary inquiry. It'd be real fun if some writer attempted to write it.
I'm only up to page 130 of the Collected Fictions, and there have been several reviews and many mentions of non-existent books. Why is fan-fic usually limited to Twilight and its ilk?
Cecily wrote: "I'm only up to page 130 of the Collected Fictions, and there have been several reviews and many mentions of non-existent books. Why is fan-fic usually limited to Twilight and its ilk?"Perhaps Twilight fan fiction is easy to reproduce! I have forgotten which one, but in one story Borges starts with a premise and cites numerous classical and modern works to support his argument, and it is only much later I realised that most references were just made up. If it were a non-fiction essay, it would be very persuasive for its authoritative (non-existent) academic referencing. A truly delightful and intriguing literary trick.
It also reminds me of a scientist duo who, to show the tendency of academic writing to descend into meaningless cryptic nonsense masked in highly technical language, published an article in the same vein in a peer reviewed journal of good repute, pretending to offer a new theory with detailed analysis. But in fact two-third of the article was just incomprehensible mumbo jumbo, and because only 2 of the 7 or 8 scientists who reviewed it objected to its publication, it was published in the journal to much amusement and shame!
Jibran wrote: "Perhaps Twilight fan fiction is easy to reproduce!"I'm sure it is (though I've barely read Twilight and only a couple of paragraphs of Fifty Shades).
Your scientist story is amusing - but also rather alarming. I would hope that important papers are more rigorously checked, especially anything to do with medicine, but maybe they're not.
Jibran wrote: "Cecily wrote: "I'm only up to page 130 of the Collected Fictions, and there have been several reviews and many mentions of non-existent books. Why is fan-fic usually limited to Twilight and its ilk..."
.... these we shall call intellectual impostors -the only ones we love (except Santa Claus). Just think what Borges could have done if instead of ideas, he was into money or women.
.... these we shall call intellectual impostors -the only ones we love (except Santa Claus). Just think what Borges could have done if instead of ideas, he was into money or women.
Sidharth wrote: "Jibran wrote: "Just think what Borges could have done if instead of ideas, he was into money or women."In a different branch of reality, he was, but we're not there, so don't know what he made of it.
'a different branch of reality' ... you really are Broged out
That's a good thing, right? ;)
Cecily wrote: "That's a good thing, right? ;)"
Can't argue with that.
Can't argue with that.
Absolutely one of my favorite authors! It's been a while . . . I need to go do a reread soon.
One good thing about Borges is that as the individual stories are so short, you could just dip in occasionally, when you need a fix.
Cecily wrote: "One good thing about Borges is that as the individual stories are so short, you could just dip in occasionally, when you need a fix."Like a little piece of really rich chocolate!
It seems so appropriate that your fine critical eye would be trained Borges's way, Cecily. We all benefit! Looks like I'll have plenty to read with your other Borges reviews, too.
Thanks, Steve. But as Forrest points out, Borges is very rich, so I've taken a short break, and will return to him, probably at the weekend. Slow and steady...
Great review. I am gobbling up all his work at once... Fascinating stuff.
Are you gobbling it up in one go - or taking breaks between each volume? (I'll check out your review, and those of other friends, when I've finished.)
I have the collected fictions, so I'm just reading whatever random stories I open the book on. The problem with this strategy is I've accidentally read the same story twice!
Chris wrote: "I have the collected fictions, so I'm just reading whatever random stories I open the book on. The problem with this strategy is I've accidentally read the same story twice!"Trapped in the labyrinth!
And reading a story more than once must increase the odds of the book falling open there again!
Nice write-up, Cecily. The Garden of Forking Path caught me by surprise. You might enjoy my review I just did post.
Glenn wrote: "Nice write-up, Cecily. The Garden of Forking Path caught me by surprise. You might enjoy my review I just did post."Ha! I was posting my appreciation of your review as you were posting this comment! Thanks, Glenn.
Cecily wrote: "Glenn wrote: "Nice write-up, Cecily. The Garden of Forking Path caught me by surprise. You might enjoy my review I just did post."Ha! I was posting my appreciation of your review as you were post..."
How about that! Thanks again.
