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Reading Borges always reminds me of scenes in fantasy novels in which the characters are researching through piles of old books in search of clues about how magic works, or looking for hints of real history that has been hidden for political reasons or by catastrophic disasters. Most of his stories are not exactly stories, more like fragments that may or may not make much sense, but that sound interesting. He creates bits of characters, scenes or ideas, and many of these don't develop into anything, but might prove insidiously memorable over time as the reader comes across other stories or situations that remind one of Borges's creations.
I generally like Borges, even though reading an entire book of his work can make one's brain feel rather mushy and vague. I am not sure if everyone needs to read this book before they die, but at least for folks who like short stories this is a good read. I gave this book 4 stars on goodreads.

Rating: 5 stars


I thought this was even better than Ficciones, which was quite good. This is a compilation of brilliantly-written short stories and philosophical essays. My favorite story in this collection is The Library of Babel.

I gave this one 3 stars. I really enjoyed some of the stories, but there is some quality of Borges' writing that makes my eyes glaze over a bit. A lot of the short stories in here were also in Ficciones, which I also gave 3 stars (it also makes sense why Ficciones was later dropped from editions as most of it plus the essays are in this book).

The essays varied in quality for me: the one about an Argentinian/Uruguayan literary cannon was interesting, but I found a lot of them were about these really detached not materially relevant ideas about symbolism from like a Jungian perspective, which I don't personally jive with.

I also gave this 3 stars, although I gave Ficciones 5 stars, and it's a lot of the same content, so I guess that's illogical. But I read Ficciones first and it gave me a feeling of "wow, this is something new" whereas this second book was more "okay, but I've seen most of this before." Because a lot of the stories are in both books, and I don't know why both would have been in Boxall even briefly, unless none of the editors had read what they were recommending :(