bookrblog

The Aleph

Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006 | South American Literature | No Comments

I picked up another set of short stories by Borges in the bookshop. It has some of the same stories as the book below, but also contains some interesting things; there’s something on the death of JFK, there’s quite a few reworks of Latin American history, and there’s Borges talking about Borges.

Everything is both dreamlike and matter of fact. He knows how to set up the ideas and symbols without having to explain them to the reader. One of the things which I find fascinating is how, in almost every story, the narrator – even when he doesn’t appear – is one of the most important characters in the story. It’s supposed to be about someone else, but it never is; it’s always the person talking to you. Which is so brilliant, because that’s true; a retold story is still always about the person telling it to you, a dream about strangers is still really a dream about you.

Whenever I read his work I start thinking about the writers he reminds me of, and they’re basically a list of my favourite writers – Jostein Gaarder, Michael Ondaatje, Pasternak even. He knows how to write, they know how to write, and considering how much I’ve whinged in the entries below, that is a good thing.

Labyrinths

Thursday, August 17th, 2006 | South American Literature | No Comments

This set of short stories by Jorge Luis Borges is simply amazing. Again, one of those writers that you hear lauded wherever you go, but are strangely difficult to find in the bookshop. I had to get this from the internet.

Most stories people write are based on psychology; his, on philosophy. Every story is constructed to examine, illustrate, play with an idea. He takes an idea, follows where it would logically go, and then takes it further, to conclusions that no one else would reach. It’s speculative fiction, a kind of absurd which sometimes is near horror, just because it’s distant from everyday but somehow close.

He’s got an entire world invented by a group of thinkers which somehow becomes realer than our world. He’s got a language which lacks nouns, so that “the moon rose over the river” becomes “beyond the upstreaming it mooned”. He’s got a guy who invents a word for every number (I have so thought of that system before!) He’s got such a variety of human beings, Christian, Islamic, Jewish. (Nearly all men, although the minotaur turns out to be a woman). He has a mystery with a twist which makes you gasp at the end.

You can really see that he was influenced by Chesterton, and by a lot of the German writers - his voice reminds me of Hesse - and of course Kafka. But he’s so original. The colour of his world is just really different from anyone else’s. The language is beautiful, and he has some perfect moments;

“In a riddle where the answer is chess, what’s the one word that must not be mentioned?” I thought for a moment and said, “Chess.”

I keep thinking about those lines.