This re-reading of Borges’ short stories was less satisfying than my previous visits, as I recall; it was a case of separating the wheat from the chaff. I have always liked him for the bizarreness, as well as for his ability to do something really interesting with the short story form, which I have so often found thin, empty and disappointing. I also respect him as part of the inspiration for Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, one of my favourite novels of all time, in which the mad monastery librarian is named Jorge, in tribute to Borges.
Borges here is in translation, of course, and for me, the translator has successfully captured a style and use of language, particularly through the use of long, languorous sentences, descriptive and atmospheric. There is often an almost Brechtian sense of alienation from our particular reality in Borges’ playing with time and space in so many of the stories, and in requiring the reader to suspend disbelief in more ways than fiction usually asks of us.
There is also his aptitude for creating a sense of verisimilitude, through the use of small plausible details which we cannot or have no real desire to verify, in totally invented situations, in order to confuse or deceive the reader; I found myself being reminded of the very earliest novelists such as Defoe and Swift, who realised way back in the early 18th century how to do this to great effect. The overall weirdness of Borges’ universes also recalled to me the fiction of Ben Marcus, and I wondered if that writer was familiar with Borges.
So, the tales or fictions are often bizarre or disturbing. The summit, I think, is reached in The Library of Babel, which posits a library as big as the universe which contains all possible writings; it combines Borges’ fascination with books with his fascination with labyrinths, and there is a computer programmer who has paid tribute to these by constructing a website that lets you interact with the library of Babel.
While I enjoyed my favourite stories again, I found myself wondering what exactly Borges had been trying to achieve; weirdness, a sense of eeriness? Alienation? Ensnaring his reader? Throughout, there is a sense of a man, a human like the rest of us, haunted by the meaninglessness of existence when confronted with time, immortality and the inevitability of death; hence the labyrinths in which characters wander, trapped… I found the earliest and the last stories better than those from the middle of his writing career, where there are too many about macho confrontations and knife fights in South America for my liking. There are some real gems, but you have to search for them.
LIT.GAZ. 
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