Labyrinths (Penguin Modern Classics)

The commonest comment that seems to prevail after being introduced to Borges is "how did I miss him"? or how come I hadn't heard of him before?.He seems to be a literary enigma to some that appears out of nowhere and restores faith in the power of fiction to stimulate the imagination.The stories are surprisingly short,well crafted,and deal in areas that inhabit the boundaries of esoteric knowledge and philosophical thought,and seem to aspire to reinterpret ancient history through the prism of metaphysical thought.

Great stories from an author who many contemporary authors cite as one of their favourites. I felt sure this short story collection would include the one I particularly wanted to read; 'The Aleph' ; I should have checked - it didn't.

If you want to enjoy Borges you have to be prepared to put some effort in. Don't be surprised if you find yourself reaching the end of the page only to ask yourself what on earth you've just read; go back, read it again, empty your mind of the assumptions you bring to the act of reading, and you'll find there's even more here to appreciate than you expected.This collection includes some of Borges's greatest short pieces;without wanting to name names (that wouldn't be in keeping with the act of reading Borges) there's one whose conclusion is so earth-shattering that I imagine quite a number of atheists will be born of its reading.

Essential works from the Godfather of Metafiction. The stories read like the prose equivalents of paintings by Magritte, De Chirico, Delvaux or Escher. Perhaps they lose a tiny bit in translation, but their effects remain uniquely tantalising.

This is philosophical and mathematical at the same time. Fitting really, considering the massive overlap in the most raw form of each of these subjects. This is an amazing book if you like to think, and it's combined with some elegant but concise writing.

Outstanding service and product ! The book seems brand new and unread, and in an immaculate condition. The packaging was done with extreme care and attention. It arrived on time to offer it as a present. Thank you :-)

good condition

I am embarrassed to admit that this was my first proper exposure to Borges - though I had seen, and was intrigued by, many fragments of his works quoted by other authors, which is what eventually prompted me to pick up this book. The experience has turned out to be a mixture of joy and disappointment.Allowance has to be made for the fact that the English translations in this collection are not those revised and approved by Borges. The sparks of stylistic brilliance occurring every now and again in this book made me wonder how different an impression I would get from the authorised translations (which, sadly, cannot be published any longer).The majority of the stories introduce metaphysical ideas dressed as fiction, which is something that I do not care for - though this, of course, is a matter of personal preference. Some stories appear to be merely jokes of philosophic or literary nature while some closely (perhaps too closely) remind the style of Poe or Bierce. This quality may or may not be an artefact of translation; however, I certainly feel that the central premise of 'The Secret Miracle' is essentially the same as that of 'An Occurrence on Owl Creek Bridge' by Bierce. I recognised this even though I only ever read the latter story some 40 years ago, in a Russian translation - so the similarity must be real.On the other hand, there are some true gems in this book - for example, 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius', whose intense poetic beauty transcends the metaphysical content, or 'Averroes's Search', which I find quite disturbing.In the latter, a Moorish scholar writes, "with slow sureness, from right to left", a commentary on Aristotle's 'Poetics' (accessible to him only as a translation of a translation) and struggles with the meaning of the words 'tragedy' and 'comedy' that keep cropping up in this work but are not to be found in any other book in his library. The scholar tries to console himself with the thought that what we seek is often nearby, and later that day attends a learned gathering at a cleric's home. There, a theological and literary discussion takes place and a famous traveller tells, by way of an entertaining account, about a large painted house he visited in China: the house had balconies on the inside and was full of people watching other people who were wearing crimson masks and doing strange things. The whole thing is dismissed as lunacy by the listeners, including the scholar - who thus misses the revelation and remains in the dark about the meaning of the puzzling words in Aristotle: theatre and drama are unknown to his medieval Islamic world.In the final paragraph of 'Averroes's Search' Borges reveals that his intention was "to narrate the process of a defeat ... of a man who sets himself a goal which is not forbidden to others, but is to him". Borges then ponders over his own difficulty with imagining Averroes based on the scraps of information about him found in various sources. The multi-lingual versions of people's names, book titles and place names scattered around the story also point to the difficulty of penetrating Averroes's way of thinking and understanding the world in which he lived; this mirrors the difficulty experienced by Averroes in the story. Fittingly, an extra layer of the same nature is added in the translation by the fact that the title of the Spanish-language original (La Busca de Averroes) cannot be adequately rendered in English because it has a dual meaning - "the search of Averroes" and "the search for Averroes" - and both interpretations are relevant to the story. Another aspect of the sublime irony of the whole situation is that the Western world largely owes its re-discovery of Aristotle to Averroes, who is also known as Ibn Rushd. Moreover, his commentary was read by medieval European scholars as the Latin translation of a Hebrew translation - not unlike the way in which Averroes reads Aristotle in the first place according to Borges (it is not known whether the real Averroes was able to read in Greek or Syriac).The description of a failure to understand in 'Averroes's Search' is so compelling that it got me thinking: could it be that I miss the point of some of the stories in this collection in a similar way? I reckon that I will have to return to them one day and try again - and perhaps this time read these stories in the authorised translation if I can get hold of it.