Ficciones (Everyman's Library (Cloth))
Reading Jorge Luis Borges is an experience akin to having the top of one's  head removed for repairs. First comes the unfamiliar breeze tickling your cerebral cortex; then disorientation, even mild discomfort; and  finally, the sense that the world has been irrevocably altered--and in this  case, rendered infinitely more complex. First published in 1945, hisFiccionescompressed several centuries' worth of philosophy and poetry into 17 tiny, unclassifiable pieces of prose. He offered up diabolical tigers, imaginary encyclopedias, ontological detective  stories, and scholarly commentaries on nonexistent books, and in the process exploded all previous notions of genre. Would any of David Foster  Wallace's famous footnotes be possible without Borges? Or, for that matter, the syntactical games of Perec, the metafictional pastiche of Calvino? For  good or for ill, the blind Argentinian paved the way for a generation's  worth of postmodern monkey business--and fiction will never be simply "fiction" again.Its enormous influence on writers aside,Ficcioneshas  also--perhaps more importantly--changed the way that weread. Borges's Pierre Menard, for instance, undertakes the most audacious project imaginable:  to create not a contemporary version of Cervantes's most famous work  but theQuixoteitself, word for word. This second text is "verbally identical" to the original, yet, because of its new associations, "infinitely richer"; every time we read, he suggests, we are in effect creating an entirely new text, simply by viewing it through the  distorting lens of history. "A book is not an isolated being: it is a  relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships," Borges once wrote in an essay about George Bernard Shaw. "All men who repeat one line of Shakespeare are William Shakespeare," he tells us in "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius."  In this spirit, Borges is not above impersonating, even quoting, himself.It is hard, exactly, to say what all of thismeans, at least in  any of the usual ways. Borges wrote not with an ideological agenda, but  with a kind of radical philosophical playfulness. Labyrinths, libraries, lotteries, doubles, dreams, mirrors, heresiarchs: these are the tokens  with which he plays his ontological games. In the end, ideas themselves are  less important to him than their aesthetic and imaginative possibilities.  Like the idealist philosophers of Tlön, Borges does not "seek for the  truth or even for verisimilitude, but rather for the astounding"; for him as for them, "metaphysics is a branch of fantastic literature."--Mary  Park--This text refers to thePaperbackedition.