Bundan yaklaşık bir yıl önce elime aldım Alef'i ve ilk öyküleri okudum. Ama Borges içine girilmesi, anlaşılması çok zor bir dünya yaratmıştı. Bir hikâyenin içinde anlamadığım ve hikâyenin hiçbir yerinde açıklanmayan onlarca gönderme, referans oluyordu ve bazen bunlar hikâyenin meramını anlamamı engelliyordu. Sinirlendim ve Borges'i anlaşılmayacak bir şeyler yazdığı için kibirli buldum.

Üstünden aylar geçti ve ben kitaba hiç dokunmadım. Sonra geçenlerde aklıma düştü ve Borges'le olan içimdeki tartışmanın mutlak galibi olmanın rahatlığıyla yine sinirli sinirli söylendim. Ama geçen zaman içinde içimdeki Borges de boş durmamış olacak ki, "Belki Borges sen anla diye yazmıyordur, kendi bilgi birikimine eş seviyedeki insanlar için yazıyordur, neden kendinden cahiller için normalde yazacağından daha basit yazsın ki?" dedi.
"Borges'in işi okumak ve yazmaktı, okurunun onun seviyesinde olmasını şart koşması kibir değil mi?" dedim içimdeki Borges'e.
"Şart koşmuyor ki, sen birkaç şeyi anlamamaktan korktuğun için o kitabı eline almayacak kadar kibirlisin sadece," dedi. "Bazı şeyleri anlamaman çok doğal, o hikâyelerde anlayabileceğin, keyif alabileceğin şeyler de var."

İkna ediciydi ve ben de tekrar okumaya başladım. Yine arada sırada "Acaba neden bahsediyor, nereden alıntılıyor, neye gönderme yapıyor?" dediğim olsa da bunun -mecburiyetten belki de, o kadar da önemli olmadığı sonucuna vardım. Borges'in hikâyeleri bundan ibaret değildi.

Ve tuhaf bir şekilde Borges'in hikâyelerini samimi bulmaya başladım. Olaylara getirdiği farklı bakış açılarını sevdim. Cesaretini gördüm. Zekâsını, yaratıcılığını gördüm. Borges'in samimiyetine inanmayı tercih etmeden Borges'in kabiliyetini kavrayamayacağımızı düşünüyorum.

n  "Que o céu exista, mesmo que o nosso lugar seja o inferno."n

Há dias (por "culpa" de uma amiga do Goodreads) ouvi uma pequena história de Jorge Luis Borges que me impressionou:
Um dia, junto das pirâmides do Egipto, Borges apanhou um punhado de areia, largou-o mais à frente e disse: "Estou a modificar o deserto.
...e, através da sua escrita, modifica a mente de quem o lê...

Dos dezassete contos, incluídos neste livro, não gostei muito da maior parte deles. Ou porque não os compreendi (perdida em labirintos infinitos); ou porque não foram "escritos para mim". Mas....dos dezassete "guardei" três, aos quais junto a frase lá de cima.
Para O Imortal e Deutsches Requiem cinco punhados de areia; para O Aleph o deserto inteiro...

“Anything can drive a person insane if that person cannot manage to put it out of their mind” – even… “a map of Hungary”! Obsession is the unifying theme of virtually all these stories, which is apt, because I’m beginning to be a trifle obsessed myself. It is perhaps most central to The Zahir.

I have the Collected Fictions (with copious translator's notes), but am splitting my review of that into its components, listed in publication order: Collected Fictions - all reviews. This is the fourth, published in 1949.

The now familiar Borgesian tropes are also here in abundance too: time, reality and dreams, immortality, infinity, mirrors and opposites, labyrinths, recursion and circularity, memory.

At this stage of working though Borge’s Collected Fictions, I feel deeply connected. There is still a beguiling, mysterious layer, but it’s not impenetrable by any means, even though I’m very aware that I’m nowhere near as erudite as Borges, so although I know many of the great literary names he drops, I’m not necessarily intimately familiar with their works.

The Immortal 6*

What price immortality? And what an opening premise: a story by a rare-book dealer, found by a princess, in a copy of The Ilyad! The story itself is about a mysterious, obsessive quest to find the secret City of the Immortals.

The journey includes Roman soldiers; escape; loneliness; fear of otherness; extraordinary architecture; finding a way through a labyrinth of caves, ladders, doors and multiple rooms; sinister troglodytes, references to The Odyssey, and much musing on life, death, mortality, and the nature of time. It sounds like a checklist of clichés, but in the hands of this master storyteller, it is fresh, beautiful, profound – and unsettling.

The city is found – abandoned and part ruined. It is beautiful and impressive, but somehow sinister – not an easy combination to describe: “This place is the work of the gods… The gods that built this place have died… The gods that built this place were mad… The impression of great antiquity was joined by others: the impression of endlessness, the sensation of oppressiveness and horror, the sensation of complex irrationality… A maze is a house built purposely to confuse men… the architecture had no purpose.” Its very existence “pollutes the past and the future and somehow compromises the stars.”

The barely-communicative, primitive troglodytes turn out to be the immortals, who have left their city to live in the labyrinth instead. The one the traveller befriends, and names Argos after the dog in the Odyssey, turns out to be Homer himself.” This sort of evolutionary regression is explored in two stories in Brodie’s Report: The Gospel According to Mark and the eponymous report of Brodie.

The philosophical aspects mainly concern the essence of opposites, and hence, ways and forms of immortality: the “Wheel, which has neither end not beginning, each life is the effect of the previous life and engenderer of the next… Over an infinitely long span of time, all things happen to all men… heads and tails tend to even out… Viewed in that way, all our acts are just, though also unimportant.” Worse, “the notion of the world as an exact system of compensation… made them immune to pity.”

For mortals, it’s different: “Death… makes men precious and pathetic… any act they perform may be their last… Everything in the world of mortals has the value of the irrecoverable and contingent.”

The Dead Man

The story is summarised in the opening sentence: a low-life urban hoodlum becomes a horseman and the leader of a band smugglers. His obsession is gaining power.

This is more than 1/3 through the Collected Fictions, and I think this has the first female character who merits more than a sentence (though it’s not a very enviable role).

Of course, it’s really about death. If you’re almost dead anyway, does it matter what happens just before?

The Theologians

A rather dry piece that perks up towards the end. It concerns two sects, each of which thinks the other heretical, compounded by a pair of believers in a doctrine, and one protagonist is obsessed with gaining the intellectual upper-hand. Are they allies (the same) or opponents (opposites)?

If “every man is two men, and… the real one is the other one, the one in heaven… our acts cast an inverted reflection” so by doing bad things on earth, good things can happen in heaven! I’m not sure that would stand up in court. The final revelation is one that recurs in Borges: the two men are one and the same man.

Story of the Warrior and the Captive Maiden

Is “going native” a choice or a necessity? Are contrasting stories essentially two sides of the same story? This is only three pages long, and the story starts halfway through.

This has echoes of The Captive and The Ethnographer (reviewed in Dreamtigers).

A Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz

“Any life… actually consists of a single moment - the moment when a man knows forever more who he is.”

There is lots of historical background in the translator’s notes and the conclusion echoes that of The Theologians ”He realized that the other man was himself”.

Emma Zunz 6*

A woman (at last), with clear inspiration from Kafka although Borges says in the afterword that the plot was given to him by a woman (without indicating whether it’s meant to be fact or fiction). It’s a compelling, twisted, and tragic story of bereavement and obsessive revenge, leading to thoughts of justice and truth.

Like the tree falling in the deserted forest, if the condemned man doesn’t know or understand what he’s guilty of, does it matter – is the sentence valid? See Kafka’s The Penal Colony for another approach to the same question. There’s a similar idea in Borges’ “The Secret Miracle”, which is in Artifices

Then what? An unbelievable story may convince everyone if the substance is true. Her “shame was real, her hatred was real… all that was false were the circumstances, the time, and one or two proper names.”

Plot summary:Emma blames her employer for disgracing her father, leading him to commit suicide. She is young, virginal, with “an almost pathological fear of men”, which makes her plan especially painful for her. She picks up a man (“He was an instrument for Emma as she was for him – but she was used for pleasure, while he was used for revenge”), then goes to her boss, shoots him, and claims it was self-defence because he’d just raped her. She tells him why she’s doing it, but probably too late for him to hear and understand. Her story is believed, and the fact of revenge absolves her guilt.

The House of Asterion 6*

The son of a queen lives a strange and solitary life in an empty house “like no other”, with many doors and corridors.

The oddness and sadness only increase when Asterion confides, “A certain generous impatience has prevented me from learning to read”.

He runs “joyously” to greet rare visitors, in part because he can “free them from evil”. Then you realise how, why - and who. Asterion is the Minotaur. There are (at least) two sides to every story.

The Other Death

Does each choice or change create a new path through time?

Grim but dull memories of a bloody civil war followed by interesting diversions into truth versus memory and the omnipotence of god, encapsulated in the question of whether a hero and a coward with the same name are two people, or two facets of one.

Deutsches Requiem

A brave and controversial piece: on the eve of his execution, the subdirector of a Nazi concentration camp sets down his thoughts, so he can be understood (he has “no desire to be pardoned, for I feel no guilt”).

He sees Nazism as “intrinsically moral” in part, because “compassion on the part of the superior man is Zarathustra’s ultimate sin”. That justifies murdering Jews, even a poet he admired: “I destroyed him… to destroy my own compassion”. Chilling.

He engenders no sympathy, but I did, reluctantly, feel the desire to be understood had been partially achieved.

Averroes’Search

A look at failure and defeat, despite great striving. An Arab physician in Al-Andalus is writing interpretations of Aristotle, but is stumped by the terms “comedy” and “tragedy”.

The Zahir 6*

Head-spinning time. “Idealist doctrine has it that the verbs ‘to live’ and ‘to dream’ are at every point synonymous; for me, thousands upon thousands of appearances will pass into one; a complex dream will pass into a simple one. Others will dream that I am mad, while I dream of the Zahir.

This opens by listing the many meanings of the word, zahir, in different languages and cultures. The one that matters here is an object that can inspire obsession to the extent that the victim loses touch with reality. Perhaps that is why, at the outset, Borges writes “I am still, albeit only partially, Borges”.

All sorts of things have been zahirs in mythology, but this one is an innocent-looking coin that Borges is given in a bar, when drowning his sorrows about a lost, dead love (a woman with an obsession of her own: glamour and perfection). It has the letters N and T scratched on it.

“There is nothing less material than money, since any coin… [is] a panoply of all possible futures”, a symbol of free will, perhaps. Money is abstract… Money is future time.”

After sleepless nights, confusion, consultation with a psychiatrist and scouring books, Borges learns more about zahirs and resolves to rid himself of the coin in another anonymous bar and to write a fantasy about it.

In Deutsches Requiem, a couple of stories earlier, the idea of being driven to madness by being fixated on a single thing (even a map of Hungary) is mentioned, and that idea is extended here. He tells of a magic tiger that was a zahir, and a fakir who painted “an infinite tiger… composed of many tigers in the most dizzying of ways”. In fact, it contained almost everything (like an Aleph – the final story in this collection). “Tennyson said that if we could but understand a single flower we might know who we are and what the world is” because everything has elements of everything else. Another obsession-inducing object is The Book of Sand, in the collection of the same name.

“Perhaps behind the coin is God.”

“The Writing of the God

“Wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity.”

A priest of the god (lower case, no possessive) is in prison, with a tiger/jaguar the other side of a piece of glass. Following on from The Zahir, his growing obsession with this tiger is no surprise.

The priest believes the god created a secret magical phrase that is hidden in creation and can ward off evil. He may have seen it many times, without realizing it, or without understanding it. He trawls his memories of the world and starts to see god and a message in everything – but especially the creature’s markings. The obsession drives him to the brink of insanity.

He has a final revelation, but it was unique to him and it dies with him.

“In the language of a god every word would speak that infinite concatenation of events… A god… must speak but a single word, and in that word there must be absolute plenitude.”

Ibn-Hakam al-Bokhari, Murdered in his Labyrinth 5*

Cornwall, 1914 (quite a shock, compared with the vague and more exotic locations of most of the other stories), and two men explore a ruined labyrinthine house, while one tells the other its story, involving a north African prince, a slave, a lion, and a prophesy of a murderous dead man.

Walking around “They felt they were being suffocated by the house… through the knotted darkness… the invisible wall, cumbered with ruggedness and angles, passed endlessly under his hand”.

When it was built, the local vicar had condemned it from the pulpit, declaring it “intolerable that a house should be composed of a single room, yet league upon league of hallways… No Christian ever built such a house.” He also told a story – which is the one after this: The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths.

Like a detective, the listener is intrigued but unconvinced: “the facts were true… but told the way you told them, they were clearly humbug”. He unpicks the less plausible aspects of the story, turns it round, and suggests an alternative.

The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths

This is the short tale quoted by the vicar in the previous story: “It is the prerogative of God, not man, to strike confusion and inspire wonder.”

The Wait

“It is easier to endure a terrifying event that to imagine it, wait for it endlessly.”

According to the afterword, this was “suggested by a true police story”. A man arrives in a new town, wanting to be inconspicuous, using a false name – that of his enemy – even though “he was not seduced by the literary error of imagining that adopting the name of his enemy would be an astute thing to do”.

He keeps to himself, goes out rarely and cautiously, tries to live in the present, and scours the news to discover if the other man has died. Instead, his enemy comes to him.

The Man on the Threshold

“One house is like another – what matters is knowing whether it is built in heaven or hell.”

A man sent to quell riots in an Indian city vanished a few years later; the narrator is trying to find him. In the afterword, Borges says he set it in India “so that its improbabilities might be bearable” though it seems no less probable than most of the others.

In “the opaque city that had magically swallowed up a man… I felt… the infinite presence of a spell cast to hide Glencairn’s whereabouts”. Everyone claimed either to have never heard of, let alone seen him, or to have seen him moments ago.

Finally, a very old man seems to know something, though what he knows is obscure and its relevance unclear, especially because he seems to be talking about events many years ago.

The Aleph 6*

This has similarities with The Zahir, earlier in this collection: a man obsessed with a dead woman, and a mysterious object that inspires obsession and seems to contain everything.

Borges visits the house of his love each year, on the anniversary of her death, staying a little longer each time, until he ends up a dinner guest. Her cousin is an obsessive poet, who “planned to versify the entire planet” and delights in reading his epic doggerel to Borges. He lavishly praises his own work, but won’t publish for fear “he might create an army of implacable and powerful enemies”. Borges “realized that the poet’s work had lain not in the poetry but in the invention of reasons for accounting the poetry admirable” – which it wasn’t, “a poem that seemed to draw out to infinity the possibilities of cacophony and chaos”!

The poet’s house comes under threat of demolition, and he is distraught because in his cellar is the Aleph, which he shows to Borges. “An Aleph is one of the points in space that contains all points”, in this case, a disc about three centimetres in diameter. This provides a dizzying effect, wonderfully described (and also explains the poet’s attempt to write about everywhere in the world). “In that unbound moment, I saw millions of delightful and horrible acts… all occupying the same point, without superposition and without transparency… Each thing… was infinite things because I could clearly see it from every point in the cosmos.”

Those stream-of-consciousness passages are wonderful, but the ending is unexpectedly flat: Borges (the one in the story) questions the authenticity and uniqueness of the Aleph and implies he couldn’t see it, thereby suggesting the poet might be mad. The house is demolished, but rather than be broken by Borges' implication, the poet, liberated from his obsession, publishes his poetry – and wins prizes for it..

Quotes

•t“The black shadow – bristling with idolatrous shapes upon the yellow sand – of the City’s wall.”

•t“I imagined a world without memory, without time” and “a language that had no nouns, a language of impersonal verbs or indeclinable adjectives.”

•t“All creatures are immortal for they know nothing of death.”

•t“Argos and I lived our lives in separate universes… our perceptions were different, but that Argos combined them differently than I.”

•t“Like all those who possess libraries, Aurelian felt a nagging sense of guilt at not being acquainted with every volume in his.”

•t“The heresies we ought to fear are those that can be confused with orthodoxy.”

•t“Her eyes were that half-hearted blue that the English call grey.”

•t“The most solemn of events are outside time… the immediate past is severed… from the future because the elements that compose those events seem not to be consecutive.”

•t“Tearing up money is an act of impiety, like throwing away bread.”

•t“To change the past is not to change a mere single event; it is to annul all its consequences, which tend to infinity.”

•t“There is no more cunning consolation than the thought that we have chosen our own misfortunes.”

•tIt’s hard to follow fashion in war, so “A foreign man she had always had her doubts about was allowed to take advantage of her good will” by sending her hats. “These ridiculous shapes had never been worn in Paris” and “were not hats, but arbitrary and unauthorized caprices”.

•t“The predictable ranks of one- and two-story houses had taken on that abstract air they often have at night, when they are simplified by darkness and silence.”

•t“A man comes to resemble the shape of his destiny.”

•t“Weary of a world that lacked the dignity of danger, the friends prized the solitude of that corner of Cornwall.”

•t“The past is the stuff that time is made of.”

•t“The notion that there might be parallels between art and life never occurred to him… Unlike people who had read novels, he never saw himself as a character in a book.”

•tA very old man “His many years had reduced and polished him the way water smooths and polishes a stone or generations of men polish a proverb.”

•t“This ancient little man for whom the present was scarcely more than an indefinite rumor.”

•t“Our minds are permeable to forgetfulness” which sounds rather back-to-front.

Telaraña de historias y leyendas absurdas y maravillosas, llenas de elementos fantásticos pero con las que viajas por todo el mundo y a través del tiempo.
He disfrutado mucho de esta lectura, aunque hay un puñado de relatos que no llegué a apreciar o entender, en cambio otros como 'El inmortal', 'Emma Zunz', 'La casa de Asterión', 'Deutsches Requiem' y 'El Alpeh' me fascinaron completamente y no puedo dejar de darles vueltas.
Borges consigue algo que nunca me había pasado, que según termine un relato quiera volver a leerlo una y otra vez para poder comprender cada uno de los mil detalles y referencias que nos presenta.

Desde luego, una lectura muuuuuy particular y no apta para todos los paladares

I found this book on a shelf at a library two days ago. The name of the author sounded familiar, but I did not know from where. I picked it up and opened it on a random page, which happened to be the first page of the short story "The House of Asterión".

It was one of the most stunning things I had ever read. Needless to say, I brought The Aleph home with me that day.

Since then I've been reading. It would be a lie to say I understood everything, that I caught every reference. Maybe that even added to the feeling of bizarre and of mystery. This book felt like reading a riddle, and not being interested in knowing the answer because the question would get spoiled. The stories have a couple of common themes; a recurring one is the labyrinth, and infinty as a way to grasp nothing. It's often abstract, many times absurd. The labyrinths in the stories hide, confuse and deceive. And while reading, I started finding details, faint details that I recognized from other stories in The Aleph. Despite the different paths, I would constantly hit what looked like the same walls. I started to encounter tigers, coins and red spots that I was completely sure that I had already read of. But the more I read, the less I could remember in which story I had seen them before. The stories started to twist around me. And when it was far too late, I realized that Borges had lured me far into his own labyrinth. I still don't know if I made it out of there alive, or at least with my sanity intact.

The latter half of this book proved to be one of the most intense reading experiences I've had to date. It's certainly not for everyone, you have to appreciate not really knowing what is going on at times. And you have to truly like to be fooled. "The House of Asterión" remains as the best piece in the book, closely followed by "The Writing of the God". The Aleph is an unusual book, and it's one of the most puzzling, and best, things I've read.

After reading Borges my brain usually feels fried, so excuse all the nonsense in this review. My intention was never to write anything about it, to let it flow, to carry on with my life. But trust me, after reading this magnificent writer, and specially such writings as the ones collected in El Aleph, life's never the same. My brain may be fried, but my soul feels somewhat soothed.

Reading him is like facing the Zahir: something that seeds in one's soul a never-ending obsession in life's groundless soil. Reading him is like finding a two-hundred-paged Aleph in a shelf, wherein I found infinite selves, like Abraham's seed, multiplied as the stars of Heaven (Genesis 26:4), living infinite scenarios that I saw forking in time and space. I read philosophical and theological theories; I read Plato and Dante reborn as an Argentinian writer living in the 20th century, who seemed to have forgotten about his authorship of The Divine Comedy, and now has to conform merely with fondness. Just like the letter (א) is interpreted as a man pointing simultaneously towards the Earth and the Heavens, representing the former as a mirror of the latter, just like that, Borges's imagination is a mirror (element he seems to love as well as tigers) that reflects what is not but could have been. If life's formula were written in the patterns of a tiger's fur, then Borges's writings would be the alter ego of that tiger. I read all the books in the world condensed in a few pages, but none of them reflected how I feel about this book in particular. I saw myself, never visiting my aunt and never finding her Kabbalah study texts and never getting interested in such theories, and ergo, in Borges neither. I saw myself at a noisy party, drinking cheap booze with friends and such, instead of staying at home, feeling the weight of solitude, trying to find a meaning to cling to and reading how Buddhism influenced Borges. The past was changed and therefore the cause was changed but the effect — Borges as an awful writer — was not. Reading him may not be like reading the writing of God, but I'm sure it is an accurate translation of it.

Creo que solo puedo decir que cada relectura es mejor a la anterior T^T

In contemplazione dell'universo

"Tutte le parti della casa si ripetono, qualunque luogo di essa è un altro luogo. Non ci sono una cisterna, un cortile, una fontana, una stalla; sono infinite le stalle, le fontane, i cortili, le cisterne. La casa è grande come il mondo."

"Nella Somma Teologica si nega che Dio possa far sì che il passato non sia stato, ma non si dice nulla dell'intricata concatenazione di cause ed effetti, che è tanto vasta e segreta che forse non si potrebbe annullare un solo fatto remoto, per insignificante che sia stato, senza infirmare il presente. Modificare il passato non è modificare un fatto isolato; è annullare le sue conseguenze, che tendono a esser infinite."

"So che alcuni operavano il male affinché nei secoli futuri ne derivasse il bene, o ne fosse derivato in quelli passati...Visti in tal modo, tutti i nostri atti sono giusti, ma sono anche indifferenti. Non esistono meriti morali o intellettuali."

Penso sia impossibile cercare di classificare Borges; né, al termine della lettura, risulta semplice condensare in breve spazio le innumerevoli tematiche toccate o semplicemente sfiorate.
Persiste, durante l’intera esperienza, un senso di vertigine che si spalanca alla frase rivelatoria o a quel passo che sembra essere la chiave per decriptare tutto; quasi come se Borges scoperchiasse un intero universo, il cui orizzonte di possibilità permette di precipitare in un altro universo ancora. Un circolo senza fine.
Borges, forse primo autore in assoluto, ha scardinato certezze, irriso le mie conoscenze - davvero scarse, il senso di vergogna m'opprime - e accantonato schemi mentali prefissati: l'esperienza di lettura diventa sì un'esplorazione di infiniti rimandi e citazioni, ma anche un gioco a incastri che possa dipanare le labirintiche costruzioni di un autore che con la letteratura ci sguazza, muore e rinasce.
Dal tema del doppio, come due facce della stessa medaglia, a partorire infinite realtà - la labilità della memoria in “L’altra morte” e “Storia del guerriero e della prigioniera”, quest’ultimo davvero commovente - si passa all’esercizio del ridimensionamento del gesto umano di fronte alla necessità dell’equilibrio - “L’immortale”, racconto cardine della raccolta, nonché il meraviglioso “Deutsches requiem”, a delineare il nazismo come necessità per la proiezione dell’opposto - e si approda a virtuosismi indimenticabili come “La casa di Asterione”, la cui gestione del materiale letterario trattato è finanche superba e “Abenjacan il bojarì, ucciso nel suo labirinto”, che carpisce il soggetto del racconto precedente per ribaltare l’intero contesto con un’indagine metafisica che accarezza il metaletterario.
In mezzo al marasma generale, da citare il racconto di chiusura, "L'Aleph", mostruosamente simpatico nel denudare il meccanismo alla base della letteratura e giustificare l'immensa conoscenza di importanti individualità che si sono avvicendate nella storia.

P.S. Divertente come Borges spieghi i suoi racconti come un prestigiatore sveli i propri trucchi: con semplicità e divertito distacco.

L’immortale ★★★★★
Il morto ★★★1/2
I teologi ★★★★
Storia del guerriero e della prigioniera ★★★★1/2
Biografia di Tadero Isidoro Cruz ★★★
Emma Zunz ★★★★1/2
La casa di Asterione ★★★★★
L’altra morte ★★★★★
Deuthsches requiem ★★★★★
La ricerca di Averroè ★★★★
Lo Zahir ★★★
La scrittura del Dio ★★★★★
Abenjacan il bojarì, ucciso nel suo labirinto ★★★★★
I due re e i due labirinti ★★★★
L’attesa ★★★★
L’uomo sulla soglia ★★★1/2
L’Aleph ★★★★★

Για άλλη μια φορά ο Μπόρχες κατάφερε να με κάνει να ταξιδέψω μέσα στα δαιδαλώδη μονοπάτια της φαντασίας του...

Η συγκεκριμένη συλλογή διηγημάτων απαρτίζεται από ιστορίες που έχουν μια κοινή βάση -τουλάχιστο οι περισσότερες- κι αυτή είναι η αναζήτηση του Θεού. Όχι όμως ενός συγκεκριμένου θεού, αλλά κυρίως της έννοιας του ή της πεμπτουσίας του. Σχεδόν σε όλα τα διηγήματα υπάρχει διάχυτος ένας μυστικισμός ενώ οι επιρροές από την Βίβλο, το Κοράνι και άλλα θρησκευτικά βιβλία είναι καταφανέστατες.

Λαβύρινθοι, καθρέφτες, σωσίες και περίεργα σύμβολα εμφανίζονται συνεχώς σε όλα διηγήματα, ενώ παράλληλα ο Μπόρχες δεν σταματάει να μας υπενθυμίζει την αγάπη του για την αστυνομική λογοτεχνία αλλά και την γεωμετρία!

Στην διαπίστωση σας κύριε Μπόρχες πως "όλοι οι άνθρωποι είναι είτε πλατωνικοί είτε αριστοτελικοί" εγώ προτιμώ να αυτοχαρακτηριστώ ως "μπορχεσικός".

5/5

Îmi place foarte mult cum scrie Borges. Cărțile lui sunt compuse din nuvele scurte la care poți reveni de mai multe ori și să găsești tot timpul lucruri noi. Fiecare nuvela este un roman in sine, comprimat la cea mai scurta versiune posibila. Cam ce ar trebui să scrii la bac ca să arați ca ai înțeles un roman întreg.

Pentru că s-a născut într-o familie bogată, fiind înconjurat complet de cărți și făcând și școala in Europa, călătorind și văzând multe lucruri de la o vârsta frageda. Poveștile sunt toate ficționalizate sau inspirate din toate culturile și locurile de pe glob.

In cartea asta am observat o atenție mai mare asupra lumilor paralele, a labirinturilor, al unui eu din trecut și viitor care se întâlnește/reîntâlnește cu protagoniștii nuvelelor in realitate, in vise sau imaginație, pedeapsa cu moartea și Alephul. Alephul este un dispozitiv magic care îți permite să vezi pământul din toate unghiurile, să cunoști lumea și pe tine însuți.

Plus un citat care aduce cu Inception înainte de Inception: “nu te-ai trezit cu adevărat, ci numai într-un vis anterior. Acest vis se afla înlăuntrul altuia și tot așa la infinit, și infinită e și suma firelor de nisip. Drumul pe care va trebui să-l străbați înapoi este interminabil și vei muri înainte de a te fi trezit cu adevărat”

I'll just quote Umberto Eco (one of my favorite authors and the writer of one of my favorite books, "The Name of the Rose"): "Though so different in style, two writers have offered us an image for the next millennium: Joyce and Borges. The first designed with words what the second designed with ideas: the original, the one and only, World Wide Web. The Real Thing. The rest will remain simply virtual."

کتاب مجموعه ای از 17 داستان کوتاه هست.کتاب خوبی بود و داستان های زیبایی داشت ...اما بزرگترین مشکل این اثر، حداقل برای من، این بود که کتاب پر بود از اسامی آدم ها ،اسطوره ها و سرزمین های ناشناخته ای که من به سختی اسم بعضی از آنها را شنیده بودم، و چون دائما" باید به پی نوشت ها مراجعه می کردم کمی خسته کننده و حوصله سر بر بود