Fictions (Calderbooks S.)
by Anthony Kerrigan, Jorge Luis Borges
Our Price: $194.64
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $1.25 (click here)
Category: Book
See more book details and other editions
Book Summary Information
Author: Anthony Kerrigan, Jorge Luis BorgesEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); Spanish (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1991-06
ISBN: 0714540838
Number of pages: 160
Publisher: John Calder Pub Ltd
Book Reviews of Fictions (Calderbooks S.)
Book Review: Complex and fascinating philosophical fictions
Summary: 5 Stars
Placing an exagerated emphasis on the `mind game' aspect of Borges' work - especially when referring to Fictions - tends to make one consider his writings as huge mystifications which, although interesting enough to read, are first and foremost games of no major consequence. This underestimates the ambiguity that Borges knowingly uses and strips his works of their speculations' positivity. The use of the `what if...?' motif, intrinsic to all fiction writing, is systematically employed by Borges in stories which, starting from axioms (explicitely acknowledged in `The Library of Babel'), explore themes from multiple viewpoints (cosmology, philosophy, theology, art...) and provide multiple levels of interpretation. Stories such as `Death and the Compass' and `The Garden of Forking Paths' are as much about the mechanics of suspense-laden literature as they are, among other things, about the relationship between someone and his/her intellectual and spiritual pursuits; pieces like `The Library of Babel' and `Funes the Memorious' are at once fairy tales and fascinating texts on knowledge. Through metaphor and allegory, the stories of `Fictions' provide a vision of the world devoid of restraining reflexes; reading them, one is forced to question his/her own habits (the same can be said about Borges' reviews of imaginary authors and books). The theme of the double, which was to become even more important later, here surfaces in stories where the notions of hero and villain are reconfigured. `Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius' and `Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote' are probably the best-known, but every piece manages to raise questions and problems, not always solving them. Essential reading.
Summary of Fictions (Calderbooks S.)
ed, tr & w/intro by Anthony KerriganReading 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, his Ficciones compressed 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, Ficciones has also--perhaps more importantly--changed the way that we read. 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 the Quixote itself, 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 this means, 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
Criticism & Theory Books
- Arts & Photography
- Biographies & Memoirs
- Business & Investing
- Children's Books
- Comics & Graphic Novels
- Computers & Internet
- Cooking, Food & Wine
- Entertainment
- Gay & Lesbian
- Health, Mind & Body
- History
- Home & Garden
- Horror
- Law
- Literature & Fiction
- Mystery & Thrillers
- Nonfiction
- Outdoors & Nature
- Parenting & Families
- Professional & Technical
- Reference
- Religion & Spirituality
- Romance
- Science
- Science Fiction & Fantasy
- Sports
- Teens
- Travel
Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others (Oxford World's Classics)Oxford University Press, USA; Published: 1998-09-17; Paperback; Book
Best price: $10.95
Price in other shops:
The Kalevala (Oxford World's Classics)by Elias Lonnrot, Albert B. Lord
Oxford University Press, USA; Published: 1999; Paperback; Book
Best price: $28.81
The TainOxford University Press, USA; Published: 2002-11-21; Paperback; Book
Best price: $9.59
Price in other shops:
Selected Prose of T.S. Eliotby T. S. Eliot
Mariner Books; Published: 1975-11-10; Paperback; Book
Best price: $12.82
Price in other shops:
David Copperfield (Penguin Classics)by Charles Dickens
Penguin Classics; Published: 1997-09-01; Mass Market Paperback; Book
Best price: $5.00
Price in other shops:
Asking the Right Questions: A Guide to Critical Thinking (6th Edition)by M. Neil Browne, Stuart M. Keeley
Prentice Hall College Div; Published: 2000-07-05; Paperback; Book
Best price: $14.44
Price in other shops:
Arthur Rimbaud: Complete Works (P.S.)by Arthur Rimbaud
Harper Perennial Modern Classics; Published: 2008-07-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.03
Price in other shops:
Companion to Narniaby Paul F. Ford
HarperSanFrancisco; Published: 1983-01-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $5.72
Letters from the Earth: Uncensored Writings (Perennial Classics)by Mark Twain
Harper Perennial Modern Classics; Published: 2004-02-17; Paperback; Book
Best price: $3.60
Price in other shops:
The Best American Poetry: 1992by David Lehman
Collier Books; Published: 1992-09; Paperback; Book
Best price: $4.50
Price in other shops: