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Borges and Me

Let me begin by saying that I have read almost none of the canon of important fiction. I just glanced at the list of books I have read that have appeared on various "Best of" lists (over at Lists of Bests, of course) with the intention of linking to it but after seeing it again, I am too ashamed. The reasons for this are myriad: spent too much time watching movies in high school, studied computer science in college, too busy reading philosophy for my "humanities" program, cannot read faster than a fifth-grader, and so on. In the year and a half since I graduated, I have taken steps to remedy this but the road through history's important literature is long and arduous. So whenever I make any grand statement regarding the world of fiction, please remember that I am still in the shallow end of the pool.

That being said, I have just finished the most impressive work of fiction I have ever read, Collected Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges. The book was recommended by a dear friend with an Alsatian name (Fontaine) who likes his scotch heavily peated and his maté strong; an endorsement from someone like that is impossible to refuse. As an aside, traversing the list of great books on the recommendations of respected friends and colleagues is quite refreshing. It would be nice if I was always busy with a book that someone else loved.

I was profoundly affected by reading Borges in a way that I have never experienced through fiction. There are a number of reasons for this and I will attempt to spill them out in a logical fashion. To begin, his language is perfect and absolutely beautiful. His style is quiet and elegant, as if each word was hand-picked from a pool of a thousand synonyms for its specific effect, but at the same time he is careful not to let sentences become too dense. The power of his language is in its subtlety. His knowledge and love of languages and their rich history practically oozes from the text. It feels as if he has every word from every language throughout time at his command, always able to pluck the right one to achieve a perfect fit. I have often thought that in order to convey the beauty of his writing, one would need his command of words. By now I'm sure it is painfully obvious to the reader that I do not possess such ability but I will forge ahead anyway.

Second, Borges has an incredibly creative mind. He is obsessed with stretching the reader's ideas about the limitations of the physical world (space, time, etc.) through exploring infinite series, labyrinths and dreams. He did not play with these constants to achieve some kind of mind-bending, alternate reality (in which Keanu Reeves' response would certainly be "whoa"), but to provide a better perspective on the world, himself or life. He possessed the kind of mind that creates the best kind of science fiction (a "fiction of ideas" to quote James Cameron) and yet makes it all seem completely plausible.

And finally, the quality that ties it all together is the intimacy of his writing. Borges manages to be extraordinarily personal while telling the story of a thousand different people in vastly different times and places. He accomplishes this in part by telling nearly every story in the first-person, as if you were sitting in a Buenos Aires cafe listening to the stories of his life. Every narrator, no matter how different from the last, is in some sense a reflection of Borges. As Dinka said when I was fumbling with a description of this, it is not unlike a great actor who can wear many masks but always brings a certain essence of their own identity to a part. And as is the case with any effective and introspective work, as the author looks inside, so does the reader. By the end of this collection, I felt as though Borges was an old friend, as if we had grown old together telling stories and sharing our thoughts and emotions.

I am certain that I am writing this more for myself than for you but I am glad that I did it anyway. I needed some closure on this, needed to say something about how much this meant to me. Obviously I would recommend it to all of you as well. If you're a trustworthy friend, you can borrow my copy; if not, perhaps a paperback version will arrive in your stocking at Christmastime. But for me, it's on to Brave New World, yet another book I'm ashamed to not have read, especially as a supposed geek. It was a recommendation from a friend.

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