Ficciones

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I think this is the most difficult rating since I have been active on Goodreads, because it definitely does not deserve 3 out of 5 stars, but for now I will give it 3 because I feel I am not able to digest this whole book yet. Me gustaría empezar mi reseña diciendo que puedo ver la pulcritud, la maestría y la belleza con la que estos cuentos fueron escritos. In one story he imagined a near infinite library containing books with every possible letter combination.

The ubiquitous lottery seems to be a symbol of the capriciousness of chance in life and the story in general seems to be taking an ironic view of the questionable role of deity in human life. It was a fascinating first-acquaintance with Borges, an author who has been staying with me for a long time, a house-ghost, a little of this and a little of that, a glimpse into my subconscious and all legends and myths in one place. In fact, I truly enjoyed the quasi-logical extremes he went to in pursuit of intellectual entertainment, imaginative possibilities and hard won ah-ha moments. Precise dates and place names and other historical references add weight to this impression, and the reader might feel overwhelmed by the amount of detail packed into that first paragraph.The rule, clearly, for readers and especially collectors is to never lend a book that you expect to get back. A reader needs to know certain precise information to grasp the meaning of what is expressed and the impression that must emanate from it, and it is to the word that Borges always delivers the right measure to him.

Some time after encountering an artifact that came from Tlön, an element composed of matter not found on Earth, the narrator declares that Tlön — its principles, languages, and history — have begun to consume our planet. The ideas and the perspectives employed have taken me to all spiritual and philosophical depths while entertaining me with high efficiency. Ficciones is a labyrinth, beautiful and witty, of ideas and feelings that mock and conquers the reader.

In "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim", he indirectly suggests that a librarian is even holier than a saint. Once I really grasped the connection between the poem and this story, it became one of my favorites in this collection. Something about the manner of Fergus Kilpatrick’s death strikes Ryan as enigmatic, a series of events that are like “circular labyrinths” (that image again! Nor were those memories simple – every visual image was linked to muscular sensations, thermal sensations, and so on.

Leer a Borges requiere compromiso, atención y a veces paciencia porque el esmero con que construye los textos y la profundidad de la que los dota no son para tomarse a la ligera ni para comprenderse con una lectura superflua. Therefore, on Tlön the phrase “the moon rose over the sea” would be written “upward beyond the constant flow there was moondling,” or simply “upward, behind the onstreaming it mooned.The maze that is Ficciones is a maze built of mazes, one opening unto another, circling around and looping back, an infinity of mazes, small as the smallest of small minds, large as the universe can be imagined. Perhaps, someone opened it, hoping for something worth more than a book; its general shape could have been a DVD or a video game.