Scan barcode
elmyhelmos's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
dark
informative
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.5
sofi_abrazian's review against another edition
mysterious
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
dibujared's review against another edition
Great collection of stories, almost all involving gauchos and knife fights, or at least violent conflict of some kind (but not always physical). Loved the simple style of the prose in this one.
Favorite stories were "The Interloper," "The Encounter," "The Gospel According to Mark," and "Brodie's Report." It's possible "The Duel" and "The Other Duel" could rank among those as well after a reread.
Favorite stories were "The Interloper," "The Encounter," "The Gospel According to Mark," and "Brodie's Report." It's possible "The Duel" and "The Other Duel" could rank among those as well after a reread.
dalu's review
4.0
3.7 ☆
Me gustó bastante! Mis favoritos son: "El encuentro", "El duelo" y "el informe de Brodie"
Me gustó bastante! Mis favoritos son: "El encuentro", "El duelo" y "el informe de Brodie"
blueyorkie's review against another edition
4.0
It is easy to miss Borges. You have to navigate the inextricable South American wars of the 19th century, one of his favorite theaters. It would help if you got used to its stories of thugs and gauchos, where knife fights are ubiquitous. And more than anything, you have to get used to a specific form of savagery and bestiality from which, without anyone understanding why, very complex behaviors suddenly emerge, like the remains of a civilization buried under barbarism, which would suddenly occur.
This small collection of a dozen short stories can be quite destabilizing. Most had set in 1850s Argentina, a young, barely independent country, where hidalgos and their noble traditions rub shoulders with pampas cowboys and a host of miserable European newcomers. Life there is complex and often short. They are picky about honor, and quarrels settle quickly.
But the latest novel is the most curious. That's a kind of exploration report where a pastor tells of having met people in Africa with strange, cruel, and destabilizing mores. They have a king, to whom they cut off hands and feet, and they gouge out eyes and eardrums so that contact with the world does not defile him. They believe in the divine origin of poetry and, therefore, kill anyone whose inspiration suddenly causes words to line up; the story ends with a plea in their favor from the explorer, who points out that despite their frankly repugnant mores, they are nonetheless men, having established a specific form of culture.
This small collection of a dozen short stories can be quite destabilizing. Most had set in 1850s Argentina, a young, barely independent country, where hidalgos and their noble traditions rub shoulders with pampas cowboys and a host of miserable European newcomers. Life there is complex and often short. They are picky about honor, and quarrels settle quickly.
But the latest novel is the most curious. That's a kind of exploration report where a pastor tells of having met people in Africa with strange, cruel, and destabilizing mores. They have a king, to whom they cut off hands and feet, and they gouge out eyes and eardrums so that contact with the world does not defile him. They believe in the divine origin of poetry and, therefore, kill anyone whose inspiration suddenly causes words to line up; the story ends with a plea in their favor from the explorer, who points out that despite their frankly repugnant mores, they are nonetheless men, having established a specific form of culture.
sidharthvardhan's review against another edition
5.0
"I do not aspire to be Aesop. My stories, like those of the Thousand and One Nights, try to be entertaining or moving but not persuasive."
Most of the stories reveal in their real themes in spoilers. So, won't talk about them specificaly. But one thing in common in all of them is that none of them are fantastic. Except perhaps, the titular one, in which a priest discovers and tries to convert to Christianitya community that look like and is called by him Yahoos. The difference between Doctor Brodie's (no relation to Miss Jean Brodie) Yahoos and Guliver's Yahoos is that the former aren't primitave rather, narrator speculates on the basis of their language, but rather a more advanced age who forgot how to read and write. Given the ever shortening attention span of our generation, it might be happening any time soon to rest of us.
About the king of Yahoos:
“So that the physical world may not lead him from the paths of wisdom, he is gelded on the spot, his eyes are burned, and his hands and feet are amputated. Thereafter, he lives confined in a cavern called the Castle (“Qzr”), into which only the four witch doctors and the two slave women who attend him and anoint him with dung are permitted entrance. Should war arise, the witch doctors remove him from his cavern, display him to the tribe to excite their courage, and bear him, lifted onto their shoulders after the manner of a flag or a talisman, to the thick of the fight. In such cases, he dies almost immediately under the hail of stones flung at him by the Ape-men.”
On the way they count:
“I shall speak now of the witch doctors. I have already recorded that they are four, this number being the largest that their arithmetic spans. On their fingers they count thus: one, two, three, four, many. Infinity begins at the thumb.”
Yahoo can see into future but no longer than 15 minutes which makes Brodie reflect:
“Knowing that past, present, and future already exist, detail upon detail, in God’s prophetic memory, in His Eternity, what baffles me is that men, while they can look indefinitely backward, are not allowed to look one whit forward.
And why did they loose all the civilisation they might have gained in past? No idea. But I think it might be they started prosecuting freedom of speech and arts:
“Another of the tribe’s customs is the discovery of poets. Six or seven words, generally enigmatic, may come to a man’s mind. He cannot contain himself and shouts them out, standing in the center of a circle formed by the witch doctors and the common people, who are stretched out on the ground. If the poem does not stir them, nothing comes to pass, but if the poet’s words strike them they all draw away from him, without a sound, under the command of a holy dread. Feeling then that the spirit has touched him, nobody, not even his own mother, will either speak to him or cast a glance at him. Now he is a man no longer but a god, and anyone has license to kill him."
Most of the rest of the stories are about rivalries, knives, gangsters etc. Often stories though realistic, are such that an alternative interpretation suggested by author becomes possible. Sometimes objects seem to have personalities of their own, sometimes the events of a story are suspiciously similar to those that occurred in past though with a decline in settings and people.
Even prefaces written by Borges are awesome.
From the story about a really old woaman:
“Now all my dreams are of dead people” was one of the last things she was heard to say."
"No one had ever thought of her as a fool, but as far as I know she had never enjoyed the pleasures of the mind; the last pleasures left her would be those of memory and, later on, of forgetfulness.
More quotes:
"I prefer the Platonic idea of the Muse to that of Poe, who reasoned, or feigned to reason, that
the writing of a poem is an act of the intelligence. It never fails to amaze me that the classics
hold a romantic theory of poetry, and a romantic poet a classical theory."
"Maybe their poor and monotonous lives held nothing else for them than their hatred, and that was why they nursed it. In the long run, without suspecting it, each of the two became a slave to
the other."
"Cardoso drew the Red’s official cutthroat, a man from Corrientes well along in years, who, to comfort a condemned man, would pat him on the shoulder and tell him, “Take heart, friend. Women go through far worse when they give birth.”
"In tough neighborhoods a man never admits to anyone—not even to himself— that a woman matters beyond lust and possession, but the two brothers were in love. This, in some way, made them feel ashamed."
"I felt (in the words of the poet Lugones) the fear of what is suddenly too late"
"I do not know how long it lasted; there are events that fall outside the common measure of time."
"I often considered revealing the story to some friend, but always I felt that there was a greater pleasure in being the keeper of a secret than in telling it."
"Certain devices of a literary nature and one or two longish sentences led me to suspect that
this was not the first time he had told the story."
"Sleeping, as we all know, is the most secret of our acts. We devote a third of our lives to it,
and yet do not understand it."
"Two men met face to face at Guayaquil; if one of them was master, it was because of his stronger will, not because of the weight of arguments."
“Words, words, words. Shakespeare, insuperable master of words, held them in scorn.
Most of the stories reveal in their real themes in spoilers. So, won't talk about them specificaly. But one thing in common in all of them is that none of them are fantastic. Except perhaps, the titular one, in which a priest discovers and tries to convert to Christianitya community that look like and is called by him Yahoos. The difference between Doctor Brodie's (no relation to Miss Jean Brodie) Yahoos and Guliver's Yahoos is that the former aren't primitave rather, narrator speculates on the basis of their language, but rather a more advanced age who forgot how to read and write. Given the ever shortening attention span of our generation, it might be happening any time soon to rest of us.
About the king of Yahoos:
“So that the physical world may not lead him from the paths of wisdom, he is gelded on the spot, his eyes are burned, and his hands and feet are amputated. Thereafter, he lives confined in a cavern called the Castle (“Qzr”), into which only the four witch doctors and the two slave women who attend him and anoint him with dung are permitted entrance. Should war arise, the witch doctors remove him from his cavern, display him to the tribe to excite their courage, and bear him, lifted onto their shoulders after the manner of a flag or a talisman, to the thick of the fight. In such cases, he dies almost immediately under the hail of stones flung at him by the Ape-men.”
On the way they count:
“I shall speak now of the witch doctors. I have already recorded that they are four, this number being the largest that their arithmetic spans. On their fingers they count thus: one, two, three, four, many. Infinity begins at the thumb.”
Yahoo can see into future but no longer than 15 minutes which makes Brodie reflect:
“Knowing that past, present, and future already exist, detail upon detail, in God’s prophetic memory, in His Eternity, what baffles me is that men, while they can look indefinitely backward, are not allowed to look one whit forward.
And why did they loose all the civilisation they might have gained in past? No idea. But I think it might be they started prosecuting freedom of speech and arts:
“Another of the tribe’s customs is the discovery of poets. Six or seven words, generally enigmatic, may come to a man’s mind. He cannot contain himself and shouts them out, standing in the center of a circle formed by the witch doctors and the common people, who are stretched out on the ground. If the poem does not stir them, nothing comes to pass, but if the poet’s words strike them they all draw away from him, without a sound, under the command of a holy dread. Feeling then that the spirit has touched him, nobody, not even his own mother, will either speak to him or cast a glance at him. Now he is a man no longer but a god, and anyone has license to kill him."
Most of the rest of the stories are about rivalries, knives, gangsters etc. Often stories though realistic, are such that an alternative interpretation suggested by author becomes possible. Sometimes objects seem to have personalities of their own, sometimes the events of a story are suspiciously similar to those that occurred in past though with a decline in settings and people.
Even prefaces written by Borges are awesome.
From the story about a really old woaman:
“Now all my dreams are of dead people” was one of the last things she was heard to say."
"No one had ever thought of her as a fool, but as far as I know she had never enjoyed the pleasures of the mind; the last pleasures left her would be those of memory and, later on, of forgetfulness.
More quotes:
"I prefer the Platonic idea of the Muse to that of Poe, who reasoned, or feigned to reason, that
the writing of a poem is an act of the intelligence. It never fails to amaze me that the classics
hold a romantic theory of poetry, and a romantic poet a classical theory."
"Maybe their poor and monotonous lives held nothing else for them than their hatred, and that was why they nursed it. In the long run, without suspecting it, each of the two became a slave to
the other."
"Cardoso drew the Red’s official cutthroat, a man from Corrientes well along in years, who, to comfort a condemned man, would pat him on the shoulder and tell him, “Take heart, friend. Women go through far worse when they give birth.”
"In tough neighborhoods a man never admits to anyone—not even to himself— that a woman matters beyond lust and possession, but the two brothers were in love. This, in some way, made them feel ashamed."
"I felt (in the words of the poet Lugones) the fear of what is suddenly too late"
"I do not know how long it lasted; there are events that fall outside the common measure of time."
"I often considered revealing the story to some friend, but always I felt that there was a greater pleasure in being the keeper of a secret than in telling it."
"Certain devices of a literary nature and one or two longish sentences led me to suspect that
this was not the first time he had told the story."
"Sleeping, as we all know, is the most secret of our acts. We devote a third of our lives to it,
and yet do not understand it."
"Two men met face to face at Guayaquil; if one of them was master, it was because of his stronger will, not because of the weight of arguments."
“Words, words, words. Shakespeare, insuperable master of words, held them in scorn.
germangfeler's review
4.0
El último libro de cuentos que escribió Borges y a su vez el único que me faltaba leer. En este volumen se desprende del lenguaje complicado y las historias fantásticas que lo caracterizaban y se decanta por un estilo más simple y directo para contar historias de malevos, gauchos y tribus. Personalmente prefiero al Borges fantástico más que a este Borges terrenal pero el libro tiene sus puntos altos, comenzando por El evangelio según Marcos.
shedontknowyoulilbro's review against another edition
2.0
Se salvan algunos relatos excelentes como lo es El Evangelio Según Marcos
de esta compilación pero la mayoría me fueron totalmente indiferentes y a veces tediosos en exceso.
de esta compilación pero la mayoría me fueron totalmente indiferentes y a veces tediosos en exceso.
thejdizzler's review against another edition
4.0
En la introducción de esta obra, Borges dice que esos cuentos son "directos". Sin embargo, encuentro esas historias más difíciles de comprender de los de "El Aleph" o "Ficciones". Las temas de cuentos como "La Lotería de Babylon" o "Dos Reyes y Dos Laberintos" eran obvias, si sus mundos eran más confusos. Mientras en "El Informe de Brodie", el mundo es nuestro, pero las temas eran algas borrosas.
No obstante, me encantaban unos pocos cuentos. Tenía miedo cuando leyendo "El Evangelio según Marcos", y el cuento titular ("El informe de Brodie") parecía a los viejos cuentos de Borges. También, las temas del duelo y la rivalidad eran claras en todas las historias.
No obstante, me encantaban unos pocos cuentos. Tenía miedo cuando leyendo "El Evangelio según Marcos", y el cuento titular ("El informe de Brodie") parecía a los viejos cuentos de Borges. También, las temas del duelo y la rivalidad eran claras en todas las historias.