A review by steve_brinson
The Aleph and Other Stories 1933-1969 by Jorge Luis Borges, Norman Thomas di Giovanni
adventurous
challenging
mysterious
reflective
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.25
I've always liked Jorge Luis Borges, and indeed considered him one of my favorite authors, but also kind of underestimated him as a thinker - to me, a lot of his stories can be summed up as "hey, what if there was a [map that was the size of the territory it was mapping], wouldn't that be wack", and were it not for his gifts for a) coming up with genuinely fascinating ideas of that nature and b) figuring out interesting and genuinely thoughtful implications without overstaying his welcome. The Aleph and Other Stories doesn't really disprove this impression, but it does make clear that aside from those stories (which are his best-remembered ones, and which include the title story of this collection), he has other things going on.
One example is Death and the Compass, probably his most famous non-conceptual story. The first five-sixths of it read like somewhere between a Sherlock Holmes pastiche and Borges' take on Criminal Minds - the detective Erik Lönnrot investigates a murder which appears at face value to be a burglary gone wrong but which Lönnrot deduces to be some kind of Jewish ritual murder, is vindicated when two more dead bodies turn up, and figures out that the murderers made the third murder look like the last but that there will be a fourth -
One reason so many of his stories are forgotten is that they don't lend themselves to that sort of concisely-describable idea, but another reason is that they are his most universal; he also has a lot of stories that work well in the context of Argentine history or culture, in particular the gaucho era and his stories about knife fights, but assume a level of familiarity with the subject that most Anglophone readers, including myself, just don't have. A lot of those stories also have more lowbrow subject matter (cf. the knife fights), but Borges doesn't really write them that way; The Meeting, in which it is heavily implied that two knives essentially take over a pair of poker players to carry forward a fight they were once involved in, treats its subject matter with not much less seriousness than any other concept in his work, though the nature of knife-fighting creates a somewhat more linear plot than his other conceptual stories.
Another standout is The Other Death (also titled The Redemption) - I do not know how to discuss its nonlinear narrative without just summarizing it, so I will simply say that it highlights a degree of character work that is certainly present in a lot of Borges' other stories but not really foregrounded in the same way.
One example is Death and the Compass, probably his most famous non-conceptual story. The first five-sixths of it read like somewhere between a Sherlock Holmes pastiche and Borges' take on Criminal Minds - the detective Erik Lönnrot investigates a murder which appears at face value to be a burglary gone wrong but which Lönnrot deduces to be some kind of Jewish ritual murder, is vindicated when two more dead bodies turn up, and figures out that the murderers made the third murder look like the last but that there will be a fourth -
Spoiler
and then it turns out that the first murder genuinely was a burglary gone wrong and only looked like a ritual by coincidence and that the criminal mastermind behind the first murder concocted the next two to trap Lönnrot. I'm an easy mark when it comes to this kind of thing, but it at least seems like a very good deconstruction of that kind of detective or the sort of criminal mastermind who opposes them, in love with patterns and clever references for no good reason, and a very effective use of Borges' own tendencies as a writer, because by reputation he is exactly the sort of writer who would write that kind of story.One reason so many of his stories are forgotten is that they don't lend themselves to that sort of concisely-describable idea, but another reason is that they are his most universal; he also has a lot of stories that work well in the context of Argentine history or culture, in particular the gaucho era and his stories about knife fights, but assume a level of familiarity with the subject that most Anglophone readers, including myself, just don't have. A lot of those stories also have more lowbrow subject matter (cf. the knife fights), but Borges doesn't really write them that way; The Meeting, in which it is heavily implied that two knives essentially take over a pair of poker players to carry forward a fight they were once involved in, treats its subject matter with not much less seriousness than any other concept in his work, though the nature of knife-fighting creates a somewhat more linear plot than his other conceptual stories.
Another standout is The Other Death (also titled The Redemption) - I do not know how to discuss its nonlinear narrative without just summarizing it, so I will simply say that it highlights a degree of character work that is certainly present in a lot of Borges' other stories but not really foregrounded in the same way.