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A review by borumi
Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges
5.0
This review was written in a hurry after being deleted by accident. I couldn't retrieve everything I had written before (I wish Goodreads had an autosave function! or that I had the memory of Funes.)
While reading part I, I couldn't help getting a creeping sensation of deja-vu, not only because of the numerous literary allusions and meta-fictional approach, but also the familiar conundrums I liked to tackle throughout my adolescence. Like Al-Mu'tasim, I feel as if I am going deeper and deeper into a labyrinth where I'm on the breathless search for someone (perhaps the omniscient creator who is laughing at my expense) without any idea of who that 'someone' is or any conscious motive or purpose.
On top of that, a foreboding of some kind of ulterior layer of truth is stimulated and pullulated, as it was perhaps deeply ingrained in our hunter/hunted instinct. We constantly vacillate between our suspension of disbelief and disillusionment by Borges' masterful amalgamation and reversal of fantasy and reality, the creator and the created, the sacred and the damned, the dogma and the conspiracy. The many references to mirror and symmetry seem to enhance our doubt as to whether we are on the other side of the looking glass at all, and whether the reflected image is any less real than the original object.
Another reminder of Lewis Caroll's conundrum is repeatedly shown in our puzzlement at what would happen if the Red King that's dreaming of us in our dream wakes up? The abrupt halt following a discovery or denouement in each story enhances this unsettling effect of becoming both enlightened and disillusioned at the same time, as if the main character and the reader are both waking up from a befuddled dream.
I haven't had this much fun (or a headache!) since reading Lewis Caroll or Italo Calvino. In fact, I was thinking of Calvino's If On a Winter's Night A Traveller (I'm pretty sure lots of other readers did as well), but I think it's pointless to compare these writers as the infinite ideas and questions and books seem to diverge as much as they converge on the forking paths of our library of Babel.
While reading part I, I couldn't help getting a creeping sensation of deja-vu, not only because of the numerous literary allusions and meta-fictional approach, but also the familiar conundrums I liked to tackle throughout my adolescence. Like Al-Mu'tasim, I feel as if I am going deeper and deeper into a labyrinth where I'm on the breathless search for someone (perhaps the omniscient creator who is laughing at my expense) without any idea of who that 'someone' is or any conscious motive or purpose.
On top of that, a foreboding of some kind of ulterior layer of truth is stimulated and pullulated, as it was perhaps deeply ingrained in our hunter/hunted instinct. We constantly vacillate between our suspension of disbelief and disillusionment by Borges' masterful amalgamation and reversal of fantasy and reality, the creator and the created, the sacred and the damned, the dogma and the conspiracy. The many references to mirror and symmetry seem to enhance our doubt as to whether we are on the other side of the looking glass at all, and whether the reflected image is any less real than the original object.
Another reminder of Lewis Caroll's conundrum is repeatedly shown in our puzzlement at what would happen if the Red King that's dreaming of us in our dream wakes up? The abrupt halt following a discovery or denouement in each story enhances this unsettling effect of becoming both enlightened and disillusioned at the same time, as if the main character and the reader are both waking up from a befuddled dream.
I haven't had this much fun (or a headache!) since reading Lewis Caroll or Italo Calvino. In fact, I was thinking of Calvino's If On a Winter's Night A Traveller (I'm pretty sure lots of other readers did as well), but I think it's pointless to compare these writers as the infinite ideas and questions and books seem to diverge as much as they converge on the forking paths of our library of Babel.