Take a photo of a barcode or cover
4.32 AVERAGE
4.32 AVERAGE
These stories are great. So cerebral, so nested, a good read on the day you want to think about things differently. I especially enjoyed "The Library of Babylon," where the entire universe was an infinite library containing every possible book, and "The Lottery of Babylon," where fate was decided by an enormously complicated lottery that nobody understood. I will likely revisit this book later, but it was fun to just read a few stories here and there as I wanted to.
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
This collection of stories, essays, and parables are all thematised by labyrinths – though often only superficially. In fact, the collection is an exploration of many metaphysical ideas in relation to the self, literature, and the infinite and universal expressed in the individual (and vice versa). The impression is that, through reference to seminal texts and ideas (Cervantes gets many mentions. As does Shaw, Shakespeare, Kafka, Poe, 1001 Nights, Sinbad, the Bible, and others), Borges leads us through the complex maze of his own spiritual, creative, and metaphysical inquiry. It is only through reflection or meditation – on this text, as on many others – that one might find the answers one seeks. But what are the questions? This book is open enough to interpretation and meaning as to raise many.
"[A] book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory."
Originally selected as a follow-up to the Borges graphic biography, because as with my experiences with Kafka, for all the reading about Borges and things labeled "Borges-esque" over the years, I'd actually only ever read one single story written by the man, back in Dr. Rose's AP English 1988-89. That story was "The Garden of the Forking Paths," which appears here among several mind-bending fictions that read like essays, mind-bending essays that read like fictions, and things in between that defy categorization. I also thought it might fulfill the Read Harder 2021 challenge to read a non-European book in translation, but that challenge specifies a novel, not an anthology. So, something else from the stack will have to do for that. The blending of narrative and pseudo-informational texts is a brilliant head trip all the way through, though a grab at the emotion, a play for universality while exploring the specific (rather than the Everyman stand-in that Borges prefers for characters), is what pushes texts from the "really like" to "amazing" classification for me.
I'm only 50 percent through and I'm exhausted. I've never read a book where I've had to look up the meaning of so many words. I'm not sure if this is the author's doing, or the translator's, but it's exhausting. I don't have the worst vocabulary, or at least I didn't think it was too bad, but what I do know is really being tested here. There have been a couple of great stories here but I'm going to put the book down for now and give myself a break.
challenging
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
I read this in college, but truly enjoy and appreciate it now.
There's no denying Borges' imagination and intelligence, but his interests are not my interests. His subjects are (at least in this collection) primarily Gnosticism, heretical Christian sects, paradoxes, philosophy, and the possibility of a multiverse. I did find a couple of the stories to be engaging (The Garden of Forking Paths and The Library of Babel are justifiably famous) but most of the book is as dry as a desert wind.
Maybe you can have too much of a good thing. That’s what I’m going to put this down to. I loved The Aleph, my first foray into Borges which I immersed myself in and thoroughly enjoyed. I found Labyrinths though much harder to enjoy, even though it has been translated, so lost was I that I felt that I may as well have been reading it in Borges native Argentinian.
The fictions, for the most part I enjoyed, particularly The Garden of Forking Paths, the Lottery in Babylon, The Shape of the Sword, Death and the Compass and the Secret Miracle. What I hadn’t realised as I reached The Immortal is that the second half of the fictions in Labyrinths are all in The Aleph. After skipping them I moved onto the Essays, and here I fell down completely.
I said in my review of the Aleph that I thought maybe I wasn’t a good enough reader for Borges, and his essays here confirmed that, or it could be that I just don’t have any interest in the points and theories that Borges wanted to expound, even if I did, I would have struggled to follow the thrust of his arguments and discussions.
After the Essays, again the parables were all in the Aleph, so all that was left was the Elegy, which was a poignant finish to the collection.
(blog review here)
The fictions, for the most part I enjoyed, particularly The Garden of Forking Paths, the Lottery in Babylon, The Shape of the Sword, Death and the Compass and the Secret Miracle. What I hadn’t realised as I reached The Immortal is that the second half of the fictions in Labyrinths are all in The Aleph. After skipping them I moved onto the Essays, and here I fell down completely.
I said in my review of the Aleph that I thought maybe I wasn’t a good enough reader for Borges, and his essays here confirmed that, or it could be that I just don’t have any interest in the points and theories that Borges wanted to expound, even if I did, I would have struggled to follow the thrust of his arguments and discussions.
After the Essays, again the parables were all in the Aleph, so all that was left was the Elegy, which was a poignant finish to the collection.
(blog review here)