Scan barcode
tom_muzi's review against another edition
challenging
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.25
trisjdavila's review against another edition
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
4.5
un poco difícil, pero me hace feliz saber porque mi mamá me dio el nombre beatriz. cuentos muy bellos, cada uno tiene un fin excelente.
sidharthvardhan's review
5.0
"All language is a set of symbols whose use among its speakers assumes a shared past."
.... and so there must be things beyond describing powers of language. What if some day you were to come across a thing or an experience who is nothing like shared past? The human impulse to communicate must find a let out, and where mere words are not enough we need poetry:
Daneri’s real work lay not in the poetry but in his invention of reasons why the poetry should be admired.
Daneri, like most good poets, didn’t invent reasons, he found them - found them in the inexplicable Aleph.
Borges is not only talking about nature of language or importance of poetry, he also seems to be speculating why the descriptions of supernatural are so vague or strange:
“How, then, can I translate into words the limitless Aleph, which my floundering mind can scarcely encompass? Mystics, faced with the same problem, fall back on symbols: to signify the godhead, one Persian speaks of a bird that somehow is all birds; Alanus de Insulis, of a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere; Ezekiel, of a four-faced angel who at one and the same time moves east and west, north and south.”
And...
“Aleph is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Its use for the strange sphere in my story may not be accidental. For the Kabbalah, that letter stands for the En Soph , the pure and boundless godhead; it is also said that it takes the shape of a man pointing to both heaven and earth, in order to show that the lower world is the map and mirror of the higher; for Cantor’s Mengenlehre , it is the symbol of trans- finite numbers, of which any part is as great as the whole.”
Again, if Borges and Daneri who have seen Aleph find themselves doubting the reality of same (perhaps an intellectual fear (fear of being ourselves insande makes us doubt anything we experience beyond that shared past), how can a reader who has but their words is supposed to believe in its existence?
Anyways, Daneri’s is taken from DANte aleghERI and like the great poet – he suffers a hell in being exposed to the inexplicable Aleph; puratory (which comes from author’s little lie) and paradise (latter success).
But why should Daneri find that sudden success? Borges stories are like little riddles in which everything strange has a beautiful explanation and that explanation is probably hinted at somewhere else in the story itself. Daneri’s obsession finds a mirror in narrator’s obsession for Beatriz Viterbo – and there lies the answer. The doubt created by narrator has same effect on Daneri that death of Beatriz had on narrator; it made him feel easy – when object of one’s obsession is set beyond possibility of possession, it doesn't kill the obsession itself (or it couldn't really be a strong obsession in first place) but it does ease one's mind about thinking of possibilities to possess. Daneri probably just stopping try too hard too hard to interpret Aleph.
“...now that she was dead, I could devote myself to her memory, without hope but also without humiliation.
*
"So foolish did his ideas seem to me, so pompous and so drawn out his exposition, that I linked them at once to literature and asked him why he didn’t write them down."
grandpa_chic's review
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
What else is there to say about this book? It's beautiful, riveting, full of references that made me want to go into a research bender. Some stories didn't resonate with me so much, but those are a minority, and I was never left indifferent even in those instances.
natalie_is_reading's review
4.0
Bought this book to read el aleph for class and decided to read the other stories as well! Definitely felt like so much went over my head- wish that my bestie profe Fernando was there to explain each story lol- but I quite like Borges’ writing style and the fantastical twisting of time and consciousness in all of the stories. Felt very Argentinian reading this on the subte
savaging's review
5.0
La muerte (o su alusión) hace preciosos y patéticos a los hombres. Éstos conmueven por su condición fantasmas; cada acto que ejecutan puede ser último; no hay rostro que no esté por desdibujarse como el rostro de un sueño. Todo, entre los mortales, tiene el valor de lo irrecuperable y de lo azaroso.In this book, any precious thing is balanced between loss and recovery. Death and some magic of resurrection.
My favorite stories in it were "El inmortal" and "La espera," which are mostly reflections on the emotional/psychological condition of ones facing death. "Emma Zunz" is also in here, a great story that is often anthologized.
Borges is a headache to read in Spanish, but it was easy to find an English version of this collection to figure out who had actually tricked whom into whose labyrinth, and who wrote the ancient historical text about it and sold it to which rare bookdealer . . .
danielkallin04's review against another edition
4.0
Every few pages Borges manages to change my perception of the world. Some of these stories are eye-opening even if they fail to reveal the meaning of life, they still contain infinity. That said, there were a couple of stories that I didn't get into and "The Maker" section was a bit too specific to Argentina and Classics for me to fully appreciate. But, looking past that, Borges is a god.