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A review by sidharthvardhan
Brodie's Report by Jorge Luis Borges
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.