Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges

Other than the story or two I'm sure I read in my seven years of Spanish classes, this was my first real introduction to Borges. It's a slim volume, less than 200 pages, and most of the works are 10 pages or less, but each takes some time to read and digest, and I had to pick it up a few times over the course of several months before I could finally really get into it and just read.


Ficciones is a really nice name for this collection of short works by Jorge Luis Borges, because they are not so much short stories as "fictions." In each one, Borges takes an idea and imagines it into being and then tells it, sometimes almost academically, as if it were a fact: an infinite library containing every book that could ever possibly exist, a dreamer who very systematically dreams a new man into being, a man who wishes for an extra year of life when he steps before a firing squad and is granted it when time freezes, and he along with it while remaining entirely conscious. I especially loved the final story, "The South," which I took (rightly or wrongly) as a commentary on all that had come before, and on the relationship between fiction and reality. As I've said here before, my final impression of a book is one of my strongest impressions. As for all that had come before, however, while some of the stories baffled me, and I wouldn't call most of them emotionally resonant (Borges' style is very intellectual, and that doesn't always appeal to me), they almost all fascinated me at some level. For that I enjoyed each one of them, with very few exceptions.