There is no intellectual exercise that is not ultimately pointless.
-Jorge Luis Borges

Borge's gnosticism--his sense that the ultimate God is beyond good and evil, and infinitely remote
from creation--is deeply felt. But the sense of dread that informs his work is metaphysical rather
than religious in nature : at its base are vertiginous glimpses of the collapse of all structures of
understanding including language itself, flashing intimations that the very self that speaks has no
real existence.
-J. M. Coetzee, Borge's Dark Mirror (NY Review of Books)

A modern author who spends his life writing two chapters of Don Quijote, not rewriting mind you, but writing the original, a wizard who dreams a son into existence only to realize that he himself is but the emanation of another's dream, an infinite library, a man accepting a challenge to a knife fight which he can not possibly win, these are just some of the elements that Jorge Luis Borges draws upon in his stories. These labyrinthine fictions loop back upon themselves and upon reality in order first to undermine the claims of reason and ultimately to call into question existence itself.

Borges was one of the great conservative authors of the 20th Century--his support for things like the Bay of Pigs invasion and his anti-Peronism are widely considered to have cost him the oh-so-politically-correct Nobel Prize--but his was a very particular conservatism, the conservatism of anti-Reason, of which the other great exemplar was Leo Tolstoy. On first reading War and Peace, I couldn't understand how a supposedly great writer had made such an incomprehensible hash of the battle scenes, but in his great essay, The Fox and the Hedgehog, Isaiah Berlin makes the compelling case that Tolstoy was thereby attempting to show just how unsusceptible events are to the application of human reason. Borges similarly challenges the central place of reason in the modern age, suggesting that existence is simply incomprehensible, absurd, unyielding to human understanding or planning. With this understanding of how subjective our interpretation of life is at the forefront of his work, Borges then proceeds to craft brief, tightly controlled, imaginative, stories which seem to play with the idea that the writer is the god of the literary world that he creates.

Of course, this too is a paradox. Like the Existentialists, he is hoist on the petard of his own ideology. If intellectual exercises are pointless, and his writings are nothing if not intellectual exercises, why devote his life to a pointless exercise? Likewise, one wonders why anyone would produce such carefully constructed stories if all of existence is so essentially dubious. The awkward answer can be nothing but faith. God may be a distant figure to Borges, a non-existent one to the Existentialists, but the very act of continuing to write beautiful stories to argue their point of view, indicates that at some level they do find a purpose to life and do trust in the capacity of their own voices to influence other people and the future. Borges shares a fascination with suicide or at least the acceptance of death with the Existentialists, but like them, he kept on going. Their actions speak louder than their words.

Perhaps because of this central paradox in his work, I found it a little difficult to read the whole set of stories straight through. I got a sense that the author didst protest too much. If everything is mere illusion, why'd he bother to write all of this & why am I reading it? On the other hand, if you read them one at a time and let each roll around in your head, you really get a chance to savor their playfulness and ingenuity and to ponder the questions they raise. I certainly recommend them, but suggest that they are best when read over a longer period of time. Don't get stuck on an airplane with just this book.

GRADE : B

While only a slim volume of about 100 pages, Jorge Luis Borges' FICCIONES is one of the 20th century's most original and influential works. A set of two collections of short stories, ''The Garden of Forking Paths" and ''Artifices", FICCIONES was the world's first exposure to the Argentinian writer and Borges' all-around best work.

The nature of the stories which Borges crafted is so unique and subtle that it defies description. He portrayed unusual occurrences, and peppered his stories, narrated in a faux-scholastic style, with references to colourful sources that, while sounding plausible, are of Borges' own invention and can be found in no library. In the first story of FICCIONES, ''Tlon, Uqbar, Orbius Tertius," he imagines an encyclopedia mysteriously containing a entry for a country that is not to be found - at least not in our reality. ''The Approach to Al-Mutasim" is a review of a book which doesn't exist; here, in a reversal of the usual order, the review brings the book into being. ''The Babylon Lottery" and ''The Library of Babel" are both clever metaphors for the human world. In the first, Borges describes an ancient society which lets all things be decided by chance. In the second, which introduced the concept of the infinite library, the story's setting is an unimaginably vast archive whose librarians from birth to death care for books whose meanings cannot be deciphered.

Jorge Luis Borges often used several key motifs in his books, such as mirrors and labyrinths, and it is this reuse of symbols which has created the ''Borgesian" genre. These symbols and the offbeat constructions which Borges almost singlehandedly invented went on to inspire legions of writers, including Gene Wolfe and Salman Rushdie.

The translation of FICCIONES has long been a divisive issue. While some, such as myself, believe that this versions of FICCIONES follows the original Spanish closely and, in any event, Borges' genius is found not as much in his language as in his concepts, others detest this 1962 version. Andrew Hurley has recently translated all of Borges fictional stories, including FICCIONES, in COLLECTED FICTIONS published by Penguin, but even his translation has sparked new battles. Should one wish to read FICCIONES in English, however, I'd suggest getting this translation. It is less expensive than COLLECTED FICTIONS and contains only Borges' finest work. For those who can read Spanish decently, I'd recommend even obtaining the original language, as Borges' stories do not use vocabulary much outside what one gets after four-years of high school Spanish.

While some readers may not "get" Borges (he can be compared to H.P. Lovecraft in possessing great influence on some but total obscurity to others), I'd certainly recommend trying FICCIONES.

After years of running into this name, "Borges," I felt as though I were falling short of my expectations as a reader to ignore this man and his colossal reputation. Ficciones seemed to be his most widely read and critically acclaimed book, and so I inevitably found myself reading it.

To try to capture the essence of Borges in a handful of words is like trying to capture the Lochness Monster on film: impossible, but frequently attempted. With that understanding in mind, here's my assessment:

All of Borges's stories are very different, and yet they all share a common sensibility, one of understated but very deeply felt anguish. This is not the anguish of an ordinary writer feeling sorry for himself and his fate. This anguish is deep, metaphysical. You get the sense that Borges views life and his fellow human beings at a distance, and yet is able to see more and understand more from this distance. He does not attempt to explain; he simply wants to impart his sense of awe, wonder, and inevitability.

The subject matter varies widely: an infinite library, a scholarly review of the life's work of a fictional writer, a boy with a perfect memory. Some of his stories are Kafka-esqe in a nightmarish sense, while others have the intellectual playfulness of an M.C. Escher drawing: what you thought was 'up' is really 'down,' and yet once you see the big picture you realize that this is the only way it can be. The endings are as inevitable as death, and yet you rarely see them coming.

I'm not so sure that Borges wrote his stories with a specific point or message, although many of them seem to have one. I believe that most of these stories are simply meant to inspire thought and contemplation of the very issues that Borges had been thinking of when he wrote them. One could do a lot worse than to see things through the eyes of this great thinker.

My only complaint is that his stories are not as accessible as they could be, and his scholarly manner may be problematical for some. But the most effective pills are often the hardest to swallow...