Ficciones

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The South might well be one of the longest, at only eight pages while The End is one of the shortest at a mere four pages, and is an example of Borges's ability, when he so chooses, to make every word count: the setting, the timing, the oblique view of the action are precise and perfect. The concepts in it are not as mentally challenging, although the labyrinth imagery and philosophical conjectures resurface toward the end.

I am positive, many times, that I failed to completely comprehend all that he intended for me to glean from his writing.It is believed that time passes differently for everyone for it is not uniform, depends upon medium and perceiver.

When he perceives a note of tenderness and clarity in one of these vile men, he concludes that it is the reflection of a perfect man who exists somewhere. There is a person in Borges’s universe who may reconstruct every dream, every day dream he had ever had.It is used as a metaphor to represent a variety of things: the overwhelmingly complex nature of worlds and the systems that exist on them, human enterprises, the physical and mental aspects of humans, and abstract concepts such as time. To me Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges is the ultimate anthology of short stories… I find in it everything I ever want to find in literature: reality and surreality, rationality and irrationality, fables and parables, legends and myths, mysticism and philosophy, history and fantasy and an endless enigma of existence. My notes from reading this book are vast and easily could have led to a dissertation many times longer than the original source material.

Thought creates its own reality, and reality is composed of varied systems of being and behavior; thought becomes the way that reality is interpreted - and therefore enacted. By stressing the weightiness of Borges's stories, and the red herrings that distracted me sometimes, I may have given the impression that the stories are long. He is granted that wish to finish the book in his head in the suspension of time between bullets leaving the guns and their impact on his body.I just need time to assimilate all the meaning in this masterpiece and then I will be able to change the number of stars in this review. There have been ingenious authors in past too but it had taken them hundreds of pages and the invention of an entirely new language to communicate what Borges has done in sparingly three or four pages. It all comes across as clinical, with a tone of little Jack Horner self satisfaction staring at his thumb saying "What a good boy am I.

What was striking about Fictions is that whenever and wherever it come to existence it immediately grabbed the imagination of readers- for it is quintessential for a reader to be imaginative to understand Borges’s world. The ideas and the perspectives employed have taken me to all spiritual and philosophical depths while entertaining me with high efficiency. There have been very few authors in the history of literature who could produce such impact of originality and Borges is certainly right up there. The seventeen pieces in Ficciones demonstrate the whirlwind of Borges's genius and mirror the precision and potency of his intellect and inventiveness, his piercing irony, his skepticism, and his obsession with fantasy. Jorge Luis Borges, possibly one of the greatest readers of all time, lost his eyesight later in life.Only a few pages into the first story it dawned on me that reading Ficciones would either be a start-and-stop marathon bogged down by frequent trips to Google, or a semi-blindfolded adventure plagued by missed understandings. Thirteen stories from Ficciones were first published by New Directions in the English-language anthology Labyrinths (1962). Something about the manner of Fergus Kilpatrick’s death strikes Ryan as enigmatic, a series of events that are like “circular labyrinths” (that image again! I deeply lament having lent, irretrievably, the first book he published, to a female acquaintance” --The Work of Herbert Quain.