One Country, One Book — Argentina

Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges (1944)

Thus far, some authors have been well known and some obscure, but none have been as revered in the Western canon as Borges. If you read Borges, you may have thought about plot and prose, recursion and metaphysics, but there’s a good chance that you didn’t think about Argentina at all. I didn’t know much about Argentina before this, and I still don’t. There are cows. There are also penguins. I assume that they’re on a North to South gradient.

Although I just said that I hadn’t been thinking about Argentina while reading, as a person, Borges wasn’t a vague idea of transcending time and place, but was actively involved in the Argentinian literary community and actively concerned with Argentinian politics. Even knowing this, it’s hard for me to think of Borges as a person instead of the abstraction of an author.

I don’t feel up to “reviewing” Collected Fictions the way that I have with other books. It’s too meta to describe a story that’s a description of a story. I don’t feel equal to the task. It would be more worth your time to read The Garden of Forking Paths — one of Borges most famous stories, short enough to read in one sitting and free to read at the preceding link.