Learning to Write with Jorge Luis Borges
And friends
This is the seventh book that offers writing advice which I have reviewed, recapped, and shared as we navigate our writing adventures together.
Following this recap find #1–6 linked below.
In 2014 the BBC questioned if Jorge Luis Borges was “the 20th Century’s most important writer”.
Shame on me. I have no excuse for not yet lining my bookshelf with Jorge Luis Borges. In Jorge Luis Borges On Writing, Argentina’s famed writer reminds us that a reader is a “polite explorer of the lives of others.”
On our behalf, he explores the lives of literary legends and poets: Kafka, Woolf, Eliot, Valéry, Faulkner, Flaubert, Melville, James, Schwob, Wells, Cortázar, Poe, Queen, Casares, Gutiérres, Collins, and Whitman.
Sometimes the exploration is gossipy, e.g., he notes that Henry James was the best man at Rudyard Kipling’s wedding. Other times it is gushy e.g., in 1986 he called H.G. Wells a genius. He proclaimed Willie Collins a master of the vicissitudes of the plot. He had a full-on man crush for James Joyce, translating Ulysses into Spanish in 1948. Joyce, he wrote in 1925, was a “millionaire of words and style”.
Borge suggests that The Iliad was western literature’s foundation stone. He writes of word music, his disdain for metaphors, the retelling of tales through translation, the narrative art, and when fiction lives within fiction.
He asks readers to consider if literary genres exist. Did they evolve, from a single work as the detective story grew from Edgar Allen Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue? He focuses on the intellect of detective novels as much as their mystery and points out the difference between those set in Europe (Britain specifically) vs. North America with the latter being more gruesome.
In addition to dissecting the mechanisms of writing fiction, he adds a few of his favorite detective story must-reads:
· House Taken Over by Julio Cortázar
· Halfway House by Ellery Queen
· The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares
· The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins and
· his own Death and the Compass.
As a writer, you may be asked which three dead writers you will invite to dinner. Read Jorge Luis Borges On Writing before formalizing your list, and brush up on your Spanish because you’re going to want to invite Borges and one or two of his South American peers to your table.
· My first recap was Save the Cat! Writes a Novel found here in The Wordy Wombats.
· My second recap A Novel in a Year by Louise Doughty is here in Creative Writing 101
· A third recap What Can Margaret Atwood Teach Us about writers and writing is published here in Writers Daily.
· Find number 4 here, in Creative Writing 101, What Can We Learn From Ursula K. Le Guin on writers and writing.
· Here is number 5, What Can a Book Editor Teach Writers? Betsy Lerner’s advice to writers in ‘The Forest for the Trees’ in Writers Daily.
· My 6th review was The Norton Introduction to Literature — Portable Tenth Edition by Alison Booth and Kelly J. Mays published in the Bouncin’ and Behavin’ Blogs.
