/lit/ - Literature

>>22761096
The Circular Ruins

>>22761106
not op but looked up this book and a summary of it makes it sound dumb
its convinced me to buy it so thanks for the unintentional rec

>>22761096
I honestly couldn't tell you,but "The House of Asterion" is incredibly poignant and also kinda overlooked, i think

I prefer some of his poems.

>>22761096
I've found them a bit gimmicky, and often more like "here's a cute idea" than "here's a good story". (The Library of Babel is a good example.)

"The South" was an exception for me. I think it was good because it wasn't so much like Borges — or perhaps, it was like him, but it had something more, that he usually lacks. I'm not alone; lots of people cite it. IIRC, JLB himself rated it highly as well.

>>22761111
It's okay, he stole the idea from Herbert Quain anyway

el sur

Novel which isn't shit in which there is a story, a series of detailedly described baroque, poetic images which connect this story, but no allegorical theme to the story, almost as if the story has no themes at all?

>>22761096

Tlon obviously

The Aleph.

>>22761096
Funes the Memorious

>>22761106
This is my favorite. There's something so beautiful about it. I've only read the di Giovanni translation into English but it's entrancingly written. I wonder if Borges' years of experience helped change some of the original story when the translation was done?

>>22761132
>a bit gimmicky, and often more like "here's a cute idea" than "here's a good story"
i think that's intentional anon... his prose is good enough to get away with it fortunately
thing is... you know when you listen to the news daily and take everything they say for granted... but every once in a while, like every three or four months, they happen upon a subject matter you have more than passing experience with and you just stand there as if struck by lightning and can't believe how absolutely retarded and even malevolent these newscasters are?
well, Mr. B is the polar opposite of that :)

>>22761096
Pierre Menard or Tlon I imagine if you are galaxybrained.

>>22762594
https://www.ubuweb.com/sound/borges_labyrinths.html

>>22762675
Why are you recommending this to me?

>>22762683
why are you asking me? you are the galaxybrained one

>>22762709
No, I was saying for me its Pierre Menard but I got the impression Tlon Uqbar Tertius Orbis was the real shit for galaxybrained chads which I am definitely not.

>>22761132
Maybe give "The insufferable gaucho" by Bolano a try

For me it's pic related, although he has many bangers

>>22761096
You should try these, I would choose Tlon, circular ruins,Story of the Warrior and the Captive
>Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
>The Lottery in Babylon
>The Circular Ruins
>The Library of Babel
>Funes the Memorious
>The Immortal
>Story of the Warrior and the Captive

>>22762916
Do you mind explaining it? It sailed over my head.

>>22761132
>I've found them a bit gimmicky, and often more like "here's a cute idea" than "here's a good story". (The Library of Babel is a good example.)

Well that's why they're short stories and not novels. Most of Borges' stories would get worse if they were expanded over hundreds of pages, and he knows it, which is why he keeps them nice and short.

>>22761096
>Borges will be in the public domain in 34 years.
God, I hate copyright so fucking much.
His best story is The Two Kings and the two labyrinths.

>>22763107
Borges' bitch wife pulled the original english translations from circulation after his death because of her personal beef with the translator.

>>22761096
What comes to mind most readily is the The Writing of the God. But I always have to read The Aleph after The Writing of the God. The Zahir deals with similar ideas but i think it's inferior to the other two I've mentioned.

I'm also partial to The Approach to Al Mu'tasim and The Man on the Threshold.

I feel I must also mention The Three versions of Judas (related, but an essay, not a story: A Defense of Basilides the False) and his detective stories.

>>22761096
No one's mentioned two of my favorites yet, "Inferno, I, 32" and "The Lottery in Babylon." The latter really introduced Borges' special flavor to me in a way that clicked hard for the first time, and the former is an exquisite miniature, almost like a fable.

>>22762808
I didn't recall which one was Pierre Menard so I looked it up and remembered that it was surprisingly good
anyway that "audiobook" is really good
here's another one, with a lecture
https://ubu.com/sound/borges_norton.html
may not be the best one but it's decent

>>22762916
Peak high IQ lit
>>22764023
The former is one of my favourite things ever written. I made a thread with it in the OP a while back or maybe last year.

Is he better translated into Portuguese or English?
t. Spanishlet who needs to read him in either of those languages

>>22764023
Looks suspiciously like Shirley Jackson's lottery.

>>22764023
>Inferno, I, 32
>almost like a fable.
For sure. I read Lord Dunsany's "Fifty-One Tales" the other day; I would call them fables rather than tales, and the tone is very similar. <Pic attached> is a typical example. (Dunsany really hates cities. Quite right too.)

>>22764023
Inferno, I, 32 is great
I thought it was more of a prose poem though

The House of Asterion is my favorite. I even read two Minotaur based comic books, but neither were as good as Borges own's tale.

My second favorite is Circular Ruins, and I have a fondness for the City of Inmmortals.

I'm not the only one who thinks "The Intruder" is about two closeted homosexuals, right?

>>22764273
if you are a homosexual, everything is about homosexuals, closeted homosexuals, and homosexuals so closeted that they hate other homosexuals and want to kill them
that's sad and boring, no different from an animal who hunts and is hunted
is not Borges against exactly this attitude? that there is more to life than survival?

bump

>>22762932
I read it a long time ago, but it's about a fictional "world building" project that takes over reality.

>>22765533
but then it isn't fictional is it

>>22765590
That's the point. Borges likes to blend fiction and nonfiction, reality and unreality. It's a trademark of his stories.

God bless Adelphi

>>22765595
reminded me of Calvino's "If on a winter's night a traveler"'s chapters 6 & 7 and their corresponding annex chapters (and of course the erotic annex chapter from 8...) the rest of the book is quite terrible to be frank

>>22765533
Holy shit, I don't remember getting that at all. I vaguely recalled it seemed to have something to do with Schopenhauer. That's all I remember.

>>22766105
Sounds like you should read it again.

It's not a major feature of the story, but one of my favorite little bits in the story is that there was a contingent of mapmakers that tried to make the most accurate map possible of a certain country, omitting no details at all as best they could.

The map they made gradually grew bigger, and bigger, and bigger, until the map of the country covered the same amount of space, the same amount of square miles, as the country itself.

It's very funny and, as is typical in Borges, it also makes a philosophical point. A map can never be the thing it represents. A map of a country can't be the country itself. There is always going to be something to a country that the map omits. In the same way, a guide, a representation, of something is never going to be the thing itself. There's always going to be some omission in a map, which can only be corrected by actually engaging directly with the thing the map represents.

>>22762932
I read it as a hypothetical treatment of Burkesian idealism manifesting itself in a materialist world.

>>22766117
Yeah, that's why it filtered me honestly. It was like a maximalist short story. I had no idea what the salient ideas were (or I've at least forgotten my incling of what they were). At any rate what I didn't get was the general ontological treatise.

>>22766117
>There's always going to be some omission in a map, which can only be corrected by actually engaging directly with the thing the map represents.
based interactionist

>>22766129
Really interesting, makes me want to go back and reread it with this in mind.

Side note, but the adjective form you’re wanting is .Berkeleyan”.

My favorite borges isn't very borgesian at all.
The man of the pink corner.

>>22764172
This one is really delightful. Thanks

>>22761140
He was a great thief. Funes the memorious is literally lifted from Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi, only Twain does a page on the idea and Borges blows it up into a story.
He also stole another story from Life on the Mississippi, can't remember the exact one but it's one of the criminal stories on Universal History of Infamy.

most overrated piece of trash since Saul Bellow
just read Marques if you want magical realism

that one about two smalltime crooks killing one another after getting possessed by a bandit's knife, forgot what it was called but i found it really intense

>>22767375
Bolano is also good, with the magic toned down
Bolano also has seen some shit in his life, not like them academics

>>22766129
That's literally explicitly what it's about

>>22769179
>>22767375
>>22766129
so we may conclude that he was not so much of an author but a "popularize of spirituality"? like we have today popularizes of science like Neil deGrasse Tyson? what the French would call "cultural animator" and is closer to a can-can dancer than something that stakes his life on his writings (excuse my French)

>>22769255
>popularizer
>popularizers
sorry, stupid autocorrect did that and I didn't check

>>22762916
>>22762917

When I started reading Tlon I thought the story will somehow represent a working model of a purely idealistic reasoning (which I found to be an interesting idea), but then there's

Centuries and centuries of idealism have not failed to influence reality. In the most ancient regions of Tlon, the duplication of lost objects is not infrequent. Two persons look for a pencil; the first finds it and says nothing; the second finds a second pencil,no less real, but closer to his expectations. These secondary objects are called hronir and are, though awkward in form, somewhat longer. Until recently, the hronir were the accidental products of distraction and forgetfulness. It seems unbelievable that their methodical production dates back scarcely a hundred years,but this is what the Eleventh Volume tells us. The first efforts were unsuccessful. However, the modus operandi merits description. The director of one of the state prisons told his inmates that there were certain tombs in an ancient river bed and promised freedom to whoever might make an important discovery. During the months preceding the excavation the inmates were shown photographs of what they were to find. This first effort proved that expectation and anxiety can be inhibitory; a week's work with pick and shovel did not manage to unearth anything in the way of a hron except a rusty wheel of a period posterior to the experiment. But this was kept in secret and the process was repeated later in four schools. In three of them the failure was almost complete; in the fourth (whose director died accidentally during the first excavations) the students unearthed - or produced - a gold mask, an archaic sword, two or three clay urns and the moldy and mutilated torso of a king whose chest bore an inscription which it has not yet been possible to decipher.

Which basically says that it's not a "working model", they are just lying to themselves KNOWINGLY (see "kept in secret" above), which means the entire premise of a story is not at all what it sets to show. I lost all interest after that, and now I'm not sure if I any other stories of his are worth the read considering that this is supposedly one of his best works, but it has such plot levities that make the whole premise worthless.

>>22769361
reminds me of Chapter 8 of "If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller" where an authors novels are "translated" into Japanese except the "translators" didn't give two bits about the author and write their own made up stuff
while this is playful, not blackpilled as the case you highlighted -- I found it a cute enough parallel

bump

>>22761096
The one written from Homer's perspective.

>>22761096
the shortest one

>>22761096
Guyaquil is my favourite. So simple and forceful.
Of course he wrote so many great stories it would be tedious to list all the good ones, so instead I will say I think The Disk, Ragnarök and most of the stories from A Universal History of Infamy are pretty underrated.

>>22762099
I believe the di Giovanni translations were supervised directly by Borges. His translation of Brodie's Report I think was the one where the English and Spanish were written simultanously by the two of them, whence the 50-50 split in royalties for di Giovanni (Borges was a big anglophile so it is possible he overrated the value of English translation, but who can say?) and the new translations authorised by his wife mentioned by a poster above.

>>22764110
Probably English if its the di Giovanni ones, if not I don't really know. I guess Hurley had di Giovanni to reference if he wanted, and Borges wrote sometimes with English in mind, which may make it easier to translate, in general, to English. (For example, the title of "The Maker" was originally English and made "El Hacedor" for the Spanish publication. Hurley has a note in his translation of The Aleph about the headache he had translating hacedor to English before he realised an English word was the original.)

>>22767196
Ignoring the other poster's joke going over your head that story is probably "Morell the Dread Redeemer". He was a real guy exaggerated for the fiction, so in that case you could only realy argue Borges "stole" the idea to write about the man, rather than a story.

>>22769361
It’s not saying the hronir are fake, it’s saying that fhey kept the fact that the first excavation was a failure so the probability of finding a hron in the other excavations wouldn’t be inhibited.
IIRC these ones were fake (planted) anyway but near the end of the story genuine hronir start appearing in the world