/lit/ - Literature

Come on, lit.
Please answer.

>>5226365
I read through the Penguin Deluxe Edition Borges' Collected Fictions recently, finished it this week in fact.
Tlön definitely stood out to me, Ficciones as a whole is probably his best work as well. Just wait until you get to The Library of Babel, it's just as mindboggling as Tlön.
The Aleph is decent, but a lot of the religious stuff didn't interest me too much and may have gone a little over my head.
A Universal History of Iniquity is little more than an exercise I feel, and has little to do with the likes of Tlön.
The Maker is a short work I liked very much, it's also called Dreamtigers in some editions, definitely give that a look. In Praise of Darkness is even shorter and is definitely worth a read through, shouldn't take you more than half an hour.
Brodie's Report and The Book of Sand are very similar to Ficciones and The Aleph (these 4 are his longest works) and offer little in the way of truly "new" material. If you're yearning for more Borges fine, but otherwise you're better off sticking with Ficciones and The Aleph.
And finally, Shakespeare's Memory. This us approximately the same length as The Maker (short), but the themes are a little different as you see a Borges that is very close to his own death, and deals mainly with memory. Gave me a headache, but only because I found the ideas in it a little staggering, it is worth reading imo.

>tl;dr read The Maker, In Praise of Darkness, and Shakespeare's Memory and maybe The Aleph
Sorry for rambling

The Circular Ruins is definitely a personal favorite, mainly for its wonderful imagery.

>>5228844
>>5228927

Thanks for the input.

Have you ever read "On Exactitude in Science"by Borges? It's just a paragraph long and it's really worth it.


I've first heard about Borges here on lit, but just got myself to read him yesterday when I was lurking around this board and tere was a thread about Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulatium and it's relations to that "On Exactitude of Sicence".

"Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" reminded me of Lovecraft's universe

>>5228647
>Come on, lit.
>Please answer.
Please kill yourself.

I recently started with Borges and I read few of his stories. The one I liked the most was The Garden of Forking Paths, it's a clever idea and it actually has plot.

I think he is a good writer but that's it. He has no stories to tell and has no real characters. He knew this very well and that's why he never wrote a novel. I admire him for this but still find him boring.

>>5229005
He touches on this fact in the Prologue of "Fictions"

Borges plagiarizes.
Borges is a hack.
Borges steals from other authors.
Borges is a charlatan.

>>5229087
who did he steal from?

It was horrifying
I felt ill afterwards

One of my favourite short stories ever.

I like Fictions a lot, although I find that "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim" and "An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain" are weak compared to the others.

>>5229082
What does he say there? I have not read it.

>>5226365
>general
Shit
>Borges
Shit

>>5229087
This. Bourges. Not. Even. Once.

> itt: jews hating on muslim borges

>>5226365
I love it because it blew my mind. I hate it because it shattered my confidence in my own ideas and writings. I love it all the more for doing this, for teaching me humility.

>>5228938
/lit/ got me to pick up Borges, and /lit/ is more or less correct in saying "it's like Lovecraft but good."

>>5229087
Anon has no evidence?
Anon is a contrarian?

>>5229689
its just a recent /lit/ meme from all the backlash about how barthes, baudrillard and derrida made their careers stretching out two-page long short stories of borges

so now this one guy is butthurt and trying to claim borges as a plagiarizer

>>5229704
Okay.

I'm not sure which is worse, shitposting randomly or having an actual shitposting agenda like that.

>>5229733
welcome to /lit/

it's been a while since i've read borges, but reading his stories made me a better reader in general

a much better reader

>>5229689
>>5229704
>>5229733
>>5229738
Check the archive, faggots.
You all don't even understand Borges, faggots.

>>5229738
>reading his stories made me a better reader in general
No he didn't, you illiterate faggot.

>>5229892
>>5229896
muh edges

Just read The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim...

I'm still digesting it.

>>5229738
Definitely. Totally agree. One of the few lucid things someone here has ever said, surprisingly rare considering the even fewer lucid things said about Borges here.

I like the story about the detective investigating the murders with occult undertones. Death and the Compass.

>>5229676

I don't understand how Borges and Lovecraft are related. I read Borges' short story where he imitated Lovecraft, but most of his stuff does not seem to be thematically similar to Lovecraft's to me.

The thing with Borges is, he built all of his literature over other literature. We're talking a blind man who practically lived in a library, who read Don't Quixote in English as a kid and was later on disappointed by the original, who translated Wilde when he was nine. There are not many emotions in his work, because he wasn't a man of emotions or experiences, he was, in his words, an homme de lettres, who lived and died surrounded by too many books and too few people.
His work is cerebral, complex, hugely erudite, but a lot or times it lacks the emotion that makes great literature universal and immortal.
The pleasure one derives from his work is more intellectual than the average lit, like solving a brain teaser, or working on complex chess puzzles. The House of Asterion dares you to guess the identity of the speaker before the final two sentences, and Emma Zunz makes you attend to a series of incomprehensible events that make themselves clear just at the end, but that you could guess from some clues. Those are goddamn riddles, and some of the simplest ones in his work. I could go on for an hour about the cross-references in Ficciones and the way they all come together in a huge complex labyrinth.

He is a weak, deeply flawed writer, but one of the greatest at that.

>>5231628
>yfw this person was serious when writing this

>>5230716
It's just a joke about writing short stories where mundane daily life is invaded by something completely mind-boggling.

>>5231628
he only became blind at 55

>>5229704
HAHA! I'm kinda a fan of those authors and they didn't care much for this shit, they dismissed the whole idea of origin so who gives a fuck. That guy apparently didn't read them "close" enough like my homie Derrida does. Well, he must have read them from a mile away.

>>5231628
>The pleasure one derives from his work is more intellectual than the average lit, like solving a brain teaser, or working on complex chess puzzles.

not sure i agree. sure his delivery can be cold, but the implications of some of his work can definitely draw emotion.

>>5231628
Yeah, eww, what a creepy nerd, reading up on all those philosophical, theological and mathematical concepts. OMG! Where's the romance?!

>>5226365
Borges is one of my favorite authors, the most interesting thing he does IMO is use various forms of shorthand to convey incredibly complex ideas. For example, a lot of his stories take the form of literary criticism of nonexistent stories; this allows Borges to compress the narrative of a purportedly huge novel (like in The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim) into a short essay, as well as allowing him to leave deliberate ambiguities about the story and its philosophical meditations in the text.

>>5231836
I really admire that.

>>5231628
I think in a lot of his stories that's true, but I think he's capable of emotion. The Secret Miracle and the Garden of Forking Paths are both, in my opinion, very emotional stories.

>>5229738
>>5230680
Can you expand on that? I'm thinking of his relation to Derrida here.

I really like his use of Latin in writing. How can someone do that without passing as a snob is beyond me.

>>5231799
He /was/ kind of a creepy nerd. Just read on his relationship with Maria Kodama. But that doesn't mean he isn't a great writer, and one of my favorite short-story writers and essayists.

>>5231855
I think if you read emotion in Borges, you're missing the point. Once I read a Goodreads review that said that The library of Babel was about searching for meaning in life, as if it wasn't about misanthropy and mathematics. It's just not what Borges wrote for. In Emma Zunz a girl loses her father and goes through a traumatic sexual experience, and yet, it is about literature and the relation between reader and writer, just like Death and the pendulum, which is a detective story. I'm pretty sure that if Borges could've written all of his stories without a single character, he would have (he succeeded partially, in those he wrote in essay form). Borges was cold, calculating, abhorrent of humanity, but he wasn't great in spite of it, but partly because of it.

I'm not the OP, but thanks to (almost) everyone who posted in this thread, what a bitter-sweet thread.

Specially for:

>>5231836
>>5231628
>>5232025