The Aleph

I picked up another set of short stories by Borges in the bookshop. It has some of the same stories as the book below, but also contains some interesting things; there’s something on the death of JFK, there’s quite a few reworks of Latin American history, and there’s Borges talking about Borges.

Everything is both dreamlike and matter of fact. He knows how to set up the ideas and symbols without having to explain them to the reader. One of the things which I find fascinating is how, in almost every story, the narrator – even when he doesn’t appear – is one of the most important characters in the story. It’s supposed to be about someone else, but it never is; it’s always the person talking to you. Which is so brilliant, because that’s true; a retold story is still always about the person telling it to you, a dream about strangers is still really a dream about you.

Whenever I read his work I start thinking about the writers he reminds me of, and they’re basically a list of my favourite writers – Jostein Gaarder, Michael Ondaatje, Pasternak even. He knows how to write, they know how to write, and considering how much I’ve whinged in the entries below, that is a good thing.