Where to start with Borges
Ficciones moves from libraries and mirrors to the fear that a perfect idea can erase the world around it.
Infinite libraries and forking paths sound clever from a distance; you want to feel the dread that gives the puzzles their weight.
Reading Borges as a cold puzzle-maker, admiring the structure of each story and missing the dread underneath it, the fact that the labyrinths are about being a finite mind inside an infinite world that does not need you. Or, the inverse failure: reading him as decorative postmodernism and missing that every story is a careful philosophical argument about identity, time, memory, and the limits of language.
Books in order
- Ficciones — Don't try to read it linearly. Pick three stories — The Library of Babel, Funes the Memorious, Pierre Menard — and sit with each for a day. The stories are short; the implications are not.
- The Aleph — The second great collection. The title story is one of the few Borges pieces that lets a single human grief through the geometry — a man stands in a basement and sees, in a single point, every place that ever existed, and the woman he loved is in there and gone. Read it after Ficciones; the procedure is the same, the temperature is warmer, and the loss is the part Borges does not usually let into the page.
Further reading
- Labyrinths — The English-language anthology that combines stories from Ficciones, The Aleph, and the essays. Useful as a second-pass reading rather than a first — go to it once you already know which stories you want to live with.
- Invisible Cities — Calvino's polite, lyrical answer to the Borges procedure. Marco Polo describes cities to Kublai Khan that may all be Venice, or none of them. Read it after the two main collections; it makes the dread in Borges audible by writing the same shape in a warmer key, and it belongs as the cousin to Borges, not as the second Borges.
- Pale Fire — Nabokov writing a 999-line poem and a commentary that quietly devours it. Read it after Borges and the labyrinth comes back as paranoia rather than dread — same architecture, a different temperature, and a useful map of how the Borges procedure can be turned into a whole novel.
- If on a Winter's Night a Traveler — Calvino's other answer to Borges — a novel made of the openings of ten unfinished novels. Read it after Invisible Cities to see the labyrinth turned into a love letter to the reader.