The story
Ficciones (Fictions) is a collection of short stories by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, published in Buenos Aires in 1944 by Sur. It combines The Garden of Forking Paths (1941) and a second section, Artifices. Its stories include 'The Library of Babel', about a universe made of an infinite library; 'Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius', about a world invented by a secret society; 'Funes the Memorious', about a man who forgets nothing; and 'Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote', about a writer who rewrites Cervantes word for word.
Borges, born in Buenos Aires in 1899, was a librarian who read widely in English, French, German and Spanish. His stories read like essays, reviews or detective tales, and take ideas from philosophy, mathematics and theology as the stuff of plot. 'The Garden of Forking Paths' describes time as a set of branching possibilities, an idea later associated with hypertext and the many-worlds theory of physics. International recognition came in 1961, when he shared the Formentor Prize with Samuel Beckett, and translations carried his name worldwide. He became director of Argentina's National Library in 1955, around the time he went blind. Writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco acknowledged his influence, and critics use the word 'Borgesian' for his labyrinths and mirrors.
Why it mattered
- Latin American writers of the Boom, including Garcia Marquez and Cortazar, built on Borges's blend of fantasy and intellect.
- His fiction of invented books and infinite libraries anticipated ideas about hypertext, databases and the web.
- His work helped give postmodern literature its game of fiction, reading and authorship.
- The Library of Babel became a common image in discussions of information overload.
Sources
- Jorge Luis Borges Academy of American Poets
- Borges, Jorge Luis Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
- Borges' Universe as a Library, or Universal Library or Archive Jeremy Norman's HistoryofInformation.com
Community notes
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