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Labyrinths (New Directions Paperbook) Paperback – May 17, 2007
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The classic by Latin America's finest writer of the twentieth century―a true literary sensation―with an introduction by cyber-author William Gibson.
The groundbreaking trans-genre work of Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) has been insinuating itself into the structure, stance, and very breath of world literature for well over half a century. Multi-layered, self-referential, elusive, and allusive writing is now frequently labeled Borgesian. Umberto Eco's international bestseller, The Name of the Rose, is, on one level, an elaborate improvisation on Borges' fiction "The Library," which American readers first encountered in the original 1962 New Directions publication of Labyrinths.This new edition of Labyrinths, the classic representative selection of Borges' writing edited by Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (in translations by themselves and others), includes the text of the original edition (as augmented in 1964) as well as Irby's biographical and critical essay, a poignant tribute by André Maurois, and a chronology of the author's life. Borges enthusiast William Gibson has contributed a new introduction bringing Borges' influence and importance into the twenty-first century.
- Print length240 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherNew Directions
- Publication dateMay 17, 2007
- Dimensions5.3 x 0.8 x 8 inches
- ISBN-100811216993
- ISBN-13978-0811216999
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Editorial Reviews
Review
― BBC
"Borges is arguably the great bridge between modernism and post-modernism in world literature."
― David Foster Wallace, The New York Times
"Borges anticipated postmodernism (deconstruction and so on) and picked up credit as founding father of Latin American magical realism."
― Colin Waters, The Washington Times
About the Author
William Gibson is a professor of ecclesiastical history at Oxford Brookes University. He is also academic director of the Westminster Institute of Education.
Product details
- Publisher : New Directions; Reprint edition (May 17, 2007)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 240 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0811216993
- ISBN-13 : 978-0811216999
- Item Weight : 9.3 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.3 x 0.8 x 8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #34,834 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #5 in Caribbean & Latin American Literature
- #753 in Short Stories (Books)
- #2,798 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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About the authors
Growing up as a teenager in Ann Arbor, I developed an insatiable taste for detective fiction. Since most of the books I came across were written for adults, I skipped juvenile-type mysteries entirely and began reading the genre’s mainline authors. By the time I had passed from Slauson Junior High on to Ann Arbor High, I was giving some thought to what I wanted to do with my life. When I was given the choice to decide what kind of curriculum I wanted to pursue after high school, I unhesitatingly elected Pre-Law. I had consumed dozens of Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason novels and was entranced by the prospect of becoming myself a crackerjack courtroom lawyer.
So it was that I entered the University of Michigan in the fall of 1947 on the Pre-Law track. I had enjoyed and done well in my high school classes in English and Spanish, but now I was getting down to serious preparation for my career in law. There were, of course, some basic class requirements to satisfy, but I was willing to be patient.
In my sophomore year I ran into a history course that slowed me down quite a bit. I forget what it was called--it might have been English Constitutional History--but I discovered that I just couldn’t hack it. It all seemed so cut and dried, dusty and lacking in drama and emotion. My exam results were genuinely alarming. The professor who taught the course--by the name of Leslie--took note of this and asked to see me for a moment one day after class. I frankly and perhaps over-dramatically explained to him that I was not finding much sense of fulfillment in the course material. He listened attentively and then asked me a single question: “What is your academic program?” I said it was Pre-Law. (I remember this moment very clearly.) He thought a bit and then said: “Mr. Yates, I need to tell you that you are going to have to take a goodly number of other courses--much like this one--in order to complete the Pre-Law curriculum.” He paused to let that sink in. Then he said, “Let me offer you a bit of advice. In your circumstances, I would give serious thought to changing your major to something else.”
That was, I believe, a critical turning point in my life.
The next day I went over to Angell Hall and switched my major to Spanish. I had continued taking Spanish courses in every semester at the university and was receiving high marks. So that seemed to be the thing to do.
Thus it was that I completed the A.B. degree, with a major in Spanish, in January of 1951. And then was promptly drafted into the U.S. Army for a two-year stretch.
With my Army service behind me, I was over two years separated from the first phase of my university education. I had given over those two years to military service, but I was compensated by my country with the benefits of the G.I. Bill. So I returned to Ann Arbor in the fall of 1953--as a graduate student in Spanish. In one year I had my Masters degree and then pushed on in pursuit of the Ph. D.
I found these graduate years to be enormously rewarding. It turned out that I did indeed have a real gift for languages. (Before leaving for the Army, I had also learned French) These language courses were particularly compatible with my continuing interest in English language and literature, absorbed as I was in fiction and creative writing. With Professor Leslie’s well-timed and well-intended nudge, I had moved onto an academic career that was particularly suited to my talents and interests
I was very fortunate to be able to take graduate courses from two distinguished members of the Romance Language Department faculty--Irving A. Leonard and Enrique Anderson Imbert. Leonard was one of the country’s highly regarded specialists in Latin American Literature and also in Latin American history. Anderson Imbert, who left Michigan in 1968 for Harvard, was a consumate classroom teacher and had published the first comprehensive history of Spanish American literature. Eventually, I wrote my dissertation with Anderson Imbert on the subject of Argentine detective fiction.
I finished my course work for the Doctorate and passed the oral exams in 1957, and went to Michigan State for what was to be a one-year appointment to replace a faculty member who had to spend a sabbatical year in Europe. I stayed in East Lansing for twenty-six years. It was a wonderful ride that included many trips to Spain and France and especially to Latin American countries, whose literatures became my area of specialization. I published extensively--articles, essays, reviews for the New York Times, a memoir in The New Yorker, many Spanish-language textbooks as well as translations of novels and short stories of Spanish American writers, especially those from Argentina, where I spent nearly five years over the span of almost twenty trips to Buenos Aires. Writing was always a pleasure and a source of deep satisfaction. In 1954 I won a Hopwood Award in drama. More than once I considered that if had become a lawyer what I might well have been limited to composing was courtroom briefs. I was wisely steered away from that destiny.
After spending a total of thirty years teaching, I retired in 1983 to California’s Napa Valley, where I carry on my second career as a writer. Thank you, Professor Leslie.
An afterthought. Looking back on it, you realize that you never see Perry Mason playing golf, relaxing at a pool, hitting the casinos at Lake Tahoe, or even sipping a glass of wine. Whew, that was a close one!
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges KBE (/ˈbɔːrhɛs/; Spanish: [ˈxorxe ˈlwis ˈborxes] 24 August 1899 - 14 June 1986), was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature. His work embraces the "character of unreality in all literature". His best-known books, Ficciones (Fictions) and El Aleph (The Aleph), published in the 1940s, are compilations of short stories interconnected by common themes, including dreams, labyrinths, libraries, mirrors, fictional writers, philosophy, and religion. Literary critics have described Borges as Latin America's monumental writer.
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Grete Stern (1904-1999) (http://www.me.gov.ar/efeme/jlborges/1951-1960.html) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
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While translated, and I cannot speak to the degree of translation accuracy since I only speak English, Borges' intent for each piece comes through clearly. Or, at least, as clearly as the several-decades gap between then and now and the deep cut references will allow it to be; this is one of those authors that will inevitably take some degree of study or analysis to pick up on everything, but even though I am certainly missing some of the subtler or niche elements present, these remain remarkably powerful.
Also, to judge a book by its cover, but this is a pretty eye-catching cover. I suspect it will really show wear-and-tear with repeat use, and perhaps even more obviously than some books, but for now, it's visually striking in a way Borges deserves.
Labyrinths is a useful first book to kick off a lifetime investigation into Borges' writings. Borges is truly original as an author as much for his intent as for his achieving it. Not quite Magic Realist, not quite Existentialist nor Kafkan: no one is Borges' equal in taking established assumptions and turning them into curious, elaborate, eruditely-supported flashing crossroads that defy simplification.
Even the most unassuming essays like "The Fearful Sphere of Pascal," a subtle historical resketching, are characteristically erudite, yet sticky and complicate the subject irresistibly from your first reading onward. The prickly thorns reach out for your existing education on the subject and are designed to flesh out the glaring inconsistencies you will have read on the subject.
The Garden of Forking Paths is an example of prime Borges storytelling at work. The story itself is a ruse. The first reading-through is not the time you are affected most by Borges, but rather only AFTER you have put the book down, when the Borges' physics of Being begin to gnaw at your world of compact, necessary daily conveniences, even in 2005 when we really ought to be intimately familiar with his universe by now. I think ultimately Borges sets tiny mind bombs set to detonate at exactly the time you seek to superimpose a Newtonian universe upon one of his stories, and ultimately, later, when you seek to superimpose order upon your own human experience. The entrance seems the same, but it has clearly moved by the time you exit the story. You become part of the puzzle, and that is the bedazzling signature of Borges, and his unassailable virtue. Everything solid in the universe of daily lived experience becomes compost and peacefully unsettled, as it originally was, before we came along to fix it up like morticians just before the funeral.
This book is divided into three sections. Most of the book is short fictional stories, far ranging in subject matter, and in my opinion, quality. The second section is rather straightforward critical essays, covering such subjects as the Argentinian Writer and Tradition, Franz Kafka, Paul Valéry and other literary figures. The third section is eight short parables. An introduction is provided by William Gibson, a science fiction writer most famous for his 1984 book, Neuromancer . The connection was hard to fathom.
Borges displays an astonishing erudition of the contemporary and ancient worlds across metaphysics, religion, history, literature and the arts. The very nature of time, and the choices one makes are a recurring theme, and certainly the word "labyrinth" features in most every fictional story. The maze that is life. I found the story "Garden of the Forking Paths" recalling the best of W.G. Sebald and Jarvier Marias. Of course, the actual antecedents are reversed. How much of an influence did he have on these writers? Time never seems to be linear in his stories; the choices are multiple, so there is a quantum mechanics edge to them. And at any given point in time, positions are only so many "possibilities." In "The Secret Miracle" Borges uses an epigraph from the Koran, long before many in the West did, for a story about a Czech Jew facing the firing squad. Time does a major compression in the story, as it supposedly does, at the moment of death. And for the following story, "Three Versions of Judas," I was impressed that the one line he chose from T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom for the epigraph was: "There seemed a certainty in degradation." Other stories involve Indians dying in prison, and a woman carefully plotting the ultimate revenge for the suicide of her husband. And "The Immortals" seems to be a rehash, with variations, of Illiad . "Funes the Memorious" concerns an autistic savant lacking, as they do, an ability to reason. In the essay section, there is a reasonable clear discussion of Zeno's paradox.
As with all collections, the quality of the stories, and the reader's reception to them, are variable. With these, I found the variation extreme. Some stories were well-composed, with incisive passages. Others, I was left wondering: Maybe it's my fault? I just don't get it. And then others, I finished convinced that this was a literary version of a Jackson Pollack painting. Borges took various erudite and insightful sentences, and splashed them on the page, with no apparent connective tissue, as though he was putting the reader on: You don't see the connections; then it is your fault. In real life, he seemed to exhibit some of these "poseur" qualities.
Also, as an aside, and confirming what another reviewer pointed out: there are a large number of misspellings in this book that a basic run through spell-check would have corrected.
I'd love for a commenter to urge me to reconsider, but I think this will be the only volume of Borges that I'll read. 4-stars.
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keep up the good work