Though, principally, the reason he decided to steal the book from the parcel (he was hoping for a new video game or Blu-ray to sell on) was because Jorge was very close to his own name. Still, “The Garden of Forking Paths” was straightforward enough that my brain cells didn’t hurt too much trying to wrap themselves around the story. He travels out of the city on a train, feeling as though he is traveling into the past, and has an unexpected confrontation as he nears his final destination. Quain was in the habit of arguing that readers were an already extinct species” --The Work of Herbert Quain. Three Versions of Judas” ― In yet another mock literary review, Borges reviews three imaginary works by Nils Runeberg about Judas, the betrayer of Christ.

Whoever is dreaming me needs to drink less alcohol or shoot less heroin because I could really use a more coherent path forward.

The stories in Ficciones are divided into two parts: The first part, The Garden of Forking Paths ( El Jardín de senderos que se bifurcan) was originally published in 1941.

For them, the world is not a concurrence of objects in space, but a heterogeneous series of independent acts. In fact, he created three genres- the essay, the poem and the short story (as mentioned by Octavio Paz) but the division is arbitrary: his essays read like stories, his stories are poems and his poems are essays. The blind Borges became Homer, a lecturer who travelled the world, sharing brilliant suppositions by pairing bits of knowledge from here and there that were only made possible by his prodigious reading. Some time after encountering an artifact that came from Tlön, an element composed of matter not found on Earth, the narrator declares that Tlön — its principles, languages, and history — have begun to consume our planet.Borges’s own diminishing eye sight perhaps helped his imagination to grow leaps and bound than to cause harm to him, which resulted such an extraordinary achievement in world literature. Es una sucesión de relatos que, aunque breves, contienen tanta belleza y tantos ocultos significados que uno tiene la sensación de haber leído un centenar de páginas y de necesitar, urgente e irremediablemente, volver a ellas hasta que todos los caminos que se bifurcan desnuden su verdad. Three Versions of Judas is in effect a religious work arguing that Judas’ betrayal of Christ was superfluous. As we say one overdoes something until one perfects it, Borges has developed a much serene, subtler prose from the baroque style employing strained and startling metaphors from his early days, and mind you that quieter style has beauty of undertones which may take you to so many avenues in so little words. De los 16 cuentos que encontramos en Ficciones —siendo honesto no sé si la definición de cuento sea la más próxima a lo que hallamos en este libro: más pareciera ser una serie de ideas o pensamientos que nos llevan o aproximan hacia algo, donde uno puede encontrarse con elementos de carácter científico, filosófico, sociológico, cultural, humanístico, entre otros.

For anyone likewise less learned than Borges I can attest that taking this approach still provides for an engaging read and is not necessarily the easy way out. This is a collection of 17 of his "best" short stories, held together merely by the thread that they are like nothing else you've ever read or even thought about. The Irishman tells a story of his involvement in the battle for Irish independence, and his dealings with a disagreeable, cowardly man named John Vincent Moon. Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe that in the future he will be” --Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote. The stories of the collection co-exist in the same labyrinth wherein the reader may move one to another through strings of probabilities, intertextuality (for some of the stories refer to other and narrator in one stories talks about creation of another one).A couple of stories into it, I found it too cerebral and purposeful, as if echoing Luis Buñ The prose style of Borges may come across as intellectual with its allusion to literature (which may be both existent or non- existent), philosophy, religion, theology, myth, culture, history of Latin America He deftly used parallelism, chiasmus, subtle repetitions-with-variations to shock the reader in a pleasant way. Su pluma, endiabladamente compleja e intelectualmente estimulante, siempre nos garantiza un enorme disfrute estético pero también un desafiante ejercicio de inteligencia. There is sadness there too, at the thought of those who would treat such mazes as homes, at the machinations of fate. Me gustaría empezar mi reseña diciendo que puedo ver la pulcritud, la maestría y la belleza con la que estos cuentos fueron escritos.