Borges' Reputation

Your comment helps me get hold of Borges’ achievement, Randy, and to want to read more, including that “Secret Miracle” story that I don’t remember reading.
 
I have just finished a reading, started a few years ago, of The Aleph and Other Stories, 1933-1969. I’m struck by how many of the stories are of a type nobody seems to be mentioning here, namely stories of knife-fights in tough neighborhoods. I don’t much care for these, and it seems nobody else here does. But Borges seems to have liked writing, and thinking about having written, these stories about violent men with whores in the background.

So I think that for a lot of us there’s the Borges that matters, meaning much less than his total story output. But “The Aleph” alone would make JLB author of a fantasy masterpiece.
 
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Star-child said:
Not when you're at the bookstore looking for something you want to read. I think Borges would fail to satisfy someone looking for what they consider a "fantasy" book.
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Someone, yes. Everyone who goes into a bookstore looking for something to read in the way of fantasy, no. Not everyone holds a narrow definition of fantasy. The same someone who is not satisfied by Borges because they were looking for, say, something along the lines of epic fantasy, would probably be equally disappointed by Lud-in-the-Mist or The Last Unicorn. They wouldn't like The King of Elfland's Daughter or any number of classic works of fantasy, either.
 
Teresa Edgerton said:
Someone, yes. Everyone who goes into a bookstore looking for something to read in the way of fantasy, no. Not everyone holds a narrow definition of fantasy. The same someone who is not satisfied by Borges because they were looking for, say, something along the lines of epic fantasy, would probably be equally disappointed by Lud-in-the-Mist or The Last Unicorn. They wouldn't like The King of Elfland's Daughter or any number of classic works of fantasy, either.
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Yup. Or they may enjoy Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Hard to tell.
 
Star-child said:
Have you read The Secret Miracle? I'm curious how you view that story in this light.

I found that story rather affecting for its themes of life's work and the backdrop of fascism, but it is also primarily an intellectual curiosity in the sense you mean.
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I didn’t have access to “The Secret Miracle” (unless the text is available online), but I did find a summary of it. I certainly want to read the whole story. From the summary it sounds kind of like Bierce’s “Owl Creek Bridge,” but where the Bierce is sardonic, the Borges sounds more affirmative.
 
Ive recommend him to quite a bit.
 
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Star-child said:
I had always understood Borges as being, if anything, magic realism. Not fantasy. I don't say that to reject Borges' as a type of fantasy, but just to point out that fantasy fans are unlikely to see Borges' as an example of the genre.
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Borges never ever ever used the phrase "magical realism" to describe himself or another writer. However, he did edit lots of the anthologies of "fantasy" fiction, his word, and wrote lots of reviews about "fantasy" books, and even wrote dozens of prologues to an Italian collection of "fantasy" books called "Library of Babel". But surely you know more about the man than the man himself.
 
Extollager said:
Borgo Press (I think it was) published a small paperback called Hesse, Reich, Borges with essays on each by Colin Wilson. This was about 45 years ago.
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Thanks. Curiously I just learned that Wilson wrote a novel with a title from a Borges story, The God of the Labyrinth.
 
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Extollager J. L. Borges' 33-volume short story anthology--how many of these have you read? Literary Fiction 8

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