Pedro Pascoe's Reviews > The Aleph and Other Stories

Another exceptional collection of Borges short (some extremely) fictions, read while on holiday.

The Immortal reads like a literate Lovecraft story. There's often something of Lovecraft present in a Borges story, particularly his more overt fantasy (or speculative, if the term fantasy triggers the more academically inclined) stories.
Deutsches Requiem is, among other things, an attempt to get inside the head of a fictional person representing perhaps everything Borges despises, which is a path less trodden these days in fiction, for many reasons.
The Zahir is a meditation on meaning in language, evocative and bewildering.
Ibn-Hakam al-Bokhari, Murdered in His Labyrinth perhaps a deconstructed historical murder mystery, and once again utilizes the Labyrinth as a powerful symbol (or series of symbols) that fascinates Borges and is never far from his writings.
The Aleph is an impossible object in an ordinary location.

Borges is capable of presenting the sublimest of conundrums and philosophies in the briefest of works, utilizing fantasy and contempory and historical and biographical works to illuminate language itself, and the fragility of the narrator in a way that no other writer I'm aware of is capable. Far from being shored up with his breathtaking academic background, it has almost had the opposite effect of disintegrating certainty and absolutes, and suddenly everything becomes qualified. It's unnerving and adds a haunting quality to some of his work in a way that mere plot is incapable of.

It is said that Borges rewards re-reading, which is certainly the plan.

And an acknowledgement of the work of the translator, Andrew Hurley, whose 'A note on the Translation' gives some insight on what it means for a work to be translated from another language - in this case Spanish.