Labyrinths, selected stories & other writings
by Jorge Luis Borges
It took me awhile to finish this book. I was bored after a few stories, but picked up the book again and appreciated it bit by bit. Several stories stuck to mind, the simpler ones, most likely:
the spy message sent through a Chinese garden, reminding me of VN's Pale Fire (The Garden of Forking Paths), the guy with a moon-shaped scar (The Shape of the Sword), the murdering constructed and guided by mysterious messages, this one calling up the Da Vinci Code, (Death and the Compass), the ruinous city of immortals (The Immortal), the "indianized" western woman (Story of the Warrrior and the Captive), and the arabic scholar attempting to understand the words "tragedy" and "comedy" of Aristotle (Averroses' Search) ....
His writings are invariably complex, in every way - the "plots", the language and the extensive references to other writings/cultures/histories- which made it hard, if not impossible, for me to fully understand. And they speed up my transition to sleep, with the ever mind-boggling expanding of labyrinths, paths, layers, paradoxes, and infinites. So it was between dream-like wakefulness and wakefully dreams that i finished this book. So very fitting, for a book or a mind who explores the confusion between reality and fantasy. :-)
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