Ficciones
by Jorge Luis Borges
Summary
Ficciones gathers the short stories Borges wrote across the early 1940s, fourteen in its first edition and seventeen by 1956, most of them built as fake scholarship, invented book reviews, or impossible libraries rather than as conventional narrative fiction. In Tlon Uqbar Orbis Tertius, a stray encyclopedia entry leads the narrator to uncover a secret society that has spent centuries inventing an entire fictional planet, complete with its own physics and language, and the story ends with fragments of that invented world beginning to leak into and quietly replace the real one. Pierre Menard Author of the Quixote is framed as a scholarly obituary for a fictional twentieth century writer who set out not to copy but to independently rewrite, word for word, several chapters of Don Quixote, and the narrator earnestly argues that Menard's identical text means something entirely different from Cervantes's because of when and by whom it was written. The Garden of Forking Paths follows a Chinese spy working for Germany during the First World War, racing to pass a message before his own capture, built around his own ancestor's unfinished novel, a labyrinth of branching, mutually contradictory timelines that all somehow coexist within the same book. The Library of Babel imagines the universe as an infinite library containing every possible combination of letters, most of it meaningless, its librarians driven by turns to worship, despair, and suicide as they search shelves that can never be fully mapped.
Borges writes with the flat, precise tone of an actual footnoted essay, and the effect on a first reading can be genuinely disorienting, since a reader has to keep checking whether a cited book, translator, or historical detail is real or one more invention nested inside the story. The stories read quickly on the page, most only a few pages long, but reward rereading more than almost anything else on this list, since a detail buried in one story's first paragraph often turns out to be the key to how it ends.
Borges published the first eight stories as El jardin de senderos que se bifurcan in 1941 and added six more under the title Artificios in 1944, when Editorial Sur combined both groups into a single volume called Ficciones. He was, by his own account, going blind through this period from a hereditary condition that would eventually leave him unable to read or write unassisted.
Historical Context & Significance
Borges was Argentine and Ficciones was first published in Buenos Aires in Spanish, which placed it outside the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction on every ground, language, nationality, and country of publication alike; an English translation did not exist until Grove Press published one in 1962, eighteen years after the Spanish original appeared. In 1961 Borges shared the Prix International, known informally as the Formentor Prize, with the Irish writer Samuel Beckett, an award given for a body of literary work already in print rather than for any single title; the honor recognized Borges as a writer, with Ficciones the book most often cited as the reason, rather than certifying that one collection over any other.
The English translation, credited to several hands including Anthony Kerrigan and Alastair Reid, made Borges's reputation in the English speaking world essentially overnight, and the collection now sits on lists like Le Monde's hundred books of the twentieth century. Its stories have influenced writers as different as Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco, and the library, the labyrinth and the forking path have passed from these pages into the common vocabulary of fiction.