This Saturday would have been the 125th birthday of Jorge Luis Borges, the blind Argentinian librarian, and this year also marks the 80th anniversary of his ground-breaking short story collection, Fictions.
Borges was born in Buenos Aires. Much of his childhood was spent with his family in Europe, however, where he read English literature, German philosophy and Spanish ultraist poetry. Returning to Argentina, he contributed poems and essays to avant-garde journals and began publishing stories in the 1930s, while also working as a municipal librarian.
In 1946, when the authoritarian Juan Perón became president, the subversive Borges was ‘promoted’ to poultry inspector at the municipal wholesale market, a deliberate snub. Following Perón’s fall in 1955, however, Borges was appointed director of the Argentine National Library, a post he held for twenty years, despite the ‘splendid irony’ that he went blind at the same time, surrounded by books he would never read with his own eyes.
The collection Ficciones was an overnight success for Borges in 1944, announcing a prose style that blurred fiction and reality, blending philosophy with humour and playing ‘games with infinity’. These very short fictions are presented as detective stories, biographies or fragments of literary criticism, but in a few pages they manage to expand the mind, explode reality and embrace the cosmos. ‘I love his work,’ said Italo Calvino, ‘because every one of his pieces contains a model of the universe or an attribute of the universe.’
Some of the most famous stories in this collection are ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’, in which Borges invented the concept of parallel universes, ‘The Library of Babel’, in which he imagines the universe as an infinitely cyclical library of hexagonal rooms, and ‘Funes the Memorious’, about a country boy who develops an overwhelmingly comprehensive memory after a horse-riding accident.
Borges gained international recognition after winning the Prix Formentor jointly with Samuel Beckett in 1961. He won the Jerusalem Prize in 1971 and the Cervantes Prize in 1980, but never the Nobel Prize. ‘Not granting me the Nobel Prize has become a Scandinavian tradition,’ he quipped; ‘since I was born they have not been granting it to me.’ The Economist has since said that Borges was ‘probably the greatest twentieth-century author never to win the Nobel Prize.’
Borges has inspired many subsequent writers, such as Umberto Eco (The Name of the Rose), Paul Auster (The New York Trilogy) and Salman Rushdie (Midnight’s Children) as well as filmmakers like Christopher Nolan (Inception) and Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth).
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