Several weeks after I finished the book, this review won't be as detailed and nuanced as I'd like. For what it's worth, I did enjoy it. I usually rate anthologies 4 stars to cover the mostly good and the some bad; some of Borges's stories felt neither good nor bad, but intellectually inaccessible to me. I've never read an author who could write cogently about so many cultures and subjects, so widely fluent in history and philosophy. I'm sure that I'll understand some of these stories better if I return to them later, after further study beyond Borges's pages: the occasional inaccessibility seems to be to his credit. This book also represented my first foray into Borges's corpus and Argentine literature at large; I have much to learn yet.

In my opinion, Borges at his best is Borges on Argentina (and neighboring Uruguay). From "Man on Pink Corner" and "Funes, His Memory" to creative takes on Martín Fierro and gaucho literature, it was nothing less than a joy to discover the region and its history so intimately, through the eyes of one of its most learned men. While his stories about Europe, Asia, and the Middle East were by no means less skillfully written, they inevitably felt rather less authentic.

On that last point, I found myself considering more than ever whether some of these stories were Borges's to write. Specifically, his work features a plethora of Jewish characters--along with a subtle yet pervasive antisemitism. One story in particular, "Deutsches Requiem," I found irredeemably egregious:

an investigation into a Nazi's soul, a subdirector of the Tarnowitz concentration camp, portraying him more like an anti-hero than anything else. Importantly, I am not Jewish, and all this should be taken with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, with Nazism on the rise globally, I can't help but think that stories like this cede too much ground. Sure, Borges doesn't suggest that this Nazi is actually a good man--if anything, he's more symbolic of the rule of violence endemic to the 20th century and beyond. But simply by drafting this character study at all, by making a symbol and an intellectual quandry of a fictional man who belonged to a very nonfictional party, who tortured and murdered very nonfictional people, innocent people--in my opinion, Borges goes too far here. Particularly since he himself was not Jewish, and since his Jewish characters by no means subvert antisemitic tropes and the same rhetoric that helped to fuel the Holocaust.

In short, I think a discussion about who gets to write whose stories is very relevant.

Overall, however, I liked the collection and liked it more once I got used to his style. Towards the end of the book (corresponding to the end of his life) I thought the stories were almost too philosophical: almost every paragraph contained some "deep thoughts" and felt like Borges, now an elderly man, was just telling us what he had learned and what the world is like. This isn't a flaw per se, but generally I preferred his earlier writing--a little more intimate and a little less moralizing. Consequently I'm not sure about the last couple books, but the first few I'd love to return to eventually, whenever I have time and whenever I have the intellectual capacity.