I very much enjoyed this. It has taken me a relatively long time… in fact I read and finished the Anatomy of Melancholy along side this slim little book.. the Anatomy of Melancholy has over a thousand pages but was much easier to understand.

In Fictions, each story needs a lot of reading and rereading and time to ferment in the brain. In fact I don’t consider I am anywhere near the end of the process but I am adding the book now to Good Reads because having read all the stories a few times I feel I need to put it aside and come back to it in a few months.


Borges makes my mind bend in a way it doesn’t naturally go. I think that is the point. He writes sentences that twist and turn, you get no gentle entrance into each story and no real help, maybe just hidden clues. And there is always far more than what leaps out first.. I think Borges was a Polymath, with a huge imagination.

The stories (is that what you call them? Or are they dreams) are short. Just a few pages. I read them once, understand nothing, read them again, understand even less. I throw the book across the room but later I refuse to admit defeat and pick it up again.

And I end up loving it.

My favourites …if I was forced to pick five are….The Circular Ruins (weird dreams), The Lottery of Babylon (a lottery ticket you don’t really want to come up), The Secret Miracle (what if you really prayed for a bit more time, and got it), The Shape of the Sword (when you thought you knew someone but….) and of course eternity and the infinite Library of Babel.

I am still working on a few.. e.g. Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote