Short stories · A way to begin
Fictions
Ficciones
Jorge Luis Borges · 1944
Synopsis
The collection brings together two books, El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan, of 1941, and Artificios, added in 1944, according to Quelibroleo. A library of hexagonal galleries contains books of four hundred and ten pages drawn from an alphabet of twenty-five signs; the mention of a country absent from an encyclopaedia opens an investigation; Pierre Menard undertakes to reproduce the Quixote; Ireneo Funes, after an accident, forgets nothing; Jaromir Hladík, sentenced to death by the Gestapo, awaits his execution.
Context
The collection appeared in 1944; most of the stories had already appeared in an earlier book or in the press, according to the Argentine government, and the author added three in 1956. The accident of 1938 inspired one of them, El Sur, according to escritores.org, which the author considered, according to Quelibroleo, perhaps his best tale. Critics count this book among those that defined twentieth-century literature, and Le Monde placed it among the hundred books of the century.
Who it is for
Short stories in Spanish, to be read one at a time; translated into French by Paul Verdevoye, Nestor Ibarra and Roger Caillois.
Prizes and reception
For Beatriz Sarlo, the first moment of radical originality in the Argentine literature of the century.
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