There are little doubts about it:
Fictions is the masterpiece of
argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. Of the larger
heterogeneity is the material that this author uses like raw materials, which is molded and distorted by author''s imagination, finally getting a new original and impressive form. The result is something of unique in the landscape of the contemporary literature.
More interpretation keys are possible to employ in approaching Borges stories; some stories look simple but they contain hidden puzzles. The author was also an esoterist, after being and avant-garde experimenter and also a conservative thinker. (There''s no contradiction among these configurations of his personality, even if it can look strange that these aspects were co-existing in the same person).
Let''s give now a look to the stories included in this collection.
All the stories are notable, but we would like to outline the one titled
The Babylon lottery.
Here it''s told the story of a society where every event happens because of a secret institution''s decisions, which works as a lottery, and decides about all the men destinies: the little accidents and the big ones in every man life are his decision''s consequences.
The situation is showed as extreme: every man of this society ruled by the lottery has been a king and also a slave, and has been praised and tortured in captivity.
In
Death and the compass, Borges proposes a police surveying story. Detective Erik Lönnrot (whose name is stolen from the compiler of Kalevala epics) must discover what''s behind a serie of inexplicable crimes, where are found out enygmatic messages which bring to suspect esoteric references to a jewish sect. In order to comprise the reasons of the homicides, Lönnrot points to understand the enigmas left behind by the assassin. So, the research moves to the field of the Jewish Kabala. With tenacity and acumen, Lönnrot deciphers the mistery and discovers the place where the last crime will be consumed. Here he goes, in order to stop the crime. But too late he finds out that all it has been a skillful
construction, finalized to bring the detective in that place, exactly in a trap. The final victim, the only one victim who was hunted by the assassin, is Erik Lönnrot.
The most important story of the collection, also perhaps the most famous story of the
argentinian writer, is
The garden of forking paths. This story is a metaphor that contains other metaphors. A chinese man goes to visit a man, who tells him about a famous and far away relative of the chinese man. This important ancestor was speaking about his will to get isolated in order to write a book and build a maze. But nobody had understood what maze and what book the old man was talking about; his imminent death had left a mistery that nobody had solved. The man who tell this story to his young chinese guest declares that he knows the solution: the book is the same maze that Tsui Pen was talking about.
This is a maze into another maze: we notice that the young chinese man is escaping, and he''s hunted by a british officer, and still we don''t understand why.
We see that the chinese man visits this man, doctor Albert, and they don''t know each other, but the latter knows the ancestor of the first one and his story. What''s the reason of the visit? It gets clear at last, just in the last few lines.
The chinese man kills doctor Albert, with a pistol. Everything seems inexplicable, but the reason is finally revealed: the chinese was a spy for the Germans, and had to communicate the name of the city that the Germans had to bomb. He didn''t have other way to make it, than assassinating a man who had the same name of that city. The following day, we discover in fact that the german aviation has attacked a city named Albert.
In this story the suspence lasts till the end, because till the end it looks strange and illogical. Then everything gets clear, everything earns a logics, and we understand the story, that surprises for its very intellective and brilliant construction. In this construction Borges has led us like blind travellers, before showing the end, which puts light on the walk that brought us to the end.
The same writer has asserted that literature is a guided dream. It''s absolutely true, if just we see this construction. That''s the result of a very gifted and creative narrator, as well the masterpiece of Borges artistic career. Impossible to forget.