★★★★☆ Fictions, not stories

Ficciones

Jorge Luis Borges

The title of Jorge Luis Borges's Ficciones is both precise and accurate. It is indeed a book of fictions. What it is not, I was surprised to find, is a book of stories. Ficciones combines two short prose books by Borges: El jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Forking Paths), consisting of a prolog followed by seven works, and Artificios (Artifices), consisting of a prolog and nine works. Borges is a creative genius and the imagination he shows in these pages is dazzling. But, with a few exceptions, they are not actually stories. They are scholarly expositions of splendidly creative ideas. For instance, the first work, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," is a description of some very strange fictional places.

When I say "story," I mean something like what literary scholars mean by the word, a work of fiction with a plot and characters. By a plot I mean, roughly, a tale in which a conflict arises, challenges the characters, and is resolved, for some value of "resolved." With a few exceptions, the characters of Ficciones are indistinct (or at least, they seemed so to me). And most of these Ficciones lacked a plot, or had only the tiniest thread of one.

There were exceptions. The main one is the story "La muerte y la brújula" ("Death and the Compass"). I say "story", because this actually is a story -- it's a murder mystery. It is not, honestly, a really great story. It's not bad, but you have read better.

Ficciones, it strikes me, is not a book of stories, but a book of ideas for stories. Indeed, I know that it has been so used. I have more than once read authors crediting Borges with the inspiration for a story. In the end, although Ficciones is imaginative and inspiring, I was disappointed. It proves that imagination and ideas do not, by themselves, great stories make.

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