Review by Booklist Review
Borges, the great Argentinian writer, was born 100 years ago this year, and to mark the occasion, Viking is publishing a three-volume English-language edition of his works. Collected Fictions (1998) and Selected Poems [BKL Ap 1 99] appeared previously and is now followed by a compilation of nonfiction. The introduction notes that Borges was "sworn to the virtue of concision," and the essays, prologues, book and film reviews, lectures, and other occasional pieces gathered here demonstrate that characteristic perfectly. The entire span of Borges' writing career is represented. That he was at home in erudition is well known, but that he also was well versed in popular culture will amaze many readers. (His history of the tango brings up interesting points.) Some of the best writing in the book are the "Capsule Biographies," each a page in length and beautifully highlighting such writers as Isaac Babel and T. S. Eliot. A trenchant assessor even of politics, Borges in one essay refers to Hitler as "this atrocious offspring of Versailles." Unforgettable eloquence. --Brad Hooper
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Reviewing a book that seeks to validate the existence of ghosts through testimony by the upper crust of British society, Borges writes: "the Honorable Reginald Fortescue became a firm believer in the existence of `an alarming spectre.' As for myself, I don't know what to think: for the moment, I refuse to believe in the alarming Reginald Fortescue until an honorable spectre becomes a firm believer in his existence." In this compilation of nonfiction prose, the third of Viking's magisterial three-volume collection of Borges's complete works, a new, fuller Borges emerges, as the writer becomes a joker; the fabulist shows himself to be a rationalistic skeptic; and the alleged conservative skewers upper-class pretensions. We also find the familiar man of letters in such classic essays as "A New Refutation of Time" and "Kafka's Precursors" (which foreshadows the most interesting ideas of Harold Bloom in a mere two and a half pages). Among the gems to appear in English for the first time are slyly brilliant literary essays, such as an appreciation of Flaubert's enigmatic novel, Bouvard and Pcuchet, and an authoritative critical history of the translations of the 1001 Nights. Other newly available aspects of Borges's oeuvre are trenchant critiques of Argentinean anti-Semitism; contemporary reviews of such works as Citizen Kane, Absalom, Absalom and Finnegan's Wake (Borges finds it incomprehensible); and capsule literary biographies for a woman's magazine. While the translations capture Borges's unfailingly elegant style, the editing at times seems overly academic: certain sentences, even paragraphs, are repeated, and certain topics (particularly time and eternity) are overrepresented, a tendency that makes the book rather difficult to read straight through. Even so, this is a volume of inexhaustible delights. First serial to Grand Street. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
After Collected Fictions and Selected Poems, nonfiction pieces from a 20th-century master, making up a three-volume centenary edition. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Familiar essays and lectures by the great Argentine fantasist, plus many hitherto uncollected pieces. Borges (1899-1986) first appeared on the American scene in 1962, when his Ficciones abruptly made it plain that a major foreign writer had escaped our attention for quite a while. Since then, our publishing houses have been briskly making up for lost time, issuing a wide variety of anthologies and collections. This one, honoring the author's centenary, comprises no fewer than 150 separate nonfiction pieces: essays, lectures, book and movie reviews, magazine articles, journalistic commentary, prologues to Spanish translations of books from other languages. This is a lot of Borges, and the volume's bulk runs counter to the spirit of his creativity. A modest and always fastidious writer, he cultivated short forms with great success; consequently, to have so much of his occasional writing deposited in one clump may not have been to his taste. Still, it's good to reread familiar pieces and discover a few new ones. Curiously, the expanded Borges does not open new vistas on this writer. Instead, it serves to confirm that his imagination circled back continually and always fruitfully to topics and figures that preoccupied him: De Quincey, The Arabian Nights, Chesterton, Schopenhauer, the Kabbalah, Nietzsche, Argentine identity, Buddhism, and the idea, variously ramified, of infinity. His characteristic pose is that of slightly pedantic bookishness, as in this opening: ""I read, a few days ago, that the man who ordered the building of the almost infinite Chinese Wall was that first Emperor, Shih Huang Ti, who also decreed the burning of all books that had been written before his time."" Apart from a little new information about this or that, what we always come away with is a deepened understanding of how passionate and rich the literary life can be. Fresh translations, useful and unintrusive notes (editor Weinberger has also translated the poetry of Octavio Paz), several new pieces of writing, but not a leap into an altered vision of Borges. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
