A tour of Borges' most notable books

To speak of Borges is to speak of Literature, thus, with the initial capital letter. The Argentine author, famous for having published books such as Fictions y The Aleph, is considered a key figure in the world of literature, and commemorated by many for his work in fiction, essays, poetry, and translation. Among his commonplaces are dreams, labyrinths, and libraries.

Borges is not only an inspiration for veteran authors, but, fortunately, for younger ones, who see in him an invisible but constant mentor they can turn to whenever they have doubts. If you want a master class in literature, or to delve into the mind of one of the most brilliant authors of all time, We invite you to a tour of Borges' most notable books.

Short biography

Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges, or, more precisely, Jorge Luis Borges, He was born on June 14, 1899, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. From a very young age, he was influenced by two currents of thought: the military and the literary, as both his paternal and maternal families shared both professions. Furthermore, his father, a lawyer, taught him to adore literature from an early age, turning him into a lover of poetry.

About, Jorge Luis Borde stated in the 1970s that his father "revealed to him the power of poetry: "The fact that words are not only a means of communication but also magical symbols and music." His mother, for her part, learned English from her husband, which gave her the opportunity to translate several works into Spanish. And so Jorge grew up, surrounded by books, languages, cultures, and dreams.

Approach to literature

Borges is one of those strange and wonderful cases, only achieved by immortals, where the person seems, from birth, to have come to illuminate the world. This can be seen in the author's own words, who He explained, in the seventies, that the "capital fact" of his life was the library of his father, stating, at the age of 71, that he had never left that place.

The aforementioned event is no small feat, as it would come to define, and by far, the life and work of Jorge Luis Borges. The author learned to read and write at the age of four., and eighteen months later, she was already taking her first lessons with a British governess. Exactly one year later she wrote her first short story, which she called The fatal visor, inspired by pages of El Quijote.

Youthful promise and success

At the age of eleven, he not only read Oscar Wilde, but also translated from his native English one of the author's most important works: The happy PrinceDuring the years of World War I, Borges and his family moved to Geneva, Switzerland, where the author completed his high school studies at the Lycée Jean Calvin. There, Praised for his intelligence and knowledge, he read the most important journalists of Realism.

He also enjoyed and studied the Expressionist and Symbolist poets, especially Rimbaud. At the same time, he became acquainted with Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Mauthner, Carlyle, and Chesterton, whom he read in their original languages ​​only with the help of a dictionary. At the same time he wrote his first verses in German and French.

From then on, he never stopped writing. He later traveled and returned to Buenos Aires, where he made friends with several renowned writers and published his first books. From 1930 to 1950, he explained magic, fantasy, and Surrealism through several of his best-known works, including Historia universal de la infamia, Fictions y The Aleph. Sadly, the author died at the age of 86 in 1986, in Switzerland.

Borges' most notable books

Fictions (2011)

This anthology of short stories is considered, to date, one of Jorge Luis Borges's finest works. The book consists of sixteen stories, which, in themselves, are a work of art in contemporary narrative. Here, Borges explores the detective, the fantastic, the unreal and the imaginary in stories such as "Death and the Compass", "The Lottery in Babylon", "The Circular Ruins", and "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", respectively.

Furthermore, This book includes what has come to be called the author's best story: "The South." On the other hand—although leaving this detail for last doesn't make it any less important—the volume also contains a very special story, one from which emerges one of the most moving and inspiring openings of any book ever written before or since this one.

• «No one saw him disembark in the unanimous night, no one saw the bamboo canoe sinking into the sacred mud, but within a few days no one ignored that the taciturn man came from the South and that his homeland was one of the infinite villages that are upstream, on the violent flank of the mountain, where the Zend language is not contaminated by Greek and where leprosy is rare.»

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The Aleph (2011)

First published in 1945, this book brings together within its pages one of the most fundamental tropes of Borges's literature: the infinite. All authors—small, medium, and large—are obsessed with one or more transcendent elements. For Borges, besides dreams, labyrinths, his city and his library, the interest was in what expands beyond, forever. We can easily find the aforementioned at the beginning of the story The Aleph:

• "On the scorching February morning when Beatriz Viterbo died, after an imperious agony that didn't stoop for a single instant to sentimentality or fear, I noticed that the iron billboards in the Plaza Constitución had renewed some kind of advertisement for blond cigarettes; the fact pained me, because I understood that the incessant and vast universe was already moving away from her and that this change was the first in an infinite series."

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The sand book (2011)

Considering that it was first published in 1979, on the eve of his death, we could say that this is the essential Borges book, one that anyone who wishes to understand the Argentine writer's thought and imagination should read. Based on thirteen masterful pieces, The author exposes these themes that became part of his concerns and dreams.

In this volume, the ego and the superego take center stage, a seemingly ephemeral infatuation, an enterprise so vast that its structure and content are capable of being confused with the cosmos and other manifestations of consciousness, creativity, reflections, and Borges's ultimate conclusions. It is the reliable example of his soul, his love of letters and his way of perceiving the world.

• "I remember her fragile air, which is an attribute of certain very tall people, as if their height gave them vertigo and made them arch."

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The maker (2012)

To conclude this short list, we've selected one of the author's most personal volumes, which simultaneously encompasses all or most of Borges's literary concerns. Among the pages of this material, as diverse in themes and genres as the author's own library, you can find poems, essays, stories and reflections, inspired by some universal facts and others deeply local.

• "God created nights filled with dreams and the shapes of mirrors so that man feels himself a reflection and vanity."

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