…thy rope of sands…
George Herbert (1593-1623)
The line consists of an infinite number of points; the plane, of an infinite number of lines; the volume, of an infinite number of planes; the hypervolume, of an infinite number of volumes… No—this, more geometrico, is decidedly not the best way to begin my tale. To say that the story is true is by now a convention of every fantastic tale; mine, nevertheless, is true.
He called it “Utopia,” a Greek word
which means “there is no such place.”
Quevedo
No two mountain peaks are alike, but anywhere on earth the plains are one and the same. I was riding down a road across the plains. I asked myself without much curiosity whether I was in Oklahoma or Texas or the region that literary men call “the pampas.” There was not a fence to left or right. As on other occasions, I slowly murmured these lines, more or less from Emilio Oribe:
Riding through the ongoing, ongoing and interminable
Terrifying plains, near the frontier of Brazil…
Labyrinths and esoteric riddles
In many of Borges’ works, myriad false leads and tantalising hints are interwoven, crafting a sort of detective story that is further complicated by the network of labyrinths and esoteric riddles that criss-cross the narrative. In some stories deception is so key to the narrative that Borges tricks the reader into believing in an inverted reality; for example, in ‘La Forma de la Espada’, the anonymous saviour metamorphoses into Vincent Moon, as multiple layers of ambiguity serve to conceal this change. More noticeably, however, in ‘La muerte y la brújula’, it is the protagonist’s fixation with an ‘interesting’ explanation of a series of murders that obscures the true events of story, and it is this obsession that leads to his inevitable entrapment in a labyrinth constructed by his nemesis. The relationship of these details to the wider detective genre is therefore doubly tricky. Does Borges conform to the conventions of the genre or does he subvert them utterly? A character in Michael Butor’s novel L’emploi du tempsencapsulates a key notion when he remarks that ‘all detective fiction is based on two murders of which the first, commited by the murderer, is merely the occasion for the second, in which he is the victim of the pure and unpunishable murderer, the detective’[1]. In ‘La Muerte y La Brújula’ we see a fascinating inversion of this trope, as it is Lönnrot who becomes the victim of the criminal Scharlach, and is duped into following an utterly false conception of the crimes. This key subversion rather suggests that Borges applies the trusted tools of the genre, in order to subvert its primary concerns.
For Manaie Molina Vedia
Of the many problems on which Lonnrot’s reckless perspicacity was exercised, none was so strange—so rigorously strange, one might say—as the periodic series of bloody deeds that culminated at the Villa Triste-le-Roy, amid the perpetual fragrance of the eucalyptus. It is true that Erik Lönnrot did not succeed in preventing the last crime, but he did, indisputably, foresee it. Nor did he divine the identity of Yarmolinsky’s unlucky murderer, but he did perceive the evil series’ secret shape and the part played in it by Red Scharlach, whose second sobriquet is Scharlach the Dandy. That criminal (like so many others) had sworn upon his honor to kill Lönnrot, but Lönnrot never allowed himself to be intimidated. He thought of himself as a reasoning machine, an Auguste Dupin, but there was something of the adventurer in him, even something of the gambler.
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| Jorge Luis Borges |
By this art you may contemplate
the variation of the 23 letters….
Anatomy of Melancholy,
Pt. 2, Sec. II, Mem. IV
The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries. In the center of each gallery is a ventilation shaft, bounded by a low railing. From any hexagon one can see the floors above and below—one after another, endlessly. The arrangement of the galleries is always the same: Twenty bookshelves, five to each side, line four of the hexagon’s six sides; the height of the bookshelves, floor to ceiling, is hardly greater than the height of a normal librarian. One of the hexagon’s free sides opens onto a narrow sort of vestibule, which in turn opens onto another gallery, identical to the first—identical in fact to all. To the left and right of the vestibule are two tiny compartments. One is for sleeping, upright; the other, for satisfying one’s physical necessities. Through this space, too, there passes a spiral staircase, which winds upward and downward into the remotest distance. In the vestibule there is a mirror, which faithfully duplicates appearances. Men often infer from this mirror that the Library is not infinite—if it were, what need would there be for that illusory replication? I prefer to dream that burnished surfaces are a figuration and promise of the infinite…. Light is provided by certain spherical fruits that bear the name “bulbs.” There are two of these bulbs in each hexagon, set crosswise. The light they give is insufficient, and unceasing.
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I recall him (though I have no right to speak that sacred verb—only one man on earth did, and that man is dead) holding a dark passionflower in his hand, seeing it as it had never been seen, even had it been stared at from the first light of dawn till the last light of evening for an entire lifetime. I recall him—his taciturn face, its Indian features, its extraordinary remoteness —behind the cigarette. I recall (I think) the slender, leather-braider’s fingers. I recall near those hands a mate cup, with the coat of arms of the Banda Oriental.* I recall, in the window of his house, a yellow straw blind with some vague painted lake scene. I clearly recall his voice—the slow, resentful, nasal voice of the toughs of those days, without the Italian sibilants one hears today. I saw him no more than three times, the last time in 1887…. I applaud the idea that all of us who had dealings with the man should write something about him; my testimony will perhaps be the briefest (and certainly the slightest) account in the volume that you are to publish, but it can hardly be the least impartial. Unfortunately I am Argentine, and so congenitally unable to produce the dithyramb that is the obligatory genre in Uruguay, especially when the subject is an Uruguayan. Highbrow, dandy, city slicker — Funes did not utter those insulting words, but I know with reasonable certainty that to him I represented those misfortunes. Pedro Leandro Ipuche* has written that Funes was a precursor of the race of supermen—”a maverick and vernacular Zarathustra”—and I will not argue the point, but one must not forget that he was also a street tough from Fray Bentos, with certain incorrigible limitations.
Borges / El inmortal (De otros mundos)
Solomon saith: There is no new thing upon the earth. So that as Plato had an imagination, that all knowledge was but remembrance; so Solomon giveth his sentence, that all novelty is but oblivion.
Francis Bacon: Essays, LVIII
In London, in early June of the year 1929, the rare book dealer Joseph Cartaphilus, of Smyrna, offered the princess de Lucinge the six quarto minor volumes (1715-1720) of Pope’s Iliad. The princess purchased them; when she took possession of them, she exchanged a few words with the dealer. He was, she says, an emaciated, grimy man with gray eyes and gray beard and singularly vague features. He expressed himself with untutored and uncorrected fluency in several languages; within scant minutes he shifted from French to English and from English to an enigmatic cross between the Spanish of Salonika and the Portuguese of Macao. In October, the princess heard from a passenger on the Zeus that Cartaphilus had died at sea while returning to Smyrna, and that he had been buried on the island of Ios.
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O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a King of infinite space. Hamlet, II:2
But they will teach us that Eternity is the Standing still of the Present Time, a Nuncstans (as the Schools call it); which neither they, nor any else understand, no more than they would a Hicstans for an Infinite greatnesse of Place. Leviathan, IV:46
That same sweltering morning that Beatriz Viterbo died, after an imperious confrontation with her illness in which she had never for an instant stooped to either sentimentality or fear, I noticed that a new advertisement for some cigarettes or other (blondes, I believe they were) had been posted on the iron billboards of the Plaza Constitución; the fact deeply grieved me, for I realized that the vast unceasing universe was already growing away from her, and that this change was but the first in an infinite series. The universe may change, but I shall not, thought I with melancholy vanity. I knew that more than once my futile devotion had exasperated her; now that she was dead, I could consecrate myself to her memory—without hope, but also without humiliation. I reflected that April 30 was her birthday; stopping by her house on Calle Garay that day to pay my respects to her father and her first cousin Carlos Argentino Daneri was an irreproachable, perhaps essential act of courtesy. Once again I would wait in the half-light of the little parlor crowded with furniture and draperies and bric-a-brac, once again I would study the details of the many photographs and portraits of her:Beatriz Viterbo, in profile, in color; Beatriz in a mask at the Carnival of 1921; Beatriz’ first communion; Beatriz on the day of her wedding to Roberto Alessandri; Beatriz shortly after the divorce, lunching at the Jockey Club; Beatriz in Quilines* with Delia San Marco Porcel and Carlos Argentino; Beatriz with the Pekinese that had been a gift from Villegas Haedo; Beatriz in full-front and in three-quarters view, smiling, her hand on her chin…. I would not be obliged, as I had been on occasions before, to justify my presence with modest offerings of books—books whose pages I learned at last to cut, so as not to find, months later, that they were still intact.
Borges / Emma Zunz (De otros mundos)
Borges / Emma Zunz (Rimbaud)
On January 14, 1922, when Emma Zunz returned home from the Tarbuch & Loewenthal weaving mill, she found a letter at the far end of the entryway to her building; it had been sent from Brazil, and it informed her that her father had died. She was misled at first by the stamp and the envelope; then the unknown handwriting made her heart flutter. Nine or ten smudgy lines covered almost the entire piece of paper; Emma read that Sr. Maier had accidentally ingested an overdose of veronal and died on the third inst. in the hospital at Bagé.*The letter was signed by a resident of the rooming house in which her father had lived, one Fein or Fain, in Rio Grande; he could not have known that he was writing to the dead man’s daughter.
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| Illustration by Phillip Dvorak |
Borges / La intrusa (De otros mundos)
2 Reyes 1:26
They say (though it seems unlikely) that Eduardo, the younger of the Nelson brothers, told the story in eighteen-ninety-something at the wake for Cristian, the elder, who had died of natural causes in the district of Morón. What is unquestionably true is that as the cups of mate went their rounds in the course of that long night when there was nothing else to do, somebody heard it from someone and later repeated it to Santiago Dabove, from whom I first heard it. I was told the story again, years later, in Turdera, where it had actually occurred. This second, somewhat less succinct version corroborated the essential details of Santiago’s, with the small divergences and variations one always expects. I commit it to writing now because I believe it affords us (though I may of course be mistaken) a brief and tragic window on the sort of men that once fought their knife fights and lived their harsh lives in the tough neighborhoods on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. I will tell the story conscientiously, though I can foresee myself yielding to the literary temptation to heighten or insert the occasional small detail.
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| Minotauro, 1958 Pablo Picasso |
And the queen gave birth to a child who was called Asterion.
Apollodorus: Bibliotheca, III, I
I know they accuse me of arrogance, and perhaps of misanthropy, and perhaps of madness. Such accusations (for which I shall extract punishment in due time) are derisory. It is true that I never leave my house, but it is also true that its doors (whose number is infinite) [1] are open day and night to men and to animals as well. Anyone may enter. He will find here no female pomp nor gallant court formality, but he will find quiet and solitude. And he will also find a house like no other on the face of the earth. (There are those who declare there is a similar one in Egypt, but they lie.) Even my detractors admit there is not one single piece of furniture in the house. Another ridiculous falsehood has it that I, Asterion, am a prisoner. Shall I repeat that there are no locked doors, shall I add that there are no locks? Besides, one afternoon I did step into the street; if I returned before night, I did so because of the fear that the faces of the common people inspired in me, faces as discolored and flat as the palm of one’s hand. The sun had already set, but the helpless crying of a child and the rude supplications of the faithful told me I had been recognized. The people prayed, fled, prostrated themselves; some climbed onto the stylobate of the temple of the Axes, others gathered stones. One of them, I believe, hid himself beneath the sea. Not for nothing was my mother a queen; I cannot be confused with the populace, though my modesty might so desire.
This moral thriller offers a perceptive account of specifically Indian anxieties
The title characters of Megha Majumdar’s second novel are a young man referred to only by a nickname, Boomba, and a woman known as Ma. Each regards themselves as a guardian, and the other as a thief. The reader is not asked to take sides, but instead to observe how the world makes thieves of guardians, and vice versa.
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One of the biggest literary hits of 2025 seemingly came out of nowhere. The Correspondent, the debut book of Virginia Evans, an unpublished author who had previously written seven unsold novels, was published in April, but it wasn’t until December that it made it to the top of the New York Times bestseller list for hardcover fiction. (After 13 weeks on the list, it now sits at No. 3.) The novel’s slowly building dominance—“one of the publishing industry’s heartwarming champions of 2025,” the New York Times called it—is the stuff of fairy tales, dangerously encouraging for every other unpublished author out there.
A companion novel to the brilliant Writers & Lovers, this delightfully witty tale of college romance matures into midlife poignancy
The university experience is a risky business in fiction. Generally, the feelings are intense, but the stakes are low; it’s all very formative for the individual character, but it can feel a bit trivial to anyone else. In fact, reading an account of someone’s university days is surely only one or two stages removed from having to hear about the dream they had last night.
