Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges

Borges has this move he does constantly in Ficciones where he’ll present the most obvious impossible tall tale, a library containing every possible book, a man who remembers everything down to the last detail, a secret society slowly inventing a fictional planet into real existence, and he just states it with total deadpan confidence like he’s citing a source. Somebody described it as wanting you to believe in a total fabrication while presenting it as fact, and that’s exactly the trick, over and over, and it still works even once you know he’s doing it to you.

“The Circular Ruins” is the one that stayed with me longest, a man dreams another man into existence piece by piece, only to discover something about his own nature by the end that I won’t spoil. It works as a pure metaphor for creation and the anxiety of not being sure you’re the author of your own life rather than someone else’s dream. There’s a real kinship there with Paul Bowles’ “A Distant Episode” style writing, though the comparison I saw made to his “Circular Valley” specifically is worth chasing down if you like this story, similar obsession with circularity and consciousness folding back on itself.

Not everyone’s on board, and I get the pushback, there’s a strain of criticism that this is academic-flavored, intellectual wannabe bait, dense allusion for its own sake. Borges only wrote what he wanted to write, readers be damned, as one person put it, not entirely unfairly. It is demanding. Some stories reward rereading more than a first pass gives you.

But the density is the point for me. Each piece works like a locked room, self-contained, and together the collection redefines the border between reality and fantasy in a way that’s genuinely hard to explain until you’ve felt it happen inside your own head reading “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” Short book. Took me longer than a book this length has any right to take.