Labyrinths

I’m going to start straight off by saying that I didn’t really get Jorge Luis Borges’s Labyrinths.  It’s a collection of short stories, essays and parables that were combined in an anthology after the author’s death and, as such, they’re not really stories that are meant to be together.  Overall, it’s not a work that’s bad but it’s really heavy going (the essays especially) and not really the kind of thing one can read on snatched lunch breaks at work or lazy Sundays.  As usual when I really didn’t enjoy a book, I’m more willing to blame my short comings than the books and I’m sure if I’d read this when I was younger and still studying bits of philosophy I’d have loved it.  It’s the kind of book to read late at night with a cup of black coffee and no responsibilities to an employer the following morning.

As I said, one of my issues with the book is that the stories were not designed to be together.  Unlike in something like In aGlass Darkly, there’s no sense of progression through the stories.  Maybe this is an intentional ploy by the books editor to create a compilation that is itself a winding labyrinth but it’s also kind of annoying.  Ideas are repeated time and time again, and it’s not just the simple bits like the use of labyrinth metaphors; it’s really complicated things like Zeno’s Paradox.  Stuff you have to Google a little bit to understand properly.  In fact, I still don’t think I know what Zeno’s Paradox is.  Here’s the Wikipedia page, see if you fare any better.  Everything might be more comprehensive if this were how Borges intended his works to be read but instead what we have is a posthumous greatest hits from a writer that I’ve been assured is as important as he is marginalised.  I actually think it’s on the list because it seems like the kind of thing academics would pretend to have read. 

For all my dislike of it though, some of the short stories are pretty good.  My favourite by far is The House of Asterion.  It’s probably only 1,500 or so words long and is well worth a quick read.  And, unlike a lot of his other works, only requires a basic knowledge of Greek mythology to understand.  I recommend searching it out, to say anything further would just be a spoiler.

Other than the odd pretty turn of phrase (“to have grown old in so many mirrors” is a particular favourite) there’s not much I can honestly say that I enjoyed here.  For all its repetition it is a very fragmented book.  Often the short stories are only a few pages long and seem like exercises in creative writing.  And there’s an essay on the concept of time that I’m pretty sure would make Stephen Hawking throw a shit fit.  There’s a quote in the 1001 Books to Read book stating, “Borges has read everything and especially what no-one reads anymore,” as though he were some kind of literary proto-hipster.  The only issue is that, hipster-like, Borges thinks we should know all the obscure things he knows and so rarely deigns to explain just what it is he actually means.

Book number three hundred and something (I’ve lost track again) is Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy L Sayers.  It’s shaping up to be a nice little whodunit.