So, JSO picked me that book among all Borges books on Amazon (his burden anyway) and I read it.
Despite it being just 180 pages or so, it took me 8 days to finish. Well, I read it only for 4 days, but it's been 8 days since I first started reading the book.
This book was a compilation of short stories.
I wish I had known before I started. I researched less and obviously I forgot the difference in preferences JSO and I have regarding some art, especially music.
Borges stories were often just a couple pages, but it does not mean his work was to be taken lightly. I am not sure if Hurley translated all right (because I had to dig up dictionary pretty often while reading this book), but if Borges did use those vocabularies, then yes, he did want the reader to think and think deep in every story he wrote.
And that was not perhaps what I wanted to do after reading a fantasy novel and The Help. Both books required no cerebral activities at all. All I had to do was intake and read nonstop without pausing for vocabularies.
Not complaining about vocabularies here, I love learning new words, it's just the thinking part I didn't expect it to be so heavy.
I do enjoy books that require some serious reflections, but this book came at a wrong time so I needed to get myself ready if I was going to read it last several days.
This book features, as I said, several short stories, but obviously The Aleph was the most memorable one. Others I can think of without going through the tables of contents are The Zahir, Deutsches Requiem, The Dead Man, The Writing of God, The Other Death, , Ibn-Hakam al-Bokhar, Murdered in His Labyrinth. Everything and Nothing, Dreamtigers, and Ragnarok.
All short stories that were not listed above were still reasonably good, few boring, but they probably had an impact of 1-3 to me out of 10. (10 would be the feeling I had in last 15 pages of One Hundred Years of Solitude [and it was 3 at best for the first 300 pages of that book]. FYI 8-9 was what I had throughout Love in the Time of Cholera.)
Those Borges stories mentioned were 5-8. The Aleph was probably 8 or 9. The Aleph was good, very good.
The view of the whole world through the Aleph was so vibrant I could not sleep thinking about it and re-reading that part. I thought about the coin in The Zahir in relation to The Alpeh. That small coin could have blocked the view through the Aleph. Perhaps, all the Borges in the Zahir really wanted was a peek through the Aleph.
Borges stories can be characterized by two: 1) circle and 2) death.
Death was not present in every story, but it was in almost every short story in the book.
The idea of circle was always there - circle of life, time flowing forward, time flowing backward, ideas like multiverse, etc. - and I liked it.
Life is a circle, it's a continuum and it does not end because of a death, as it will be continued in any other way possible - by oneself or by others.
That was in back of my head constantly while reading this book.
Borges obviously wrote for the sake of literature - no ideologies, no nothing.
Utilizes fantasies to draw the most out of the readers' inner selves in a couple page long short stories, and he does so well. Impressed. One day, I will get another book from him and read when I am really ready.
