LABYRINTHS

Jorge Luis Borges was a literary spellbinder whose tales of magic, mystery and murder are shot through with deep philosophical paradoxes. This collection brings together many of his stories, including the celebrated ‘Library of Babel’, whose infinite shelves contain every book that could ever exist, ‘Funes the Memorious’ the tale of a man fated never to forget a single detail of his life, and ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’, in which a French poet makes it his life’s work to create an identical copy of Don Quixote. In later life, dogged by increasing blindness, Borges used essays and brief tantalizing parables to explore the enigma of time, identity and imagination. Playful and disturbing, scholarly and seductive, his is a haunting and utterly distinctive voice.

JORGES LUIS BORGES (1899-1986). Argentine poet, novelist, essayist, a pioneer of Magic Realism, and one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. He had a particular love of English literature. His philosophical influences include Kabbalistic thought, Swedenborg, Berkeley and other Idealist philosophers. His interest in Swedenborg is apparent from his essay ‘Testimony to the Invisible’ and the sonnet ‘Emanuel Swedenborg’.

References: Testimony to the Invisible and ‘Swedenborg and Borges: the Mystic of the North and the Mystic in puribus‘, in In Search of the Absolute: Essays On Swedenborg and Literature (London: Swedenborg Society, 2004); J L Borges, The Total Library, ed. Eliot Weinbeger (Allen Lane, the Penguin Press, 2000).