Excepcional autor, con cuentos cortos pero muy profundos. ( )

The best of the stories in this collection are sublime. They are so good that they never allowed me to read anything else for the rest of the day - they just took up too much intellectual and emotional space. Many of the stories seemed very cerebral to me - an infinite library, a review of a book that doesn't exist - until the last page or two when somehow all those ideas would coalesce into an emotion and it felt like I'd been hit with something blunt and stunning. Borges backs you into a corner, guiding you to follow his reasoning until you reach a particular conclusion and it's so bleak that you have to retrace your steps to find the fallacy or give in and accept that life is not worth living (I'm sure he wants the reader to do the former, which is kind of life affirming in the end).

The only problem is that because this alchemy is so finely balanced, it didn't always work for me. Maybe that was because I didn't know enough to appreciate the ideas of the stories. I certainly got less out of the religious-themed stories than the speculative ones. Nevertheless, when these stories are at their best (mostly in Part One), they are as good as literature gets. ( )

Reading this book was like getting stuck in conversation with a boring co-worker who doesn't want to get back to work.

I did not like it. ( )

1.1

Hall