Fictions - Jorge Luis Borges

A friend's ping suggested I read "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius". The name sounded unusual. I looked it up and it was a short story by an Argentine author. Since the recommender was usually good with suggestions, I decided to try it out. Hence I ordered "Fictions" which contained this particular story. Not much later, I picked it up.

I lapped up Borges like a thirsty dog. I had been wanting to read something interesting for some time and all I had managed to pick up were Nietzsche and Woolf. After the tiresome descriptive readings that were laden with philosophies, Borges seemed unnaturally succinct and extremely gripping. It took me a while to get used to his style; the mild humour, the puns. At times I doubted whether what I was reading was fiction but the author made it evidently clear eventually.

There were a total of seventeen stories split up in two parts : "The Garden of Forking Paths" and "Artifices". The stories were altogether fantastic. Imaginary planets, impeccable memory, fateful lotteries; all these and more made up for some of the most pleasant reading that I have done till date. Moreover, the content was stimulating to an extent that I often put down the book to think how the author must have come up with such an incredible plot or how I might have gone about building on the same theme.

JLB was, in a word, awesome. He is a keeper for sure. One can pick him up between books or when does not have the time for bigger novels. A story roughly takes ten to twenty minutes to complete and leaves you slightly perplexed, slightly stimulated but mostly entertained and satisfied. Will look for more of his works for sure. But as of now, I will take a short break from reading.