🪴 GoDeep
Search
← University Challenge
Portrait of Jorge Luis Borges

Literature · Novelists

Jorge Luis Borges

1899–1986 · Argentine

Latin American fantastic fiction

Jorge Luis Borges never wrote a novel, but his short stories of labyrinths, infinite libraries and imaginary encyclopaedias reshaped twentieth-century fiction. Working as a librarian and then, under a government he despised, as a poultry inspector, he became director of the National Library of Argentina just as hereditary blindness took his sight. He shared the first Formentor Prize with Samuel Beckett in 1961, which made his name abroad, and he remains the most famous writer never to have won the Nobel Prize.

How to spot them

  • ▸Labyrinths, mirrors, tigers, infinite libraries and encyclopaedias of invented worlds
  • ▸Director of the National Library of Argentina, by then blind
  • ▸Fictions of a few pages that review books that do not exist
  • ▸The first Formentor Prize, shared with Samuel Beckett in 1961
  • ▸Buenos Aires, knife-fighting compadritos, and a late life spent travelling and dictating

Key works

A Universal History of Infamy (1935)

Embroidered biographies of real criminals, his first book of narrative prose

"Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" (1940)

An article in a pirated encyclopaedia reveals a conspiracy to invent an entire planet, whose objects begin appearing on Earth

"The Library of Babel" (1941)

A universe of hexagonal galleries containing every possible book of 410 pages

"The Garden of Forking Paths" (1941)

A Chinese spy for Germany in the First World War, and a novel that is also a labyrinth of branching time

"Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" (1939)

A French symbolist sets out to rewrite Cervantes word for word, and the identical text is judged richer

"Funes the Memorious" (1942)

A young Uruguayan, paralysed by a fall from a horse, can forget nothing at all

Ficciones (1944)

The collection that gathered The Garden of Forking Paths with Artifices; it shared the 1961 Formentor Prize

"The Aleph" (1945)

A point in a Buenos Aires cellar from which every point in the universe can be seen at once

Key ideas

  • The infinite: libraries, lotteries and gardens of forking time used to make abstractions concrete
  • The reviewing of imaginary books, a way of writing the vast novel without writing it
  • Authorship as impersonal: every writer creates his own precursors, and all texts may be by one hand

Quick-fire facts

  • •Born on 24 August 1899 in Buenos Aires; his English grandmother meant he read English before Spanish
  • •The family was stranded in Europe by the First World War, and he was educated in Geneva
  • •Under Perón he was removed from his municipal library post in 1946 and offered the job of poultry and rabbit inspector, which he refused
  • •He was appointed director of the National Library in 1955, by which time he was almost blind; he called it God's magnificent irony to give him books and night together
  • •He shared the inaugural Formentor Prize with Samuel Beckett in 1961
  • •Labyrinths (1962) was the English-language selection that made his reputation in Britain and America
  • •He held the Charles Eliot Norton professorship at Harvard in 1967–68
  • •He was awarded the Cervantes Prize in 1979; he never received the Nobel Prize, which is often blamed on his accepting an honour from Pinochet in 1976
  • •He died in Geneva on 14 June 1986 and is buried there

Drill it — 9 cards

1 / 9new card

Sources