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Borges: A Life by Edwin Williamson
Recognized as the one of greatest writers in the last century by Susan Sontag and others, Jorge Luis Borges the Argentinean writes about the gauchos (cowboys) of Pampas and cuchilleros (knife fighters) of Buenos Aires. A metaphysician who is keenly preoccupied with the notion of self and nonself (celebrated in his schizophrenic Borges and I with the unforgettable ending, "I do not know which of us has written this page"), he was the riddler of counterculture in the 1960s, but still enormously influential today when we consider the achievements of Amis, Barth, Calvino, Chatwin, Eco, Fuentes, Marquez, Pynchon, etc.
Unfairly, Salman Rushdie once described Italo Calvino as "Borges on a bad day." Calvino's reply, probably recorded in an unpublished manuscript buried among his highly guarded papers, ought to invoke Borges's mirror as the perfect rejoinder to Rushdie's sound byte.
EDWIN WILLIAMSON's BORGES: A LIFE is highly serviceable. Unlike his subject's bold, imaginative digression into philosophical speculations and pseudo histories, Williamson's biography is a straightforward, literal chronology of the novelist's life with little embellishment that, at times, suffers from excessive Freudianism. Although the biographer makes a strong case of the dominating influence of Borges's mother, Leonore Acevedo, who accompanied her son on his professional travels well into her late eighties, Borges's women are a long, intriguing list of failed and secret lovers, disappointed admirers, and his widow Maria Kodama, who met Borges as a teenager when the novelist was in his mid-sixties.
Equally eclectic are Borges's intellectual debts. A founder of Argentine's ultraismo, the off-shoot of an European avant-garde society of poets, Borges was adept in combining the movement's "techniques (plastic metaphors, concision, created images) with the expansive rhythms and the energy of my first Whitmanesque efforts," he wrote to a friend in 1920. Affected by his English side through grandmother Fanny Haslam of Staffordshire, who married grandfather Borges, Borges's early readings included Chesterton, Carlyle (who led to his interest in Schopenhauer and the philosophy of Berkeley and Hume), and of course, Shakespeare. Borges's classic short-story, Circular Ruins, is said to be peopled with Tempest characters who are "of the stuff that dreams are made of."
Finally, Borges's irresistible signature is his love of magic and mysticism. An acute Kabbalah observer, long before this form of Jewish theosophy is transformed into a Top 20 hit now made famous by the Material Girl, Borges's brilliant revisions for criollismo (the gaucho literature of Argentina) acknowledged instead the mystical oneness of the Kabbalist faith that incorporates its own contradictions. Criollismo "is not a nostalgic cult of the gaucho and the pampas," Williamson says, quoting a Borges manifesto, it was a criollismo that would "converse with the world and with the self, with God and with death."
In one of Borges's most important works, The Aleph (1945), which is defined as the infinite number that encompasses the others, it is a sign "used by the Kabbalists to denote the chief of the ten emanations of God," William explains. It is the "brain, the first commandment, the heaven of fire, the divine name `I am Who Am' and the seraphim called Sacred Beasts."
Fortunately, instead of a prostelysing, shop-girl philosophy, Borges's short stories and poems craft an other world of historic and literary references, not religious mysterium; surrealism, not contradictions; and literary imagination and elegance unfettered by the prescriptive burden of theology.
Michael Hsu
24/11/2004
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Michael Hsu is a senior editor of banking laws in America.
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