(Doctor Brodie's Report in English) Reading Borges' Fictions (The Garden of Forking Paths in English) was a literary epiphany for me when I was 17. I hadn't ever read anything else by Borges, but have had a couple of short story collections lying around the house for a while. I read this (short) collection in a couple of days. It is very different from Fictions in that there is no explicit fantasy in these stories: they all focus on Argentinian "characters", mostly but not only men. They are rarely stories with a big reveal at the end, but all have a depth that you rarely find elsewhere. And of course Borges' writing is such a fine thing. This constant reference to real people and events mingled with (presumably) fictional ones blurs the line between facts and fiction. These are fake memories, one could say, but fake memories of the best kind ever. Superb.
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