"A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face."
Yes, we built up our reality, and we do so with all objects, physical or spiritual, we encounter on our way and which we process. Borges is truly a literature of thoughts, smart speculations, impeccable imaginary constructions. With a flavor of truth, he invented historical or literary figures so perfectly recreated one would swear they must have existed.
He famously stated that "writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes." Borges was not a very "prolific" author. The number of pages he produced was not huge. He never wrote a novel. (Maybe the story The Congress, quite long for borgesian standards, was the closest he ever was).
He basically wrote short stories and essays, interestingly with a blurred line between the two. Stories looking like essays and essays you could hardly differentiate from stories. Also poems that could be read as short narrations.
But if we consider his richness, the complex fascinating ideas with which he constantly fills his texts (a full volum could be forged out of many of the ideas he “wasted” for just a 10-page narration), then Borges is among the most "prolific" authors in all Literature. A vast author, a sea of infinitude.
He also reframed a language, reverting a literary tradition. The narrative of Castile started off with some sort of magnificent psychedelic road novel, but ever since one would have considered Castilian only valid for a dry realism. Borges turned it into a key to a splendid intellectual and aesthetic universe.Those colorful supernatural realms of contemporary Latin American literature would be unthinkable without the argentine’s luminous prose.
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