The Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges was one of the key writers of the twentieth century. He started out as a poet in the 1920s, but his reputation is largely based on the completely original short stories he wrote through the 1940s. He introduced an intellectual playfulness to literature that has had a worldwide influence. His stories, or fictions, as he preferred to emphasise, dazzle the reader with paradoxes and philosophical puzzles of time and identity. His reputation spread to Europe in the 1960s.
The book under review is part of a new series from an imprint that specialises in Hispanic literature. It is designed to be a “lively, scholarly, accessible introduction” aimed at undergraduates, postgraduates, but “also responsive to the general reader”. The first third of the book covers Context, with chapters on the historical background, on Borges' own life, and on a few key themes. The remainder of the work focuses on Borges' two ground‐breaking collections of stories, Fictions, and The Aleph, giving detailed and lucid discussions of the individual stories in these books, stories that certainly deserve the close critical attention they have received. There is a page of suggestions for Further Reading and a short bibliography.
This account of Borges is clearly written and fair‐minded in that it is willing to be critical of Borges' weaker writings and in its acknowledgement of the work of other critics. But the general reader would probably want something bolder, with more character. As a whole the book seems to suffer from constraints, probably imposed by the publisher. With a text confined to 186 pages and the focus on the two important collections, there is little room for wider aspects of Borges. There is virtually no discussion of his poetry, and very little of his influence. It is not always fair to judge a book by its omissions but, on the other hand, this does have the ambitious title of a “Companion”. This volume is rather short and narrow in scope for that claim, so it remains at the level of an introduction, at which point one notices the high price: £50. There are other, cheaper introductions in print. This, therefore, is a book whose appeal will be limited to university libraries, for undergraduate courses in Spanish‐American literature.
