By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Book of Sand’ is a late story by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986). This 1975 short story is narrated by a book collector who acquires a mysterious book which appears to have an infinite number of pages. ‘The Book of Sand’ contains a number of Borges’ recurring themes, including the infinite, the power of books, and the idea of an object which becomes an obsession for the possessor.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ is a 1940 short story by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986). The story tells of the narrator’s discovery of a fictional country named Uqbar, whose inhabitants wrote of the legends of a planet named Tlön. The inhabitants of Tlön believe a form of philosophy known as subjective idealism, meaning that they believe nothing exists outside of their perception of it.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Kafka and His Precursors’ is an essay by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), in which Borges examines some earlier writers and argues that their themes and moods prefigure the writing of the Czech author Franz Kafka (1883-1924). Towards the end of ‘Kafka and His Precursors’, Borges famously asserts that every writer creates his own precursors, and that is what Kafka has done.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Immortal’ is one of Jorge Luis Borges’ best-known and most widely studied short stories. Published in his collection The Aleph in 1949, ‘The Immortal’ takes the form of a ‘found’ manuscript purporting to be written by a Roman soldier who, nearly two thousand years ago, discovered a river which bestowed immortality upon any who drank from it.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The fiction of the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) often returns to the same prominent symbols, with Borges finding new ways to inflect the mirror, the book, and the labyrinth, among others. But Borges uses these key symbols in different ways in his fiction, so they resonate with new meaning and significance.