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Review [published June 2009]
Jorge Luis Borges: The Book Of Imaginary Beings
Ben Granger
Borges is that rare writer, one who can truly change
your outlook forever. To read Labyrinths or Ficciones
is to experience the universe anew, to find a poetry
in mathematics, a mysticism in reason. In tales like
‘Funes the Memorious’, ‘The Library of Babel’ and
‘The Garden of Forking Paths’, Borges explores the
concept of infinitude. A child with endless knowledge,
a library that goes on forever, the constantly diverging
paths of reality which make possibility itself endless.
In doing so he finds a beauty in the concept perhaps
unique in literature – the master poet-in-prose of the
infinite. The prose he captures these dizzying absolutes
within is understated, mellifluous and simple, dreamlike
and factual, making the fantastical real, and the
prosaic extraordinary. In ‘Pierre Menard, Author of
the Quixote’, he describes a man re-writing Cervantes’
work, word for word, without reading the original, and
makes the idea seem not just possible but inevitable,
and beautiful. In ‘Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ another
world – one whose inhabitants inhabit a realm of pure
thought – floods from the pages of an encyclopaedia
to overwhelm our own. Borges not only makes us ac-
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cept this could happen, he makes us welcome it. The
highest philosophical concepts of time, space, reality
and perception are rendered malleable and human, the
arcane loses its abstraction while retaining awe.
In 1957, after he had written most of the stories which
make up Labyrinths, Borges undertook the task of penning
a compendium of descriptions of fantastical beings
– dragons, unicorns, phoenix and the like. Such an
obscure, niche-laden, listing exercise would probably
be seen as treading water at best in most other authors,
– and in the case of most other authors the accusation
would probably be accurate. You can’t readily imagine
James Joyce publishing a list of his favourite fairy tales
for example, nor a joke book by Samuel Beckett. What
could be a mere whimsical addendum to a body of work
from another writer instead becomes a wonderful vista
on the gifts of Borges. This is not a case of “he could
write about anything and make it wonderful” – the old
“I’d listen to him sing the phone book” cliché – for
Borges, style and content are inseparable. Rather, the
format of a scholarly researched compendium allows
him to brandish with a flourish the outstanding knowl-
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