Book of the Day

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Argentinian writer, poet, essayist, translator and academic, Borges has made a fundamental contribution to philosophical narrative and fantasy as a reinvention of reality, so much so that today Borges is an adjective to express the dreamlike, fantastic, bookish and labyrinthine.

A false country discovered in „a pirate encyclopedia“, Uqbar, and an imaginary planet, Tlön, „maze hatched by men“ but capable of changing the face of the world;

Menard’s Don Quixote, identical to that of Cervantes and yet infinitely richer; the magician who shapes a child in the matter of dreams and discovers that he is in turn only a dream; the infinite Library of Babel, whose shelves „record all the possible combinations of the twenty or so spelling symbols … that is all that is given to express: in all languages“ and which will survive the extinction of the human species; the garden with forking paths; the sleepless Funes, who has more memories than all men will ever have together; the discerning detective Lönnrot, who solves a series of crimes thanks to an equilateral triangle and a Greek word, Tetragrammaton, and is condemned to death; the Jewish writer Jaromir Hladìk, to whom God grants to carry out a tragedy in verse before the German firing squad, in a motionless instant that lasts a year.

They are the lemmas of an illusory encyclopedia and at the same time, not unlike that of Tlön, of arcane, irresistible power.

-linate

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