On Writing by Jorge Luis Borges is a collection of short essays that dealt with literature, writers, and the craft of writing. It was interesting to see how his mind worked, but many of the writers and books that he wrote of, are ones that I have never read or ever had an inkling to read, then, now, or in the future. When writing about authors that I was familiar with, his words were always interesting and intelligent, but I didn’t always find myself agreeing with him … opinions are like that.

I found his writings on detective stories quite intriguing. I attribute much of my appreciation and interest on this subject to living with my wife Vicky for more than thirty years. I was constantly hearing about the vast numbers of detective and mysteries that she read. I loved her enthusiasm (for so many things in life), but very, very rarely did I read the actual sources of that particular excitement.

When he wrote about the very beginnings of detective stories—in his reviews and essays about Edgar Allan Poe and Wilkie Collins—I had to wonder if Vicky had read his words, owing to her love of detective stories, mysteries, as well as the writings of Borges. Voicing opinions seemed to come easy to Borges. Concerning Collins’ book (published in 1868), Borges simply said, “The Moonstone is a masterpiece,” but he felt that Poe got far too much attention and credit for his work, especially his poem “The Raven,” and The Murders in the Rue Morgue (published in 1841.) Of The Murders, he wrote, “The first detective story recorded in history. The story established the essential rules of the genre: the enigmatic, and at first glance unsolvable crime, the sedentary detective who deciphers the enigma by means of his imagination and logic, the case recounted to the detective’s impersonal and somewhat indistinct acquaintance.”

He explained the British love for their detective stories, owing to their “two incompatible passions: a strange appetite for adventure and a strange appetite for legality.” Of his own times, Borges wrote of the decline of the detective genre in the United States, “where it has become realistic and about violence—sexual violence, as well.” And continued with, “The intellectual origins of the detective story have been forgotten. They have, however, been maintained in England, where very calm novels are still written. They take place in an English town; everything is intellectual, everything is calm, there is no violence, and not too much bloodshed.”

Allow me to showcase some of the lines that really stuck with me from this collection.
* Before Borges goes on to show how Poe came up with his most well-known poem in a Boston lecture, Borges wrote, “At that point, Poe had written the famous poem that everyone knows, and perhaps too well, for it is not one of his good poems: ‘The Raven.’”
* Of Joyce’s writing in Ulysses. “He is a millionaire of words and styles.”
* Of Whitman’s masterwork, Borges said, “Leaves of Grass, the unprecedented revelation of a man of genius.”
* Of Virginia Woolf, he tells of her being born as Adelina Virginia Stephen in London in 1882, and goes on to observe that her first name “vanished without a trace.”
* Of Henry James, “James is not a psychological novelist. The situations in his books do not emerge from his characters; the characters have been fabricated to justify the situations.”
* “Language is an efficient ordering of the world’s enigmatic abundance. Or, in other words, we invent nouns to fit reality.”
* Discussing of Flaubert, he writes, “History has it that the famous Lao Tzu wanted to live in secret, without a name; a similar will to be ignored and a similar celebrity mark the destiny of Flaubert. He wished to be absent from his books, or barely, invisibly, there, like God in his works.”

In a curious essay about time, he wrote how Schopenhauer said that “the shape of our intelligence is time, a thin line that only presents things to us one by one?” Later he cites the following related incidents. Writing of Miguel Servet’s reply to the inquisitors who had condemned him to the stake, he quotes his words, “I will burn, but this is a mere event. We shall continue our discussion in eternity.” A similar quote came about after someone had flung a glass of wine in the face of a gentleman during a theological or literary debate. The victim showed no emotion and simply said to the offender: “This, sir, is a digression: now, if you please, for the argument.”

There is a fairly short introduction by Suzanne Jill Levine that mentions how important Borges was to other writers, especially Italo Calvino, Gabriel García Márquez, and many other very inventive writers. After Borges was blind, Levine points out how his dictated work was more direct and had a less adorned style than his earlier work. She also listed the four precepts of his fellow Spanish ultraístas poets: 1) reduce lyric poetry to its primal element, the metaphor; 2) eliminate all connective words and phrases; 3) abolish all ornament and confessionalism; 4) condense several images into one. He also writes, “All poetry is a confession, and the premises of any confession are one’s confidence in the listener and the candor of the speaker.”

I learned much more about Borges, which I am rather ignorant of, but overall, I wasn’t greatly impressed by this collection. I don’t know if it was the translations, the editing, Borges’s thoughts themselves … or my current headspace, which often colors so much. Still, it was a curious visit between these covers.

From one of the great masters. ( )

First, let's stipulate that Borges gets 5 stars. Always.

With that, know that his is not a book written by Borges to instruct aspiring writers but is a collection of 38 short pieces, assembled after his death, pertaining to literature as a realm or endeavor and the part the writer plays within that realm. 10 of the pieces are published in English translation here for the first time. The tile could be “On Criticism” or “On Literature” without giving up any accuracy.

Here's the kind of stuff you'll encounter (From “The Detective Story”):

“The detective novel has created a special type of reader. This tends to be forgotten when Poe's work is evaluated, for if Poe created the detective story, he subsequently created the reader of detective fiction.”

And (from “Narrative Art and Magic”):

“From the foregoing it can be inferred that the main problem of the novel is causality. One kind of novel, the ponderous psychological variety, attempts to frame an intricate chain of motives similar to real life....In the adventure novel, such cumbersome motivation is inappropriate; the same may be said for the short story and for those endless spectacles composed by Hollywood with silvery images of Joan Crawford, and read and reread in cities everywhere. They are governed by a different order, both lucid and primitive: the primeval clarity of magic.”

The pieces were written over a nearly 80 year span. Some were included to demonstrate Borges' development as a writer, some because they have had enormous influence, and some because they're just plain good – I include the very short snippets from the chapter “The Critic At Work” and also the two pieces quoted above as well as “Kafka and His Precursors” and “Stories from Turkestan”.

This is not a good introduction to Borges' work – try Labyrinths or thumb through Collected Fictions for that – but could be very valuable if you're trying to get a handle on what exactly he was up to. ( )