🇦🇷Jorge Luis
Borges

Jorge Luis Borges grew up in a house with two languages and a library without end. Born in Buenos Aires on August 24, 1899, to an Argentine lawyer of English descent and a mother whose family had fought in Argentine independence, he was reading English before Spanish — Kipling, Stevenson, the King James Bible. His family's library, which included a complete set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, was, he later said, the essential fact of his childhood. He did not merely read books. He inhabited them as a form of reality coordinate with but richer than the Buenos Aires streets outside. That childhood metaphysics — the book as world, the library as cosmos, the map as territory — never left him. It became the architecture of one of the most original literary minds of the twentieth century.

Educated in Geneva during the First World War, where he learned French and German, and then in Spain, where he fell in with the avant-garde Ultraist movement, Borges returned to Buenos Aires in 1921 and spent the following decade writing poetry and essays. His early work was rooted in Buenos Aires — its neighborhoods, its milongas, its knife-fighters, its immigrant communities — but it was already inflected by the philosophical preoccupations that would define his mature fiction: the nature of time, the unreliability of identity, the mechanisms by which human beings construct meaning from an ultimately meaningless universe. He published several essay collections and poetry volumes in the 1920s and early 1930s, but remained a respected rather than famous figure.

The decisive turn came in the late 1930s. A serious head injury in 1938 — he struck his head on a poorly lit stairway and developed septicemia — nearly killed him and, during his convalescence, triggered an explosion of fictional invention. He began writing the short stories that would become Ficciones (1944) and El Aleph (The Aleph, 1949): densely imagined, philosophically precise, formally innovative fictions that read like encyclopaedia entries from alternate universes, detective stories set in labyrinths of metaphysics, or thought experiments that happen to be exquisitely written prose. "The Library of Babel" imagines a universe that is a library containing all possible books. "The Garden of Forking Paths" proposes a novel that is also a model of time in which all possible outcomes occur simultaneously. "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" is a review of a work that does not exist, raising questions about authorship, reading, and originality that literary theory spent the next fifty years unpacking.

Borges was losing his sight throughout this period — a hereditary condition that had also blinded his father — and was totally blind by the early 1950s. In a supreme irony that he noted with his characteristic deadpan wit, he was appointed Director of the Argentine National Library in 1955, the same year he lost the last of his functional vision. "God gave me at once 800,000 books and darkness," he wrote. He continued to work by dictation and from memory, composing fictions and poems in his head before having them transcribed. His later work is more lyrical and concentrated: short poems, fables, and brief parables that achieve in miniature the same philosophical scope as his more elaborate earlier stories.

The failure of Borges to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature is one of the most discussed gaps in that prize's history. He shared the inaugural Formentor Prize with Samuel Beckett in 1961, and from that point was considered annually among the leading candidates for the Nobel. He never received it — reportedly because of his acceptance of a decoration from Augusto Pinochet's Chilean government. He died in Geneva on June 14, 1986, the city where he had been educated as a boy, and where he chose to end his life with his companion Maria Kodama. His influence on world literature — on Gabriel García Márquez, Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, and virtually every major postmodern writer — is immeasurable. He invented, or perhaps discovered, a mode of fiction in which philosophy becomes storytelling and storytelling becomes philosophy, and no writer who came after him has been able to think about the form without thinking about Borges.