Reading Borges: The Aleph, The Book of Sand, and Beyond
Begin with the Borges story you have just finished. Read its essay on its own, pair it with the other story below, or follow the comparisons toward Roberto Bolaño and Bruno Schulz. The choice depends on what you want to pursue: seeing everything, possessing an inexhaustible book, or inventing a literary world.
The descriptions below avoid endings. The linked critical essays discuss the stories and novels in full.
Return to a single story
“The Aleph”: sight, memory, and the narrator
Choose this essay if the extraordinary vision in “The Aleph” has left you thinking about the man who reports it. The reading keeps his grief, jealousy, and rivalry in view as it examines the promise of seeing every place at once. It also asks what happens when a simultaneous experience has to become a sequence of words. This is the place to return to the story’s narrator, his motives, and the distance between what he sees and what he can tell.
“The Book of Sand”: ownership and the search for a page
Begin here if the book itself has stayed with you: its elusive pages, the failed attempts to find a beginning or end, the temptation to open it again. The essay follows the narrator’s efforts to recover and catalog what he encounters, then places that effort beside Orpheus’s demand for assurance, Augustine’s inquiry into time, and early Wittgenstein’s limits of language. Read it for the particular trouble of owning something you cannot reliably consult.
For a paired reading, move from “The Book of Sand” to “The Aleph.” One essay follows the effort to locate a page; the other follows the effort to recount a vision. Keep the two narrators’ circumstances in view as you compare them.
Follow Borges into Bolaño
For readers of both writers: the comparative essay
This essay starts from the invented scholarship of “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” and brings it into conversation with Nazi Literature in the Americas, “Labyrinth,” and The Savage Detectives. It is a route into literary invention: authors, biographies, documents, and the forms that make imagined lives convincing. Read it when you want a sustained comparison across the two writers. Save it until after the Bolaño works if you want to encounter their discoveries for yourself.
For readers new to Bolaño: choose a first book
If the comparison interests you but you have yet to read Bolaño, take this path first. The guide begins with the short novel Distant Star and explains how to move toward the larger books. Its job is practical: choosing an entry and deciding what to read next. Follow the guide into a book, then return to the Borges–Bolaño essay when you want to examine the relationship in detail.
Borges beside Bruno Schulz
The section “Why It Feels Like Kafka Meets Borges” uses Borges as a way to read Schulz’s multiplying streets and unstable reality. Choose it for a change of texture: the essay puts those maze-like spaces beside the sensory detail and family life of The Cinnamon Shops. The connection is a reading analogy, with Schulz’s dreamlike town at its center.
Finding the Borges stories
“The Aleph” and “The Book of Sand” are individual stories as well as titles associated with collections. For the essays above, begin with the title story in each volume. Andrew Hurley’s translations are available in Penguin’s The Aleph and The Book of Sand and Shakespeare’s Memory. The earlier translations linked below offer another way to find the two stories.
Sources
Jorge Luis Borges, “The Aleph,” in “Three Stories,” translated by Anthony Kerrigan. The New Yorker, January 7, 1967.
Jorge Luis Borges, “The Book of Sand,” translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni. The New Yorker, October 25, 1976.
Penguin, The Aleph, translated by Andrew Hurley.
Penguin, The Book of Sand and Shakespeare’s Memory, translated by Andrew Hurley.
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