Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges

Published 1944 · 149 pages · 39,547 words · about 3 hours at an average pace · Fantasy, Short Fiction

How hard is Ficciones to read?

Ficciones scores 61 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 52 out of 100
Borges writes clear Spanish with learned vocabulary—philosophical, theological, bibliographic. Translations capture the precision. The vocabulary serves the game.
Sentence structure: 50 out of 100
Sentences are well-made, often elaborate in their qualifications. Borges is clear even when paradoxical. The syntax serves argument.
Abstraction: 72 out of 100
Abstract ideas—infinity, identity, time—are the subject. Concrete scenarios dramatize them. You think as you read.
Information density: 65 out of 100
Each story packs ideas densely. Rereading reveals connections. The stories reward and demand attention.
Narrative indirection: 62 out of 100
Stories often mask as essays or reviews. What's "happening" may be conceptual. You must follow the game.
Symbolic density: 68 out of 100
The labyrinth, the library, the mirror, the tiger—Borges's symbols are consistent and layered. A personal mythology emerges.
Ironic distance: 65 out of 100
Borges views his inventions with ironic detachment. The metaphysical questions are treated as games. Seriousness and play coexist.
Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
Stories resolve as puzzles while staying open as philosophy. The endings satisfy narratively while extending conceptually.
Structural complexity: 55 out of 100
Individual stories vary in form—some are conventional narratives, others fake reviews, others labyrinths. The collection is varied.

How Ficciones is regarded

Ficciones holds a literary regard score of 92 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Where Ficciones sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (105 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, Ficciones scores 90 out of 100. A second mythos, tragedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.2. About the map of stories.

Mode: Ironic (returning to myth)
Con alivio, con humillación, con terror, comprendió que él también era una apariencia, que otro estaba soñándolo.
Symbol: Anagogic
El universo (que otros llaman la Biblioteca) se compone de un número indefinido, y tal vez infinito, de galerías hexagonales
Mythos: Irony/Satire, Phase 3 — Satire of the High Norm (irony iii)
Todo: la historia minuciosa del porvenir, las autobiografías de los arcángeles, el catálogo fiel de la Biblioteca, miles y miles de catálogos falsos
Genre: Anatomy + Romance
Más razonable, más inepto, más haragán, he preferido la escritura de notas sobre libros imaginarios.

Where the story of Ficciones takes place

  • Buenos Aires and Uruguay, 1937-1944 (Tlön, Menard, El Sur) (1937 to 1944), the main setting
  • Ireland, August 1824 (Tema del traidor y del héroe)
  • Fray Bentos, Uruguay, 1884-1889 (Funes) (1884 to 1889)
  • Lund and Malmö, Sweden, 1904-1912 (Tres versiones de Judas) (1904 to 1912)
  • Staffordshire, England, July 1916 (El jardín de senderos)
  • Connaught, Ireland, 1922 (La forma de la espada)
  • Nazi-occupied Prague, March 1939 (El milagro secreto)
  • The hexagonal Library of Babel
  • Babylon of the Lottery

5 things that are true of Ficciones, with the passage for each

  1. The Cyclopaedia volume that contains the Uqbar article has 921 pages, four more than the 917 of the narrator's copy.

    pero en vez de 917 páginas constaba de 921.

  2. Pierre Menard's Don Quixote is word-for-word identical to Cervantes's, yet the narrator calls it richer.

    El texto de Cervantes y el de Menard son verbalmente idénticos, pero el segundo es casi infinitamente más rico.

  3. In the Library each book has 410 pages, 40 lines to a page and about 80 letters to a line.

    cada libro es de cuatrocientas diez páginas; cada página, de cuarenta renglones; cada renglón, de unas ochenta letras de color negro.

  4. Yu Tsun kills Stephen Albert only because the British town to be bombed is named Albert.

    la ciudad que se llama Albert y que no hallé otro medio que matar a una persona de ese nombre

  5. Jaromir Hladík is executed at two minutes past nine on 29 March, although in his mind a year has passed.

    Jaromir Hladík murió el veintinueve de marzo, a las nueve y dos minutos de la mañana.

Scenes in Ficciones that Frye would name

53 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Anagnorisis, untitled
Con alivio, con humillación, con terror, comprendió que él también era una apariencia, que otro estaba soñándolo. The magus's discovery that he too is dreamed pivots the whole tale.
Anagnorisis, untitled
yo soy Vincent Moon. Ahora desprécieme. The narrator's confession reveals he is the traitor he has been describing.
Anagnorisis, untitled
Busco algo más efímero y deleznable, busco a Erik Lönnrot. Lönnrot learns the series was a trap designed for him.
Pathos, untitled
Inició un grito enloquecido, movió la cara, la cuádruple descarga lo derribó. Hladík's death by firing squad after the year-long miracle.
Agon, untitled
Dahlmann empuña con firmeza el cuchillo, que acaso no sabrá manejar, y sale a la llanura. Dahlmann accepts the challenge: the agon is entered and left open.
Anatomy, untitled
Ahora tenía en las manos un vasto fragmento metódico de la historia total de un planeta desconocido The encyclopedia of Tlön is the book's central anatomic catalogue.

Books that share these scenes with Ficciones

About the author

Jorge Luis Borges