The Aleph and Other Stories

The Aleph and Other Stories Review

Jorge Luis Borges published El Aleph in Buenos Aires in 1949, three years after Ficciones, and the collection is in some ways his most personal work: the title story was written in the wake of the death of Beatriz Viterbo, a woman Borges had loved for years, and the grief underneath it gives the story an emotional weight that his more purely ludic fictions sometimes lack. The narrator, named Borges, visits the house of Beatriz’s insufferable cousin Carlos Argentino Daneri every year on her birthday, ostensibly to maintain a connection with her memory, and discovers in the man’s cellar an Aleph — a point in space approximately two or three centimetres in diameter that contains all other points simultaneously, from which it is possible to see everything in the universe at once.

The passage in which the narrator lies on the cellar floor and looks into the Aleph is Borges’s most celebrated sustained piece of prose, and rightly so. He sees the populous sea, the dawn and the dusk, the multitudes of America, a silver cobweb at the centre of a black pyramid, a broken labyrinth (which was London), his own face. He sees everything at once, all times and all places superimposed: the Aleph contains the universe and the universe contains the Aleph. The vision is described in a torrent of present participles, item after item, impossible and impossible and impossible again, and ends with the narrator finding, among all the things the Aleph contains, Beatriz Viterbo’s letters. He has looked at the entirety of existence and what he cannot get past is the woman who is gone.

This is Borges at his most emotionally direct, and it alters the stories around it. “The Zahir” — the inverse of the Aleph, an ordinary coin that, once seen, fills all consciousness until the person who has seen it can think of nothing else — is a meditation on obsessive love filtered through a philosophical conceit. “The Dead Man” is a compressed tragedy about a young man who achieves everything he desires and dies without understanding that the achievement was already his execution. “The Theologians” takes two Christian theologians whose careers are spent refuting heretics and eventually each other, and ends with a revelation about identity and theological opposition that is both funny and devastating.

Where Ficciones is the collection in which Borges’s games are most brilliantly constructed, The Aleph is the collection in which they most clearly have something at stake beyond the game. The emotional undertow — grief, rivalry, the impossibility of complete knowledge — keeps breaking the surface of the philosophical play. Reading Ficciones and The Aleph together is the complete experience of Borges: the cooler, more rigorous collection and the warmer, more troubled one, together mapping a mind that thought about infinity and felt it as a personal loss.

Our rating: 4.5/5 — Borges’s most emotionally resonant collection, and the one that demonstrates most clearly that the greatest literary metaphysician of the twentieth century was also, underneath it all, a man who had loved someone and lost her.