2005 was Penguin Books seventieth anniversary and to mark the occasion they published seventy books at £1.50 each which were largely extracts from other works in their vast back catalogue as is this one although this is collated from several collections of short stories. With Borges though, as he is mainly a writer of short stories, you ended up with seven complete works in the book and as an introduction to his literary output this book is excellent. The art of writing a short story is extremely difficult as in a short space you must not only have a beginning, a middle, and an end but also express an idea or indeed several which will leave the reader satisfied and in all seven of these Borges has proved himself well able to meet those aims. Knowing that he was Argentinian I was expecting South American themes but instead the first two ‘The Mirror of Ink’ and ‘The Lottery in Babylon’ are set in the Middle East, the third ‘The Library of Babel’ could frankly be anywhere and everywhere. The fourth ‘The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero’ is in Ireland, ‘The Witness’ is probably medieval England, ‘Ragnarok’ could also be anywhere, whilst the final story ‘Blue Tigers’ is based in rural India. A linking theme, if there is one, is the somewhat mystical and fantastic ideas behind all of these stories, that and the definite quality of the prose. I hadn’t read any of Jorge Luis Borges before this slim volume and indeed this is the only book of his work that I possess but I definitely need to read more.

Sadly Borges suffered from fading eyesight for many years and became blind at the end of the 1950’s however he continued to write, dictating stories initially to his mother who took on the role of his secretary until her death. The last two stories in this book were written after his blindness and there is certainly no diminution of the power of his writing. I just want to pick out a couple of the stories that I particularly enjoyed:

‘The Library of Babel’ is an exploration of the concepts of infinity in that the library described contains all possible books that are exactly 410 pages long with a fixed format of forty lines per page and eighty characters per line where a character is one of twenty two letters of the alphabet, a full stop, a comma or a space and all combinations of these appear at least once in one of the infinite series of books stored in the apparently infinite number of replicating hexagonal galleries that make up the library. The concept of a library that because it has all combinations of the twenty five characters and therefore contains books of apparently complete nonsense but must also due to randomness have every book that could possibly exist expressing every theme and also arguing both for and against every idea is beguiling. The impossibility of ever finding a specific work is also clearly spelled out along with some of the oddities of infinite series in that a revolution in the past had destroyed countless volumes but that this didn’t matter because books survived elsewhere in the library which differed from the vandalised editions by as little as a punctuation mark somewhere within them.

‘Blue Tigers’ also drew me in with a weird mathematical theme, the tigers are not flesh and blood but a collection of odd blue disks that the narrator finds on top of the plateau of a sacred hill. These discs are uncountable, initially he thought he had around ten of them but when examining them found far more. Sometimes there would be as little as three but holding these few and then letting them fall could reveal hundreds. The narrator spends nights trying to find a pattern to the ever increasing, and decreasing, quantities without any success and eventually, to save his sanity, he gives them to a blind beggar who seems to understand in someway that he is the fitting custodian.

Naturally the four mathematical operations – adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing – were impossible. The stones resisted arithmetic as they did the calculation of probability. Forty disks, divided, might become nine, those nine in turn divided might yield three hundred. I do not know how much they weighed, I did not has recourse to a scale, but I’m sure their weight was constant, and light. Their colour was always the same blue.

As 2005 was the seventieth anniversary it is clear that this year (2025) is the ninetieth and again Penguin have marked their birthday with a set of books, this time ninety of them at £5.99 each, some of which will be featured in this blog as the year goes on. The actual anniversary is the end of July so I am dedicating my August theme this year to the first four Penguin titles, which I will be reading in their first Penguin editions something I don’t do often due to the fragility of these ninety year old paperbacks.