The Perpetual Race of Achilles and the Tortoise
Penguin : Great Ideas
Paperback
: 26 Aug 2010
£4.99
Synopsis
In this collection of wise, witty and fascinating essays, Borges discusses the existence (or non-existence) of Hell, the flaws in English literary detectives, the philosophy of contradictions, and the many translators of 1001 Nights. Varied and enthralling, these pieces examine the very nature of our lives, from cinema and books to history and religion.
Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.
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Student review by Liam Hoare, Royal Holloway, University of London
The ability to pen essays is an art, a skill possessed by few of the great writers. Postwar, the field seems to have become the preserve of Americans: Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion and Gore Vidal to note but three. In the case of the latter, the reason he is so good – or at least he was prior to his intellectual decline – is because he is able to construct the most erudite and concise sentences: clear, elegant, and powerful.
George Orwell – the best essayist to come from these fair shores – set down in “Politics and the English Language” plain rules regarding how he felt essays should be written, all to do with lucidity and simplicity. “Never use a long word where a short one will do. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. Never use a foreign phase or scientific word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.” Such guidelines must not chiselled in stone and revered like the Ten Commandments, but as a framework Orwell’s suggestions are essential for any essayist.
These rules though are rarely, if ever, adhered to in the work of Jorge Luis Borges, whose eclectic essays have been collected in this new publication headlined by “The Perpetual Race of Achilles and the Tortoise”. Whether writing about the nature of hell or English detective fiction, in a crude attempt at intellectualism his sentences become laden and verbose – in the worst sense of that term – as to make entire paragraphs and pages unfathomable. Whole essays are rendered pointless and inaccessible through his agonising exercises in verbal acrobatics.
That said, it needn’t be necessary to banish Borges entirely. Beneath the smog of pretence that chokes most of his early writings, later hope springs and signs of life are to be found. Borges is at his strongest in the political crucible: when defending the individual, constructing biting polemics against totalitarianism. His thoughts become more directed and succinct – more Orwellian – and this is reflected in the character of his prose and the course his arguments take, as the essays move from
Genesis to Revelations.
“Our Poor Individualism” stands out as the pinnacle within this new collection. “The most urgent problem of our time,” Borges concludes, “is the gradual interference of the State in the acts of the individual; in the battle with this evil, whose names are communism and Nazism.” Written in 1946, we can see in these remarks his steadfast opposition to the contemporaneous Peronist movement: that fatal combination of nationalism and social democracy headed by a corrupt generalissimo and his cheap floozy, his ‘latest flame’.
“Without hope and with nostalgia, I think of the abstract possibility of a party that had some affinity with the Argentine people; a party that would promise a strict minimum of government.” Far from it, Borges’ romantic visions for his Argentina of individuals was crushed in the rotten postwar climate under a jackboot. He was to remain Moses: wandering eternal in the desert, never to set foot on blessed soil.
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