Borges always has the ability to mess you up. In the previous review, I spoke to a book of his (also a new edition of one of his classics by Lumen) about the difficulty I have in simply thinking about re-reading a book I liked. It scares me, and that doesn't change, that I read it again and break the spell that was created when I first read it, that I become disenchanted with something I couldn't believe better, that I no longer like. That feeling I had when I opened Fiction for the second time. And no. That feeling I had when I saw myself reopening "El Aleph" . And, thanks to [insert here whoever you believe in], neither. There's a new edition in bookstores, a new book and an exaggerated spacing for me but it won't make it difficult for you to read when you're a kid, to prevent you from reading this summer. Lumen continues with Borges, and we (and I suppose his heirs too) are the lucky ones.
I have always thought, and every time I re-read it more, that in order to read something about Borges you have to have the capacity to doubt yourself, to know yourself imperfectly everywhere, to know clearly that there are people who know more and better than you and who will run you over concepts and references that may not even exist but that you believe them because since you can't or want to contrast them you think they're true. That's Borges in essence. And one can add to it the always prevailing figure of the unreliable narrator, of the cloudy memory, of the dubious memory; of the story as sword and flag, of the stories as a common link between humans, of the book as an absolute and total container.
Each of Borges' stories contains all the others. As if it was a matryoshka, it is to open one of his stories and see that everything is in there, even sometimes you (I think I will never overcome the great surprise that always gives me to see how the narrator of The Aleph addresses you directly when previously in the story has not done so. And I think that's the fear that gives the certainty of knowing that an author, although dead, is always alive. "Borges: the infinite author").
In" El Aleph", which is so-called because of the last of the stories (and for me the best of all Borges' short stories), he gathers 17 stories. They are relatively short stories because they have few pages, but when you read them, they lengthen to the infinite within you. You find in them some of those famous quotes from Borges (one of the few that are on the Internet and that do belong to him) and you realize that taken out of the context of the story are something totally different from what they want to mean in the story ("Don't quote it, read it"). You read stories about stories that can keep you far away from both chronologically and by yourself: ignorance. Borges knows that you won't know what he's talking about but, as if he was a Zen master, he is certain that with what he tells you he will open a gap in you, a gap that will be filled with references, with old stories full of the paranormal (which in his case is something very normal), with references to the circularity of the universe... a gap that not even when the book closes will close. And then Borges is left as a wound, and you only have the option to delve into it, to see if it is possible that looking inside you find the solution to the problem. That's exactly what happens when you read their stories.
Summer is the best time to visit favorite places, to find yourself in that place where you were happy. We are always the months before the holidays thinking about where to go, looking if the figures that appear in our bank account are enough to get where we want to go. And the irony of all this is that many of us who are here, those of us who like this rare and minority activity that is reading, we just need to get the comments a simple blue ticket and desire and time to open a book, pose your eyes on it, move them from left to right for a while and return to whom we were when we read it for the first time. I know that I will never be a writer because I believe that achieving this is only possible if your writing has been built by magic. And Borges is a magician, the great magician of words.