The Book of Sand

The best stories cannot be cut by a sentence. “El libro de arena” is a lesson in geometry, a sale, an obsession and a disposal, each in a paragraph or two, and its ending in the Biblioteca Nacional is required by the arithmetic of the infinite with which it opens. “El espejo y la máscara” is built in threes, and its third term is necessary to the first two; “Undr” keeps the same law. The book as a whole passes less well. “El soborno” is an academic anecdote the book could lose without losing a thought; “La noche de los dones” says what Borges had said before of memory and initiation; “Utopía de un hombre que está cansado” is in part a catalogue; and “El Congreso”, long by Borges’s measure, runs loose in its middle before the ending gathers it.

Score: 7.9 / 10

The disclosures can be stated. In the title story the infinite, which the earlier Borges held as a delight of the intellect and built as a cosmos in “La biblioteca de Babel”, arrives as a physical object in a flat in Buenos Aires, and it is unbearable: its owner cannot sleep, fears it, and can only lose it among other books. That is true of a mind that has spent itself on the infinite, and of an old age that wants a finite world. “El otro” discloses that a man cannot speak to his own youth; “El Congreso”, that a body representing all humanity becomes the world and dissolves; “Ulrikke” admits love, late and as image. Held here because these disclose one condition, the old age of a mind, more than a social one, and several restate what Ficciones and El Aleph found first.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Height comes in a few places, and coldly. The title story climbs by dimension from its first sentence, “La línea consta de un número infinito de puntos” (the line consists of an infinite number of points), to a book whose first page cannot be found and whose numbers do not repeat: a true terror made of a household object. In “El espejo y la máscara” each poem rises above the last, and the third, never quoted, is sublime because it is withheld. “Undr” ends on one word found after a lifetime; “El Congreso” closes on a long drive through Buenos Aires, the book’s one warm height. “There Are More Things” builds real dread from furniture no human body could use, in a borrowed manner. Between these, “El soborno” and “Avelino Arredondo” do not rise, so the frequency is middling.

Score: 8.1 / 10

Here the book’s invention is strongest, because Borges builds myths rather than borrowing them. The book of sand is a made archetype, a Bible without a first page sold by a Bible-seller, and it has passed into common use as the figure of the infinite text. The one-sided disc of Odin in “El disco”, owned by a king in rags and sought in vain by his killer, is a fable of the sacred object no one can hold. “Undr” and “El espejo y la máscara” build one pattern on Norse and Irish ground: the poem that is a single word, the poem that is the end of poetry. “El otro” builds the double from Borges himself, and the myth bears weight. Held below the gate because several of these are variations on one figure, and some, Sigurd and Brynhild in “Ulrikke”, the house of “There Are More Things”, are evoked more than built.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The departure is from Borges’s own manner. The dense, erudite fiction of the 1940s, with its footnotes and invented scholarship, gives way to dictated tales in a deliberately plain style, oral in rhythm, carrying the old themes without the apparatus. For a famous writer whose manner had become a school, that was a stake. But the turn had been made five years before, in El informe de Brodie, whose prologue set out the programme; here it is applied rather than risked, and the themes, the double, the infinite, the sacred word, the sect, are his own proven ones. Against the Spanish-language story of 1975, after the Boom, this is the late work of the writer the Boom had swerved from. A wager on a proven path is not a swerve, and much of this book is that wager, placed well.

Score: 7.6 / 10

In the best stories the brevity is the knowledge. “El libro de arena” can know the infinite as an object only because it is short: a longer tale would explain it, and its terror depends on its stopping. “El espejo y la máscara” knows the ascent of poetry through its three-part form, the fairy-tale triple that makes the third term fatal. “El otro” is a dialogue of two speakers who are one man, a form that can exist only as a short scene. The collection adds less. Its order means something, the double first and the infinite last, the self at the opening and the world at the close, but the middle is an assortment, and nothing in the book’s form changes what “El soborno” or “Avelino Arredondo” knows.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Evidence first, over fifty years. The title story and “El otro” have been returned to by readers, critics and philosophers, and they keep yielding: the book of sand as an emblem of hypertext, of the archive, of the infinite in a finite room; “El otro” read beside “Borges y yo” and “25 de agosto, 1983” as a sustained meditation on the self as two. “El Congreso” holds more than its length shows and has had serious attention. The rest has been read less, and some of it, “La Secta de los Treinta” and “Undr”, yields mostly through its relation to stories in Ficciones and El Aleph. The criticism of Borges is vast but gathers on the earlier books; this one is returned to through two or three stories, and the axis records that.

Score: 8.0 / 10

The field is fiction in Spanish, and the short story wherever it was read, in the 1970s. The intrinsic force is modest: the book showed that the metaphysical tale could be told plainly, without the scaffold of invented scholarship, and it confirmed the late manner, but it does not reorganise what a story can do, as Ficciones did. Delayed influence through the title story is credited, and it is concentrated in one piece. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: “El libro de arena” is one of the most cited fictions in the discourse on digital and infinite text, its figure known well beyond readers of the book, and “El otro” is widely anthologised; but writers who follow Borges follow the Borges of 1941 to 1949, not this one, and the field was not redirected.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Fifty-one years. Form: the text survives whole as published in 1975, with no question of its authority, and Borges’s prose carries no surface fixed to its moment. Presence is continuous: the book has stayed in print in Spanish, in the collected works and in single editions; it stands entire in Hurley’s Collected Fictions; it has been widely translated. The charge is on presence, which is uneven. The title story and “El otro” live across the culture, as present as any Borges. The book as a book is read much less than Ficciones, El Aleph or El hacedor, and most of its stories are known chiefly to readers of the complete Borges and to the academy. That unevenness holds the figure a step down; the two stories keep it above the bar of the gate.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Judged on Borges’s Spanish. The late plain style is a command, not a lapse: short sentences, few adjectives, a voice that sounds dictated and is, with the comic dryness and the exact placing of a strange word that are his signature. The last paragraphs of the title story, where the narrator considers burning the book, does not, and hides it instead on a shelf of the Biblioteca Nacional, are as controlled as anything he wrote. “El espejo y la máscara” has the cadence of a saga; “El otro” carries its double’s dialogue without a false step. Held well below the summit on three charges: some stories are perfunctory in finish, “El soborno” and parts of “Utopía”; “There Are More Things” imitates a manner, and its inventory of the incomprehensible is weaker than the earlier lists; and the plainness sometimes thins to summary.

Score: 8.4 / 10

One law governs most of the book: a thing of infinite or sacred weight enters a finite life and ends it, or is lost. The book of sand, the disc, the third poem, the word Undr, the Congress that becomes the world, the self met on a bench: each is an absolute a man cannot keep. Take the two most distant pieces, “El libro de arena” and “Avelino Arredondo”, whose assassin shuts himself away for months before his act. They obey a version of the same law, a single act prepared in seclusion, an absolute in a small room, but it takes some stretching to say so, and “El soborno” and “Utopía” stand further off. The voice holds the whole across Norse saga, Irish court, Texas faculty and Buenos Aires flat, and that is a real range held.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Judged on what a slim book of short stories holds. Consciousness and the self across time, in “El otro”. Love, once, late and doubted, in “Ulrikke”. The sacred and poetry, many times. Politics and history in “Avelino Arredondo” and in the Irish and Norse fables; the future of society in “Utopía”; institutions in “El Congreso” and “El soborno”; death throughout. The range across ages and places is wider than most collections hold. What keeps the axis at the foot of the twelve is that each order is touched in a story of a few pages, from one vantage, an old scholar’s, and that the family, labour and the social world of any one time are glimpsed or absent. A low mark on a small form describes the form.

Score: 7.2 / 10