He’s somewhat panicked because the expansion of a local café means his house will be torn down.

However, unexpectedly, Carlos calls Borges one night. Borges isn’t about to suggest that anyone write a prologue praising such an awful work. Borges considers it about the dullest thing he’s read, and it’s not improved by Argentino elaborating his style with ever more varied adjectives (like different words for “blue”).Īrgentino initially claimed he didn’t want to publish the work for political reasons (he works at a library), but, eventually, he decides to publish it, and he wants Borges, a writer himself, to approach another writer to do the prologue. He seems to be the sort of writer who imagines the literary praise critics will heap on each line of his work. It’s pretty awful – we get quotes, but it’s certainly ambitious in attempting to accurately describe, in correct poetic form, the geography of Earth.Īrgentino expounds on why each line is so clever in its literary allusions, poetic form, and violations of reader expectation. The visits get longer until, during one, Carlos confides that he’s been working on a massive work of poetry. To get closer to her memory and the places imbued with that memory, Borges develops the ritual of visiting her first cousin Carlos Argentino every year on the anniversary of her death.

The narrator, in fact, is called Borges, and the story starts out by noting the death of one Beatriz Viterbo on April 30, 1929. As you would expect from Borges, this story is chockfull of literary allusions.

Borges aleph