"The Form of the Sword" by Jorge Luis Borges

 

"To read Borges is to have your head squeezed by lemons," said a friend of mine recommending mind-bending titles to me.

What did I know back then? What do I know now?

Borges is like a haunted house. You dread entering into it, but curiously enough, you do enter. And once you're in, you're trapped for good.

The Form of the Sword is a short story from Ficciones. It's about an Irishman recalling the events of how he got the scar on his face... with a twist.

[spoilers ahead]

The way I read it, I believe it's a story about guilt and how it metaphorphs the guilty person into someone they are not, sometimes, into their complete opposite. We can see why Borges chose this particular way to tell the story, to let the narrator tell his own story through the eyes of someone else. It's a sensible technique to use for storytelling when it comes to guilt and self-disgust. 

What I didn't like about the story is how straightforward it ended. It could've been done subtly for a doubled effect.

"Funes, the Memorious" by Jorge Luis Borges

 

One of the stories from the short story collection "Ficciones" by Jorge Luis Borges.  It's about a boy named Ireneo Funes who became crippled after he fell from a horse but became blessed or cursed by a prodigious memory. Funes doesn't recall his memories like you and me, his photographic memory allows him to revisit his past and experience it in great detail, a process that "the visual image is linked to muscular and thermal sensations".

This is the first story I've ever read by Borges. I have to admit, his style can be a bit of a challenge, but the reading experience is highly rewarding. There's something eerie and haunting and even sad about the way he unfolds the story to his readers. 

In this story, for example, Borges tries to imagine the consequences of having a highly superior autobiographical memory, of being affected by something extraordinary, by something limitless... by infinity. It's like Borges was trying to compare humanity to divinity. Thus, the question: What is it that defines humans?

To answer this question, Borges makes a juxtaposition of what is normal and what is not by contrasting the narrator's normal memory and the Übermensch memory of Funes. In the story, Borges paints Funes as a superman, someone inhuman, endowed with an ability that many of us would like to have. However, towards the ending, I couldn't help but detect a kind of sympathy and sorrow from the narrator towards Funes, especially when he tells us that "he suspects that Funes is not capable of thought because to think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract."

This sentence took me a while to understand. What if, one might ask, I think about details, for instance, a dog? Borges would ask, "what kind of a dog it was? what color? what pattern did it have?  What movement did it make? etc". Borges is trying to say that fully retaining a specific memory is impossible. Our memories are bad knockoff Rolexes of the real thing, that's if not the thing itself is wholly made up. It's a matter of semiotics. Because even though, by some means, you managed to recall it 100%, it isn't the real thing.

Bottom line, according to Borges, we humans are unique,  because we forget. That's what separates us from gods. We are not ideal. We are a plethora of many things, but we are not only one thing. 

When I read the story my mind drifted to Tool's Lateralus: "To swing on the [infinite] spiral of our divinity and still be a human". We highly regard infinity and aspire to it because (a) we cannot fathom it and that's why the idea of it is alluring and awe-inspiring, and (b) because we are the complete opposite... but that's what defines us.

"XX" by Rian Hughes

 

It's big and bold, like really BIG and bold, and it has gone where no man has gone before... quite literally.  

I've always been a sucker when it comes to postmodern ergodic literature. Experimental works such as Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves, Steven Hall's The Raw Shark Texts, J. J. Abrams's S. — to mention a few. That's the reason why I didn't hesitate when I saw it on Amazon even though it's a mammoth of a book, closing in on 1000 pages. When it arrived, I couldn't pull my eyes away from it: the layout, the design, the texts, however quirky and surreal they were. I was simply in love. 

In simple words [NO SPOILERS HERE], XX is about a signal of extraterrestrial origin that gets picked up by Earth, the attempts of decoding it, and the ramifications that follow.

The book, however, isn’t about mankind’s first contact with the third kind, but rather about the impact of such an encounter on humans politically and socially, which stresses issues of racism, refugees, immigrants, and gender. That’s how the book is so relevant and real to the modern reader, despite its over-the-top indulgence in fantasy.

Overall, the plot is linear, not in the sense of moving from point A to Z per se. There are subplots, and hordes of articles and wiki pages and interviews and letters and drawings and musical notations in between. But if you exclude all that, you'll get a nice story and a very deep one that manages to reduce the whole of human existence into a simple theme — ideas. In this regard, Rian Hughes is the Hideo Kojima of the written word. The guy introduces you to a new idea, then another, then another. Reading XX felt like playing Death Stranding or watching Inception. It was a breath of fresh air.

The characters are likable, in a way, but they aren't that striking, especially when I was about two-thirds through. They felt kinda flat and their interactions seemed inane and mannered. [SPOILER ALERT: No. I'm not talking about the AIs or the aliens or even Dana]. I'm talking about our human companions, Jack, Harriet, and Nixon. That's one of the many reasons why I shelved the book before managing to finish it.

The prose is purple. It's heavy. It's technical. And it doesn't flow naturally. But Hughes doesn't leave his readers behind. He tends to wrap up the key ideas occasionally in a manner that is meaningful, poetic, and reductive. 

Summary: 

XX showcases the excruciating amount of hard work and thought behind it. It's a grand tribute and a love letter to ideas, to the written word, to books. However, the book starts with a promise but fails to deliver. It's the kind of book that I'd recommend for a niche audience of die-hard sci-fi fans. Don't get me wrong. It's a great book, but it could've been a hell of a great book if it was edited properly.