nastya ’s Reviews > Fictions > Status Update

It’s refreshing to read this takedown of a much-admired writer, a writer who seems to enjoy playing abstruse word games instead of telling a straightforward, readable story. As Charles Bukowski wrote, An intellectual I a person who takes a simple idea and says it in a complicated way. A writer is someone who takes a complicated thing and says it in a simple way.” Borges is often more interested in playing word games than in saying something clearly. He is loved by the intellectual elite, who misconstrue this wordplay as profundity and who laud books like William Gass’s ‘The Tunnel, which is 900 or so pages of gobbledegook interspersed with occasionally readable passages that merely serve to demonstrate the Gass is capable of clear and cogent writing but prefers to show off his high intelligence by confounding the reader with his involuted wordplay. David Hume is not the easiest writer to read, but at least he writes with a high-flown clarity and has SOMETHING TO SAY. As Schopenhauer once wrote:

Only he who writes for the sake of what he has to say writes anything at all worth reading.”

Thanks for pointing out that Borges, among many others, is an emperor sans clothing.

I think you have a point. While I like a lot of his stories and poems, he is not among my favorite writers, primarily because I find him so hard to love. His writing, to me, lacks what I would call "heart." It is dry, and cold, and aloof. It is often brilliant, but too often at the expense of the reader's pleasure. As a reader I want to feel a certain camaraderie with the with writer, I want to feel like I'm "getting to know" him or her, but with Borges, unfortunately, I always feel that he is keeping me at arm's length.

Brandon, at the point where I am at with Borges, I agree with you. Very well said about wanting the camaraderie from your writer, and about Borges playing games at the expense of the reader's pleasure. I don’t know, maybe I just have the wrong expectations for fiction. If someone wants something intellectually challenging, there are entire fields, like science, math, philosophy, full of books designed to be hard and stimulating. But is that really why we turn to fiction?
Do people genuinely enjoy literary puzzles just for the sake of it? To feel what, exactly? And I myself enjoy a few of Pynchon books, who is no stranger to playing with his reader, but they have fascinating encyclopedic anecdotes, and anyway, my favorites all have warm beating hearts and a ton of wit. I understand that Borges just has no time for it in a few pages for each stories, but it all just leaves me cold and unamused. Anyway I don’t have the answers yet, there's still time for me to see all the hoopla people express int heir reviews.

Kiekiat wrote: "It’s refreshing to read this takedown of a much-admired writer, a writer who seems to enjoy playing abstruse word games instead of telling a straightforward, readable story. As Charles Bukowski wro..."

Hah, not so much a takedown at this point, Kiekiat, but I am definitely not that impressed. Interesting observation about Gass, i want to try him some day when I finally find his books, but I think I know what you mean. I started two Gaddises and I was tired of them pretty early, to be honest. I think the older I get, the more impatient and fed up I feel with these type of masturbatory exercises, there should be a great reason for me to get through the 1000 pages of your recognitions and not feel that i wasted time in the end. I think I would be much more interested in an exercise like this when I was younger and felt I had a lot to prove to everyone, now there's a motivation :)

That's Borges in a nutshell. :)