Exactly as the title foreshadows, I found myself quickly getting lost in Jorge Luis Borges’ Labyrinths. The first definition Google provides for labyrinth is “a complicated, irregular network of passages or paths in which it is difficult to find one’s way; a maze.” Fittingly, I found Borges’ narrative style to be at times complicated, meandering, or just misleading. I found myself needing to read sentences or passages more than once – usually several times over. And even when I felt that I was properly following the storyline, I’d come across a passage that would make me question my understanding of what came before. In this way, both frustratingly and amusingly, I felt like I was navigating a real labyrinth consuming Borges’ work. I’d like to think this was his exact intention.

Despite feeling occasionally uncertain, I really enjoyed the reading journey Labyrinths led me down. The stories were unusual and unexpected yet vivid and compelling. In each, I am positive something significant or interesting completely flew over my head. But, again, faithful to the title, I think the stories were written to provide unique paths for every reader and allow certain details to go unexamined upon your first pass. Typically in a maze, people will walk up and down the same corridors repeatedly in the process of way-finding, and in this same way, I expect multiple reads of Borges’ text to be necessary to reveal all the nuanced mysteries.

Before reading this text, I had known Borges to be associated with the genre of “magical realism,” but upon finishing, I was surprised that scientific-fiction (sci-fi) wasn’t a more affiliated style. The short stories were full of incredible invention, science, mathematics, physics, and philosophy. Certain passages were so formal and academic – almost mathematical – that I sometimes felt a rigorous background in these topics was needed to properly appreciate what was being said.

Throughout, Borges remained faithful to the themes of time, plurality, and importantly, labyrinths. In many of his stories, Borges completely deconstructs my understanding of time and introduces extraordinary layers of possibility in each narrative. I couldn’t help but be reminded of the way Rick Riordan describes the Labyrinth in the fourth novel of the Percy Jackson series; a self-aware, self-expanding maze that bends time and has a fragile relationship to reality. Similarly, Labyrinths felt like an infinitely vast, infinitely layered maze, with supernatural intelligence. There is one quote in the very first short story that I think perfectly reflects the text’s enormity: “This plan is so vast that each writer’s contribution is infinitesimal. At first it was believed that Tlön was a mere chaos, an irresponsible license of the imagination; now it is known that it is a cosmos and that the intimate laws which govern it have been formulated, at least provisionally” (8).

Question for discussion: Do you think Borges could have achieved the same maze-like reading journey in a single narrative arc rather than across multiple short stories/essays?