Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism | Borges, Jorge Luis - Alberto Manguel (essay date 2000)

Alberto Manguel (essay date 2000)

SOURCE: “An Endless Happiness,” in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 5055, February 18, 2000, pp. 12-3.

[In the following essay, Manguel argues that Borges's significance as a writer derives from his delight in language and his faith in literature.]

The visible work of Jorge Luis Borges may appear daunting (the citations, the obscure and illustrious names, so many of them apocryphal, the apparently abstruse subjects), but his legacy, I believe, is less in his erudite writing than in his companionable approach to literature. Borges was, as he often said, more of a reader than a writer, someone who not only told stories but transformed them through his perception. At a time when the electronic media insist on the value of speed over depth and instantaneous communication over past reflection, Borges reminds us that the craft of reading is a slow, quiet and endless happiness, a memorable...

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