[In the following review of the Collected Fictions, the writer sees Borges as a “master of intellectual subtleties.”]

A single substantial book of short stories may seem a relatively modest output for a lifetime. But Jorge Luis Borges, the blind Argentine librarian who was probably the greatest 20th-century author never to win the Nobel prize for literature, was one of fiction's most playfully paradoxical spirits, and he would surely have disagreed. For Borges, an immensely erudite man whose whole life was consumed by a passion for books and the idea of bookishness, was a miniaturist who found no virtue in length for its own wearisome sake. He had no desire to write novels, for example. Much better to embed the summary of the plot of a novel within the framework of a paradoxical short story, and thus distil its essence.

Collected Fictions gathers together all the short stories in a single volume, in English, for the first time; later in the year there will be a collection of his poetry, and, finally, a compilation of nonfiction. The last will include essays, and a selection of his considerable output of journalism on the cinema—he wrote extensively about Charlie Chaplin, for example.

Borges's first collection of stories, A Universal History of Iniquity was published in Spanish in 1935, but he did not make it into print in the English language until 1948—in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, it was not until 1960, by which time he had written the best of his fiction, that a full selection of his stories was published in the English-speaking world—and immediately acclaimed by the likes of John Updike and John Barth.

The talent of this man was immediately recognised to be odd, brilliant, inimitable, as distinctively different in its own way from almost anything that had gone before as Franz Kafka's had been.

What exactly is Borges's way of writing? It is an intellectually beguiling mixture of fantasy and erudite detective fiction, all spiced up with games-playing, wit and paradox. Every word, each small detail, counts. Stories come tricked out with erudite references to literary matters. But these are never presented in order to dazzle us with recondite knowledge alone. In fact, they are often fake references, clues only within an elaborate game.

One of the curiosities of Borges is that his stories often read as though they had been written in English in the first place. Why does this syntax seem to resemble our own so closely, we ask ourselves, somewhat bemused?

This is not wholly surprising. Borges was raised by an English nanny and an English grandmother, and he had a life-long passion for English literature. Robert Louis Stevenson and G. K. Chesterton were among his favourites.

Generally speaking, his best stories were written between 1940 and the mid-1950s—such models of laconic precision and scrupulous economy as “The Lottery in Babylon”,“The Library of Babel”, and “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”. The first two take place within fantastically absurd, hermetically sealed worlds of the imagination. The rules of the Babylonian lottery are like no other, and include the unusual notion of a “negative draw”—which means imprisonment or death for the unlucky winner. In “Pierre Menard”, the story's central character sets himself the heroic task of writing—not rewriting—a great epic word for word. In this case, it is Cervantes's Don Quixote.

These stories reveal Borges at his most characteristic, using the most rigorous logic in the service of the most bizarre and illogical propositions. His self-conscious artfulness as a writer, his relentless examination through writing of the very idea of fictionality, has influenced Nabokov, Malraux, Foucault and many others.

The very last story in this book, among his best and translated into English for the first time, is about a man who is offered the gift of the memory of William Shakespeare and, believing it to be the greatest gift that a literary man could ever be vouchsafed, accepts with eagerness. The consequence is less good than he had imagined. There was a profound difference, he discovers, between Shakespeare the man and Shakespeare the writer. He had been offered the memory of the man. The great writer surpassed his mere manhood in his writing. A lovely, subtle point, and one so typical of this great and enduring master of intellectual subtleties.