Top shelf biography. I could have done with a little bit less of the Argentine politics; I understand that it is very linked with Borges and his writing, but... still, so well researched and a really comfortable pace. Great job. ( )

A heavily researched but still unsatisfying biography of Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. When he was “discovered” in the 1970s, Borges went from pathetically obscure to darling of college sophomores in the blink of an eye (“Hey, this guy Borges thinks we might just be the dreams of somebody else! How cool is that!”) I confess being as infatuated as my juvenile compatriots, but Borges’ quirky writing still has a hold.


Edwin Williamson’s biography seems to lack pacing. There’s a lot of detailed material on Borges life up to his 30s or so; a sickly and myopic childhood; a family move from Buenos Aries to Geneva, where Borges’ father seems to have forced Borges into a traumatic encounter with a prostitute to “make a man of him”; another family move to Majorca where Borges seems to have established some sort of relationship with another prostitute; and return to Buenos Aries to engage in endless rounds of sterile argument among Argentine intellectuals over which literary theory was correct (without anybody actually writing any literature). After that, Borges settles down to life with his mother (he shared an apartment with her until she died at age 99) and a low paying job as assistant librarian in a suburb. Perhaps he had fewer literary contacts and thus Williamson had fewer sources; the book coasts along until the 1970s, when the now elderly (born 1899) Borges is suddenly “discovered” by the international literary world. He won a series of literature prizes and served as a visiting professor at several American universities. There was a falling-out with literary friends over his apparent support of the Chilean military junta, and he eventually retired to Geneva where he died in 1986.


Williamson’s treatment is less of a life of Borges and more of an attempt to psychoanalyze him. He focuses a lot on the women in Borges’ life. Admittedly there are some strange things going on. The younger Borges would never be mistake for a Latin matinee idol; he was ultra-myopic and wore glasses with perfectly round frames and “Coke bottle” lenses. He had a tendency to fall head over heels for unobtainable women; the novelist Norah Lange; her sister Haydée; and various society ladies. Williamson contends the Norah Lange affair was especially traumatic; she was never serious about him while he was heartbreakingly serious about her. Lange was of Scandinavian ancestry and a flaming redhead; Williamson claims references to redheaded women in Borges stories were all flashbacks to her. Perhaps; but perhaps they’re just redheaded women in a story; the main story (The Aleph) Williamson cites as evidence was written many years after the affair with Norah Lange was over. In another sad affair, Borges had a brief relationship with Elsa Astete in 1930; then, 14 years later and after she was long married he wrote her a few passionate love letters; then, 23 years after that and at the urging of his mother, he married the now widowed Elsa. The marriage lasted three years – Elsa didn’t fit in with Borges friends and academic career. He had a fling with the much younger Estella Canto in 1944; and again in 1949; and again in 1955; Canto noted that Borges was so heavily dependent on his mother that whenever he and Canto went out he excused himself every half hour to call home. Borges’ last romantic interest was Maria Kodama, who he met when he was a professor and she a student; he was 37 years older. He became quite infatuated and she became his “secretary”; eventually they married in a pagan ceremony in Iceland (divorce from Elsa being illegal in Argentina at the time, but apparently Odin didn’t care) and again in a church service in Geneva shortly before his death. Well, that’s all interesting, and I suppose Williamson makes his case that Borges was a little conflicted about women; but I wonder if the degree of influence on his literary work was a great as Williamson makes it. Williamson has similar takes on other recurring themes in Borges work - knife fights, bravery, books, and tigers – but it seems to me that the effort Williamson makes in tracing these links might have been better used in tracking down more ordinary information. For example, we never learn how the Borges family supported itself during their travels to Europe. Borges senior was a lawyer, but he obviously wasn’t taking a lot of cases in Switzerland. There’s some hint that the family owned some property that they rented out but no real analysis of finances; they were certainly impoverished after Borges’ father died. Similarly, we never learn what was wrong with Borges eyes. Williamson mentions that Borges was severely myopic, and that he had “several” cataract operations even while young (Iwas initially a little puzzled how you can have more than one cataract operation per eye, but since having cataract surgery myself I’ve learned that before the advent of intraocular replacement lenses sometimes things didn’t go well) and finally that Borges suffered a detached retina after a fall, but there’s no great detail in what was going on. It’s also never clear exactly how much formal education Borges had. As near as I can tell, he attended a “college” in Geneva, but Williamson doesn’t say what that means – is this like a four-year college, or a high school, or what? And, of course, there are no maps. The book gives a lot of geographic detail – where the literary friends met, the addresses of the apartments where Borges lived, the paths of the long walks Borges liked to take – and a simple street map of Buenos Aires would make this a lot simpler.


Williamson’s use of Borges’s stories to illustrate supposed facets of his life is repetitive to the point of annoyance. Williamson, as mentioned, describes the story The Aleph with the contention that Borges intended it to symbolized the end of his relationship with Norah Lange. Then, a few dozen pages later, Williamson describes the plot of The Aleph again to illustrate some other aspect of Borges’ life. Then he does it again. And again. Borges’ literary output was not that large, but still it seems like Williamson is doing an excessive amount of recycling. One of the things that attracted me to Borges was his use of mathematics – infinite series, recursivity, and set theory – but other than a mention that Borges was fascinated by Zeno’s paradox Williamson never acknowledges this.


Another potential problem is Williamson may have fallen afoul of Borges notorious sense of dry humor. Many of Borges works are cast as reviews of imaginary books or biographies of imaginary authors. Borges is known to have concocted some literary hoaxes; translations of non-existent Arabian Nights stories, for example. I wonder if some of Borges works are deliberate attempts to confuse his trail – especially since his output increased as he got more popular. Williamson claims that Borges’ story The Approach to al-Mu’tasim is a fragment of a never completed autobiographical novel; it may be that Borges told somebody that but reading the story will make you wonder how the hypothetic novel was going to derive from it. It could be that was Borges intention.


There are a lot of interesting details about Borges here, and he was an interesting guy; it’s just not clear that the details give as much insight into Borges’ life as Williamson argues for. A little let psychology and a little more data would have been helpful.
( )

Borges has had quite an interesting life - when taken together with his statement that all of his stories are, in a sense, autobiographical, it adds a lot to ones appreciation of his writings.

He has had a tempestuous and passionate life, living in Argentina throughout most of the 20th century, and hopping along in Europe and the US for a while, too. His life is a story unto itself, and rich enough to provide a background to his inimitable storytelling. ( )

Jorge Luis Borges, the great Argentinean writer, led a fascinatingly diverse life almost entirely within the city limits of Buenos Aires. Buenos Aires was, in the early twentieth century, one of the largest and most cosmopolitan cities on the planet, and so it is fair to say that Borges experienced numerous worlds without needing to leave home. Born in 1899, he was bilingual from the first, as his grandmother was British. His parents were in conflict over Argentinean politics, which perhaps influenced Borges’ seeming non-partisanship in his writing.

Indeed, if there is a problem with Williamson’s Life, it is the reduction of Borges’ life, character and work to this conflict between his parents. Williamson frequently tries to psychoanalyze the life and work in terms of this conflict and, as far as it goes, this provides insight. But did his parents really shape Borges’ entire life? The evidence provided by Williamson himself indicates otherwise.

For instance, there is the matter of Borges’ early love affair with Norah Lange, a Norwegian-Argentinean red-haired beauty who obsessed Borges for nearly a decade in the 1920s and ’30s. Many of Borges’ early poems and stories were shaped by his affair with Lange, and more, by her jilting of him in favor of Oliverio Girondo.

Also, there is the matter of Borges’ politics: throughout his life he consistently opposed the conservatives, whom he thought barbaric (and who, before World War II, were fascists). Though later Borges would insist that his writing was never political, in the ’20s and ’30s he often wrote essays, reviews and editorials from a strongly liberal perspective.What Williamson does best is bust Borges out of the “magical realism” jail he has been placed in by his North American critics. Born in a tough neighborhood of Buenos Aires, the young Borges witnessed the knife fights and gang battles that provided the material for so much of his work (both early and late)—work, however, that is little known in the Anglophone world, at least until recently with the publication of Andrew Hurley’s translation of Brodie’s Report.

This is not to say that Borges wasn’t interested from early on in experiments designed to extend the range of fictional narrative. He seems to have immediately grasped the relationship between history, memory and narrative and the fact that memory and its reportage often serve to “smooth out” or justify history. Borges’ great achievement was to rough up or striate our understanding of memory and history. For this, curiously, Borges never won the Nobel Prize, though he was short-listed for many years.

The reason for not winning the Prize was probably due to the fact that Borges never published a novel and even with his many short stories, he was never an overtly liberationist writer (which is what the Prize committee generally rewards). He did attempt to write novels and several of his greatest stories are in fact synopses or “fake reviews” of novels he seems to have wanted to write. The problem for Borges seems to have been his conception of the novel as “a representation of a time labyrinth”—a conception that served him so well and so famously in his stories seems to have bogged him down in longer works. Instead, the top Prize went to Marquez in 1982, whose novel One Hundred Years of Solitude is clearly in debt to the notion of a “time labyrinth.”

Williamson’s biography is lucid, comprehensive and deeply informed, not only of the life and work of Borges but of all those in his orbit. While Williamson is clearly fascinated by the events and people that shaped Borges’ work, he does not neglect the peripheral material that makes a great life great reading.

[Originally published in Curled Up with a Good Book ] ( )

A fairly good biography, a tad lengthy, but not burdensome. Williamson tells the story in a straight narrative and chronological fashion, a format that I prefer for biographies (and most narrative histories). Williamson presents Borges short stories and poems as an outgrowth of the conflicts in his life: the fight between his father's ancestors and his mother's ancestors; the fight between his father's failed life and his mother's high expectations; the fight between his patrician Latin American self, the underclass of Argentina, and his English grandmother; the fight between his intense love for women who didn't reciprocate and his hatred for those who stole his love or broke his heart. This is all well and good, and Williamson does not make any suppositions out of left-field, but Williamson does not emphasize, enough, Borges intense relationship with books, ideas, words, and epistemology. I mean, I believe that "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" is less about his father (pp. 211, 213, 239) than, to put it in simple terms, the paradox that words are unreal yet buttress our reality. I think, too, that "The Library of Babel" is less about his (ubiquitous) romantic disillusionment (p. 254) than infinity and letters.

Still, I believe Borges was an intensely shy, bookish man who felt nothing but generally unrequited love for amazingly brilliant and hot women his whole life. Man, that Norah Lange really threw him for a loop. We've all been there Jorge.

Thus, though I think that this is an excellent biography of the man Borges, it is only an adequate explanation of Borges the author. Thus, four stars, and, thus I must search for a literary/critical view of Borges (that doesn't make me want to punch random Literature majors). ( )