This is an ingenious story apparently based on a true event related to an offensive by the British against the Germans in 1916.

It is told in the first person by an Asian called Yu Tsun who is obliged to do something that may result in his death.

He is a German spy.

He talks of having the “Secret”, the name of the exact site of the new British artillery park on the “Ancre”, whatever that is.

He searches his pockets and finds a revolver with a single bullet.

A man called Captain Richard Madden is after him. He is an Irishman in the the service of “England” (I presume he means Britain).

He tells us “with the eyes of a man already dead”. “I contemplated the --- day which would probably be my last”.

He goes to the house of a Dr Stephen Albert.

He is guided by children who tell him he should take the road to the left and bear left at every crossroad.

He knows that this is what to do to find the centre of certain labyrinths.

Yu Tsun is the great grandson of Ts’u Pen, Governor of Yunnan, who wrote a novel and created a maze “in which all men would lose themselves”.

His novel made no sense and nobody ever found the labyrinth/maze.

Yu Tsun comes to the house and Stephen Albert assumes he has come to see the garden of forking paths.

Yu Tsun says “the garden of my ancestor, Ts’ui Pen”.

Stephen Albert has in him “something of the priest and something of the sailor”. He is thus a man with Neptunian qualities (my comment).’

Albert tells Yu Tsun that at Ts’ui Pen’s death they found only “a mess of manuscripts”.

The book was a mass of contradictory rough drafts. The hero dies in the third chapter, while in the fourth he is alive.

No-one could find the labyrinth. “The novel’s confusion suggested that it was the labyrinth.”

Ts’ui Pen had written “I leave to various future times, but not to all, my garden of forking paths.”

In fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives, he chooses one at the expense of the others. But Ts’ui Pen chooses, simultaneously, all of them.

“He thus creates various futures, various times which start others that will in their turn branch out and bifurcate in other times. This is the cause of the contradictions in the novel.”

Albert reads a few pages of the book to Yu Tsun.

The subject of the book is time, but the word itself is not mentioned.

The Garden of Forking Paths is an incomplete picture of the universe.

Yu Tsun kills Albert with his one bullet: In this way the Chief comes to understand that the secret name of the city to be attacked is Albert.

Madden breaks into the house and arrests Yu Tsun, who is condemned to hang.

Personally, I find it strange that there was not any better way to communicate the name of the city than by killing someone. ( )

So, so good. First two stories were solid fives. More Borges please. ( )

‘’Summer was drawing to a close, and I realised that the book was monstrous.’’

Jorge Luis Borges, one of the most prominent Argentinian writers and one of the forefathers of Magical Realism, created stories where everything takes place in a superbly orchestrated, organized chaos. His world is one of mysteries, bookish cyphers and secrets, a blend of mystical tradition and the Occult. In sceneries made of hallucinatory landscapes, labyrinths, mirrors and gardens, philosophers, men of the law, artists enter dark corridors and strange libraries, stepping on the blurry line between the Real and the Fictional.

‘’From the rear of the secluded house within a lantern approached: a lantern that the trees sometimes striped and sometimes eclipsed, a paper lantern that had the form of a drum and the colour of the moon.’’

The Garden of Forking Paths: A story set in WWI, of secret services, strange ancestors, and the unbroken sequence of Cause and Effect.

The Book of Sand: An infinite book, without a first or last page, without a story or characters, leads its unfortunate owner to despair.

The Circular Ruins: A story on the eternal circle of Fate, of our existence and our actions, and the literary immortality of the stories within the stories.

On Exactitude In Science: I doubt you’ll ever read a more bewildering photograph.

‘’Of the many problems which exercised the reckless discernment of Lonnrot, none was so strange - so rigorously strange, shall we say - as the periodic series of bloody events which culminated at the villa of Treste-le- Roy, amid the ceaseless aroma of the eucalypti.’’

Death and the Compass: A story weaved in Kabbala, Jewish tradition, detective puzzles and incarnation.

‘’A yellow, rounded moon defined two silent fountains in the melancholy garden. Lonnrot explored the house. Through anterooms and galleries he passed to duplicate patios, and time after time to the same patio [...] The house is not this large, he thought. Other things are making it seem longer: the dim light, the symmetry, the mirrors, so many years, my unfamiliarity, the loneliness.’’

My reviews can also be found on https://theopinionatedreaderblog.wordpress.com/ ( )

A series of inventive short stories about mazes, philosophical riddles and mysteries, including discussions of metaphysics that pre-date quantum theory. Even with this complexity and intricacy, the stories are surprisingly approachable and enjoyable. This wafer-thin selection did exactly what I hoped it would: it provided me with a taster for an author I thought I would be interested in but was not entirely sure of. I will certainly be picking up something more substantial from Borges, and I'm glad for the fortuitous path that brought me here. ( )