Book of a lifetime: Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges

From The Independent archive: Richard Gwyn learns from Borges that instead of writing big books, we can just pretend that they exist, with the potential for an infinity of outcomes

The Argentine author in Rome in 1982 (Keystone/Getty)

When it came to settling on a single book, in the end it had to be Borges – and it had to be this one.

Other books have had a powerful impact on me, but none marked a turning point in my understanding of the world and the written word in quite the same way. I first read these stories at the age of 18, while living in an abandoned shepherd’s hut halfway up a mountain in Crete. I had found the spot by chance while exploring an empty stretch of beach, and moved in for the summer.

I had just consumed The Brothers Karamazov and The Magic Mountain in rapid succession, and the brevity and intensity of Borges’s writing came as a revelation. Borges himself had something to say about big novels: “It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books – setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them.”