“. . . not for nothing am I the great-grandson of that Ts’ui Pen who was the governor of Yunan province and who renounced all temporal power in order to write a novel containing more characters than the Hung Lu Meng and construct a labyrinth in which all men would lose their way . . .”
I know I’m not the first to choose Borges in A Personal Anthology and I doubt I’ll be the last. I thought about not including him for fear of duplicating what others have said, but the fact is that his work has excited and influenced me more than any other writer. ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ is a story that begins like a John Buchan spy tale but becomes a dizzying but equally thrilling contemplation of time and infinite pathways. Reading him for the first time in my late teens I was struck by the way he opened up whole new possibilities for writing beyond the social realism that I was used to reading at that time. The fact that I then spent most of my twenties trying and failing to emulate his style is of course not his fault.
First published 1941; collected in Collected Fictions, Allen Lane 1999
A Personal Anthology 