Borges leaves you truly maddening deeply

The Total Library: Non-Fiction 1922-86 By Jorge Luis Borges (Allen Lane, #20) Reviewed by Chris Dolan

DURING the Neruda retrospective at the Edinburgh Book Festival three years ago, Basque author Bernardo Atxaga sidled up to me and whispered: "Give me Borges any day". I understood the sentiment - and why it had to be uttered under the breath. Borges isn't as sexy as Neruda. His fiction is quiet and sharp and devilishly clever. Neruda's is big and sweeping and lusty.

This collection of Borges's non-fiction, however, had me running back to Neruda for forgiveness. A selection of 161 articles, reviews and speeches, it is a truly maddening affair. The appealing fragments are short and scrappy, the unappealing prose verbose and sometimes impenetrable.

For the Borges completist there is much that sheds light on his work - his fascination for the Kabbalah, for the fictions within fictions of the One Thousand and One Nights. He is fascinated by defunct systems of thought - and his knowledge of them is breathtaking. In an essay on the invention of a 13th century thinking machine he comments "its futility does not diminish its interest". That's endearingly pure Borges. He attacks Charlie Chaplin's 1931 film, City Lights, with: "Its lack of reality is comparable only to its exasperating lack of unreality."

Such stuff is fun and flattering to the reader's minor-league erudition in the same way as trying your luck at University Challenge is.

Sometimes, though, the game gets spiteful. You get a mental picture of Jorge the Bibliographer, tucked away in the dusty basement of the Argentine National Library, scorning us lesser beings who inhabit the prosaic world outside. If you don't speak German, Latin, Italian and French, Jorge's not going to help you out by translating his quotes (thankfully the editors do).

If it's slipped your memory that Quesada is Don Quixote's real name (a rather Borgesian notion, if you'll permit) you'll be lost for the rest of the essay. The thesis that gives its name to the collection, The Total Library, would no doubt be fathomable if you're prepared to spend a week up to your oxters in the OED, a Bible Concordance, The Golden Bough, and the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica. But, to this reader at least, it didn't seem worth the trouble.

But his irascible venom can be fun. A book he's never found the urge to return to has "huddled in the same corner, reading itself for years". He snipes at French film-makers who don't wish to resemble their American counterparts: "a risk, I assure them, they do not run".

The film reviews are fascinating snapshots across more than half a century, and Hollywood itself gets it in the neck regularly. Directors are stupid and dull or, more damningly, "don't always lack talent". The entire industry "has defamed Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde three times now".

He's big on our Robert Louis. He cites him, along with Jules Verne and the One Thousand and One Nights, as his greatest ever literary joys. He quotes RLS all over the shop, knows his Robert Burns, and draws a startling comparison between the French Academy and Celtic culture. I felt like a schoolboy getting a headteacher's gold star whenever the Great Man confirmed an opinion.

He dismisses The Thirty Nine Steps as a dull book but good film, Citizen Kane as a work of genius but one you don't want to watch twice. King Kong, even back then, looked tacky to him. He vindicates my respect for Julio Cortazar's short stories. Unexpectedly, he is as bewildered by Finnegan's Wake as I am. He deplores, in a 1945 film review, the relatively recent habit of dubbing films into foreign languages: "A monster that combines the face of Greta Garbo with the voice of Aldonza Lorenzo."

AMID his intellectual tilting at windbags and his divining the redundant (regarding the Kabbalah, he talks of studying it "to absurdity") there are intriguing snippets.

The committed politico Neruda, apart from the odd reversal, basked in civic eminence. Borges largely suffered for his agnosticism. Shut out during the Peron years, his late reinstatement was clouded by the onset of blindness. He spoke out much more directly than I would have imagined against fascism and racism, especially for such an avowed Germanophile. Yet there's a rather sad remark he makes the day Paris was liberated, surprising himself with the "discovery that a collective emotion can be noble". In an early extract, the author counsels against believing everything you read. When he states "the true intellectual refuses to take part in contemporary debates" it's hard not to get exasperated.

Amass the opinions and notions of any individual - especially those of such a brilliant and factious savant as Borges - over more than 60 years, and you're bound to end up with a cornucopia of contradictions, oddities, freshness and anachronisms. If you don't know Borges's work, skip this for the moment and go straight to his fantastically inventive fictional work, his magnificent poetry.

For the devotee, The Total Library is strong beer - dark, bitter and headache-inducing. But you can always take a restorative sip once in a while of Neruda's tonic wine.

Chris Dolan's most recent novel is Ascension Day

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