Oscar Hijueols' intro to Jorge Luis Borges' “The Aleph”.

I FIRST ENCOUNTERED 'THE ALEPH" BY THE GREAT ARGENTINE WRITER Jorge Luis Borges one afternoon over twenty years ago, in 1973-I believe- when I was down on the Lower East Side visiting a friend, a young Armenian intellectual, such as one might meet at City College in those days. While he fiddled about in his kitchen (or walked his dog, or pleaded/conversed with his girlfriend on the telephone), I sat on his itchy, cat-haired, roach-egged couch, idly riffling through a pile of books that I had pulled from his shelves, among them a mildewed, jaundiced-looking, much-read-over pocketbook edition of THE ALEPH AND OTHER STORIES by Borges. Now, just a few days earlier I had been informed about the results of an aptitude test I had taken, the upshot being that I was apparently most suited for the profession of accounting. That well may have been my destiny, but I am happy (unhappy?) to report that the experience of reading "The Aleph" for the first of many times had a great effect upon me and my future; I have loved and will always love that story-and I will always be indebted to Borges for having written it-because, aside from its many wonderful qualities, it will always hold a special meaning for me: quite simply, "The Aleph" is the story that first inspired in me the desire to one day write.

As for the story itself, "The Aleph" is part love tale, told in a voice that is both obsessively introspective and delicately urbane; it has an undertone of near horror, like a ghost story-as in an Edgar Allan Poe tale the object of the narrator's love, Beatriz Viterbo, exerts a great power long after she has been dead; it has a quite visual, nearly cinematic, narrative that is a pleasure to read. Ironically, Borges, who suffered from a hereditary progressive blind-ness, had often spoken about the influence of film upon his writing. In the economy and vividness of its details, it is instructive to young writers-note how effortlessly Borges suggests the shifting universe by opening with a most introspective and bemused narrator noticing yet another new brand of Ameri-can cigarette being advertised on the billboards of Constitution Plaza in Buenos Aires. And it is quite funny-especially to writers-when, for example, the narrator, Borges himself, muses over the critical success of a decidedly second-rate talent, Carlos Argentino Daneri, who to the narrator's cha-grin has risen to the top of the poet's profession while the narrator has not.

For a final note; without betraying the essence of the story, which is the "Aleph" itself, nor this story's spectacular climax, I will leave the reader with my sense that in this work, as in certain others-"Funes, the Memorious," for example-Borges is really writing about and paying tribute to the writer's consciousness, which, through its command of and access to the imagination and language, can contain and replicate everything that has existed or will ever exist in this universe.

From YOU’VE GOT TO READ THIS. The following is the introduction by Oscar Hijueols to Jorge Luis Borges story “The Aleph”.