Borges: A Life

by Edwin Williamson

Book Overview

Short story writer, essayist, and poet Jorge Luis Borges (1899?1986) revolutionized the literature of Latin America almost single-handedly and left a legion of readers and admirers worldwide.Based on an unprecedented range of interviews and on research into previously unknown or unavailable resources, this is the first biography in any language to encompass the entire span of Borges?s life and work. In Borges, Edwin Williamson brings to life the little...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0670885797
• ISBN13: 9780670885794
• Release Date: August 2004
• Publisher: Viking
• Length: 592 Pages
• Weight: 2.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.5" x 1.5" x 6.5"

Customer Reviews

Charming and delighful

From his early days as an Ultraista to the latter years when he served at the helm of Argentina's most prestigious library, Borges, as defined by Williamson, was himself a work in progress, his life that of a book under constant revision, even though the cover remained the same. Williamson's take on "Georgie" is sincere, playing to the sympathies of the reader. In his attempt to flesh out Borges the man versus Borges the writer, Williamson may have proven once and for all that Borges' life was the real work of fiction.

Deserved, definitive but tedious

I have read all of Borges' ficciones multiple times in translation and I consider him one of the most important writers of the last century. That's easy: there is a case to be made that he is, or will eventally be seen as, the most important writer - his familiarity with ancient texts, islamic matters and philosophical puzzles makes his stories seem far more contemporary, as we move further into the 21st century, than the works of authors to whom postwar scholars usually award that level of accolade. I found this book to provide useful critical insights that greatly enhanced my understanding of Borges' work. That said, it was awfully ironic that an author whose works rarely exceeded 10 pages in length and who frequently made fun of pedantic academic men and their works is memorialized by a biography of this length and detail. It seemed as if the governing principle of the book was to incorporate every scrap of paper the author had found concerning Borges's life, and he was not to be deterred. I would have thought the first 150 pages or so, covering a period during which none of his stories were written, could have been condensed to about 50, and that is being generous; Borges himself might have done it in 5 to 10. Is there not a biography to be written of Borges that narrates events with the same economy as his own stories reflect? He loved, the woman was important to him, the love was reciprocated for a time, but ultimately the woman did not maintain the relationship - ok, that is good to know, and certainly the hunt for the impact of the relationship in the stories is justifiably at the heart of the biography, but must we be presented with entire chapters devoted to each year of the relationship? The detail adds little to an understanding of the stories; it is neither novel nor particularly entertaining; and, as noted, such level of detail is fundamentally at odds with the aesthetics of the subject of the biography. If there is ever another edition, a severe edit would be of great assistance to future readers.

Dreaming of a weaver of dreams

Borges famously wrote that all he'd been was a weaver of dreams. Williamson's life of Borges shows him to have dreamt copiously through his long existence. He was a wreckless public speaker who loved to drop bombs in interviews and was unafraid to court controversy. He started his literary life as an ensign of the avant-garde and a bolshevik sympathiser. He morphed into a cultural nationalist, an admirer of the cut-throats of the barriadas, the knife-men of the Pampas and of old-fashioned milongas and tangos (he even wrote a few). He was remarkably clear-sighted about the awfulness of Argentinian fascism, headed by the indestructible General Peron and was a philo-semite. He later endorsed several dictatorships both in Argentina and abroad because he regarded them as the lesser evil (and he might have been right, although it probably cost him his Nobel prize). But he opposed the torture and vanishings of the Dirty War and he decried the manipulation of popular sentiment that General Galtieri achieved when he chose to invade the Malvinas (Falklands). He ended his life as mystical agnostic and chose to die in his second fatherland, Geneva. Having read several Borges biographies I was surprised at the considerable links between his life (especially his sentimental life) and his work. Williamson teases the meaning of many obscure lines in Borges's work, by showing how they emanated from specific experiences, usually negative. This approach, while frequently enlightening, occasionally has its limitations. This biographer attempted to show that virtually everything Borges ever wrote , said or thought (at least until he met Maria Kodama, in the early 1970s) was a consequence of a battle in his head, between his mother ("the sword of honor") and his father ("the dagger of the compadrito"). While this framework can be enlightening, Williamson is so exhaustingly repetitive at flogging this horse, that the reader ends up feeling rather like someone who is accosted in a bar by a tiresome drunk who just goes on and on about some pet peeve. An insight is not a worldview, Mr. Williamson! Also, some of the chapters repeat themselves almost word for word, as if though the author had forgotten what he wrote before. The reader, alas, like Funes the Memorious, cannot forget and is therefore tempted to gloss over these bits. I was also surprised not to see any reference to Naipaul's essay "The Return of Eva Peron". Naipaul met Borges, interviewed him and also reviewed his work in a very lucid fashion. Surely the thoughts of one of the greatest living writers about one of his predecessors would have been of some interest? The conclusion is that Borges definitive life in English (such as Boyd's life of Nabokov) remains to be written. While that happens, this is a better place to start than most. I give the book four stars because it has rekindled my old love for the Master's work. I think I'll dip into it in the next few weeks.

The second best biography available

Jorge Luis Borges famously wrote that all literature is autobiographical, something so true in his own case that I had my doubts whether his any biography of him could tell us any more than his literature. After all, there isn't much compelling about Mr. Borges' life aside from his writing: he lived at home with his mother until she died when he was 75 years old, and he boasted about not venturing beyond his bedroom and his father's library for days at a time. Without a doubt, Mr. Borges' extremely original work is far more interesting than his seemingly unimaginative life. All that made for a challenging assignment for biographer Edwin Williamson, who pulled it off surprisingly well. Mr. Williamson certainly did his leg work: he apparently read everything Mr. Borges wrote short of his laundry lists, and he talked to scores of people who knew Mr. Borges when he was alive. But the most interesting parts of this book's 384 pages was still the examination of the literature, where Mr. Williamson convincingly reveals how much of the great writer's work was an elaborate code hiding his personal suffering coming from failed loves, and a feeling of inadequacy in regard to his mother, who all but worshipped the heroes of the Argentine independence movement in her family line. But that is about as close as Mr. Williamson comes to uncovering Mr. Borges' inner self. He could have come a bit closer had he not left out several important facts that must have been easy to come by: Mr. Borges' finally found love with former student María Kodama, who was many years younger than the writer. But Mr. Williamson doesn't tell us how much younger. Additionally, Mr. Borges' well-known and important (but puzzling) estrangement from his boyhood friend Adolfo Bioy Casares gets only a passing mention. And Mr. Borges' political naïveté and confusion -- he called Argentina's dictatorship of the mid-1970s to the early 1980s a "necessary evil" and he turned his back on his native land by choosing to die in Switzerland -- is chronicled but not explained. It's difficult to judge how much of this is Mr. Williamson's fault. As one of the 20th century's most important and influential writers, Mr. Borges is clearly a worthy subject for a major biography. But the man's private life perhaps means that a worthy biography is impossible. Despite Mr. Williamson's noble effort, the best biography of the enigmatic Argentine may still be his collected works.

Fine Biography

This is a fine biography of the great Argentine writer, Jorge Luis Borges. Williamson's primary goals are to provide a good description of Borges' life and to correlate events of his life with his written works. This good book is the product of both careful research on Borges' life and a sensitive reading of Borges' publications. This book is best appreciated by those with a good familiarity with Borges' fictions and poetry. Penguin has recently published excellent collections of Borges' fictions, poetry, and non-fiction writing. If you haven't read Borges for a while, reading Williamson's biography in tandem with parts of the Penguin collections is a good experience. Williamson does a particularly good job of pointing out the parallels between Borges' personal preoccupations, particularly his search for love, and changes in directions in his work. Borges was a sickly, bookish child who became one of those people who view the world through a highly intellectualized prism. For example, one of his enduring preoccupations was a search for love that would accomplish what Borges thought the love of Beatrice had done for Dante. Borges also had a complex relationship with his parents which also had significant intellectual dimensions and was entangled with his sense of identity as an Argentine. Like many very creative people, Borges was an odd and often unhappy individual who was able to turn some of his personal conflicts and agony into substantial work. Many of the apparently metaphysical themes of his fictions were personal issues for Borges. Williamson does an excellent job of illuminating Borges' work. Williamson is also very good on Borges' somewhat convoluted relationship to his home country. As mentioned about, this was bound up with his complex relations with his parents. Borges was often, however, an engaged intellectual. In the 30s, 40s, and 50s, he was an outspoken opponent of the right and of Peron. Some of his stands demonstrated real courage because he spoke out when Peron was at the height of his power. Late in life, unfortunately, his hatred of Peronism led to him to give support to the detestable military dictatorship responsible for the Dirty War. He came to regret this stance and did exhibit some moral leadership in human rights campaigns against the dictators. This will be the standard biography, at least in English, for some time.