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The Widow Ching--Pirate (Penguin Mini Modern Classics) (2000)

by Jorge Luis Borges(Favorite Author)

3.68 of 5 Votes: 3

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English

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review 1: One of the Penguin Mini Modern Classics series, this is like a little collection of curios - five stories displaying different aspects of Borges's writing. Fittingly, there are examples of fantasy recounted with the gravity of history, and history told with the elaboration of fantasy. Three studies focus on lesser-known figures from history: the 'doughty' Widow Ching, who ran a formidable pirate fleet in the seas around China; the New York gang boss Monk Eastman, with his unexpected affection for cats; and the Japanese etiquette master whose arrogance led to the sworn vengeance of the 47 Ronin. The collection rounds off with two more fanciful tales: the story of an encyclopedia which describes an entirely invented world, which threatens to become more real than reality its... moreelf; and the story of a man who sets out to rewrite Don Quixote in the original words. For me, the first three stories in this collection were the most enjoyable: I found the last, on the 'Author of the Quixote', rather baffling because I simply couldn't see the point. Is Borges is making a point about the folly of modernist literary criticism and the arrogance of modern writers? Or, as I always fear with Borges, am I just too daft to understand?!This is a very short taster of Borges - 75 pages in total - but if you haven't read him before, it will introduce you to his erudite and playful approach to the short story. If you are a newcomer, hopefully you'll be tempted to seek out some of his other books, because while this is a fair introduction it doesn't do justice to his imagination. I have to say that I didn't enjoy it as much as Penguin's collections of his longer, more elaborate stories - Labyrinths, for example - but it was at least an introduction to some unfamiliar, but intriguing historical figures.
review 2: There's always an inherent danger in reading Borges as his short fiction carries with it an intrinsic risk of exploding, each story being an impenetrable and enigmatic mass of chaos plucked from the depths of his cavernous imagination and bound in heavy and endless threads of language.This short collection of five stories is no exception. Covering a range of themes-including piracy, thuggery, Japanese etiquette, false knowledge, and unoriginality of art-each story has, at its heart, a brilliant kernel of an idea, to which Borges adds one or more metaphysical twists, and then finally wraps in the referential but labyrinthine language of an academic.If it weren't for his ineluctable qualities of creativity and mystery, I have no doubt his verbosity would put off even the most ardent of readers, but as it stands his stories tantalise, leaving the reader as intrigued as they are uncomfortable, and, above all, absolutely uncertain about what boundaries, if any, should be placed on literature, let alone reality. less

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