Volume 18, Number 10 · June 1, 1972
Borges's Surprise!
By Michael Wood
Doctor Brodie's Report
by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni
Dutton, 128 pp., $5.95
Selected Poems 1923-1967
by Jorge Luis Borges, edited by Norman Thomas di Giovanni. a bilingual edition
Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, 328 pp., $12.50
Jorge Luis Borges is an artist of anxieties, the author of brief, haunting fictions in which safe assumptions and old habits seem suddenly threatened or are shown up as tenuous and provisional. Or he used to be. For the eleven stories in Dr. Brodie's Report, first published in Spanish in 1970, are offered as just straightforward tales, modeled on those of the early Kipling. His discretion and diffidence, formerly represented by the frequent fussy characters in his fiction, or by the faintly mannered, self-mocking prose, here express themselves as a pretense that the stories somehow got themselves told on their own. The book is full of cautions against literature, against what can happen to good tales in the embellishing and careless hands of literary men; and we are to look for the core, for the myths half-buried in these doubtless belated and falsified versions.
Review, 2697 words
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