A Companion to Jorge Luis Borges
Steven Boldy
2009, Tamesis
208 pages, hardback
WELL-INFORMED and deploying knowledge and insights accrued from many years of dedicated study, Steven Boldy’s Companion to Jorge Luis Borges will be of considerable interest to aficionados of the great man of letters, aiming to position his writing in the Argentine literary tradition and then contemporaneous domestic and international affairs. It will not be suitable as an introduction to Borges, which Boldy acknowledges in his Foreword by pointing out that the book has been designed for keen readers of his work. It does, however, offer a useful framework for exploring the meaning of his writing, especially Ficciones and El Aleph. Borges remains an enigmatic point of reference for Argentine letters to this day whose significance cannot be underestimated, and Boldy has made a valuable contribution to the corpus of scholarship about a writer who has been able to excite, like none other, the imagination both of his people but also readers universally. – GJ
