The Aleph and other stories - J.L. Borges

Notes:

• The collection contains 17 fictions. A full page has 39 lines, each line has roughly 13 words, which leads to the average fiction being some 3.000 words long. The median fiction is 2.500 words long;
• Merkmal 1: Short stories are built around one single, simple, paradoxical idea. For example: the desert is a labyrinth without walls;
• Merkmal 2: All stories are drippling with obscure rimandi, which seem too strange to correspond to existing writings, but which passed all the Stichproben for existence I made;
• There mostly is only one character, sometimes there are two but are just two halves;
• Tendency for ancient, historical setting;
• Often the narrator takes the word, says: I am going to tell a story, tells said (mysterious, paradoxical) story, offers his considerations afterwards;
• There is often a sudden twist at the end.

What is seducente about this type of writing is that it is naked, it does not linger on the good idea the writing is based on, it just shows it gefühlt half sketched and then moves on to the next. Ma non è uno stile trascurato: the descriptions are short but poignant, straight to the point. So the art must (could) be taking great care to make it look sketched, while actually every word has been carefully weighted. This collection deals with labyrinths.