Book Review: "The Library of Babel" by Jorge Luis Borges

The Library of Babel (2000; originally published in 1941)
Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)
Etchings by Erik Desmazières
Translated from the Spanish by Andrew Hurley

39 pages

Jorge Luis Borges’ short story The Library of Babel opens

The Universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries.

The people who live among these galleries are called librarians, and Borges’ narrator is one of them; he describes the bookshelves that line the walls of each of these hexagonal galleries, and how each gallery connects to others exactly like it, stretching out to unknown distances above, below and beyond. He tells us that over many centuries librarians have postulated and eventually accepted as true certain fundamental axioms about the Library, such as that each book is filled with a combination of a fixed set of “twenty-five orthographic symbols,” that the Library contains books with every possible combination of these symbols, and that no two books in the Library are the same.

Starting from this deceptively simple structure, Borges creates a strikingly intricate short story, filled with emotional and intellectual complexity. As generations of librarians build on their ancestors’ knowledge to develop a better understating of the Library’s structure and purpose and origin, some among them challenge the accepted understanding, and promulgate contrasting views, sometimes forcefully. The result is a messy, complicated, fabulous world, whose inhabitants experience hope and melancholy, awe and despair, as they spend their lives moving among the vast expanses of hexagonal galleries of books.

Told in compact, vivid prose, this story can be enjoyed by a reader as simply a creative piece of fantasy fiction. It becomes transcendent, however, with the recognition that Borges’ imagined library serves as an evocative allegory for our own universe, in which we, like the librarians of the story, seek to divine from our limitless surroundings some enlightenment about the structure of our reality, the meaning of our existence, the circumstances of our beginnings.

This piece was originally included in a book of Borges’ short stories published in the early 1940’s; a few years later it was included in perhaps Borges’ most well-known collection Ficciones (in English, Fictions). Though the collection has been translated into English, I encourage you to read this story in the gorgeous edition from the publisher David R. Godine (2000). It includes a series of eleven etchings by Erik Desmazières, which, as Angela Giral points out in her introduction to the book, “are no mere illustrations of the writer’s words; they are the product of a parallel imagination, inspired to create in visual images his own, equivalent universe."  (The cover picture is a partial example of one of the etchings.)

In this beautiful edition, which you will enjoy returning to again and again, the combination of Borges’ captivating story and Desmazières’ evocative etchings demonstrate the power of a book to transport readers to another world.

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf