Selected Non-Fictions.

• Author: Mujica, Barbara

Selected Non-Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges. Ed., Eliot Weinberger. Trans., Esther Allen, Suzanne Jill Levine, Eliot Weinberger. New York: Viking, 1999.

Jorge Luis Borges, arguably the most influential Latin American writer of the twentieth century, wrote thousands of pages of nonfiction, including essays, book reviews, film reviews, prologues, encyclopedia entries, and notes on articles and culture. Much of this material is still uncollected in book form even in Spanish. Eliot Weinberger has made available to the English-language reader 161 pieces of Borges's most significant non-fiction pieces, most of it for the first time. Two-thirds of the writing included in this volume has never been translated before. The rest has been newly translated for this edition.

Weinberger has made a careful selection, drawing from all periods and nonfiction genres of Borges's writing. He has made a conscious effort to display Borges's vast erudition, but also his fascination with popular culture. The book includes not only essays on Dante, Shakespeare, Kafka, Oscar Wilde, and James Joyce, but an acerbic note on the world's obsession with the Dionne quintuplets and an insightful article on the tango as well. Borges wrote prologues to works by the Japanese author Ryunosuke Akutagawa, the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, the Czech Jew Franz Kafka, and the American Jack London. For many years a movie critic, Borges reviewed fires as diverse as King Kong and Crime and Punishment. He was as comfortable commenting on Katharine Hepburn as on Paulinus. He wrote on Kabbalah, the Koran, gnosticism, Chinese literature, and the apocryphal Gospels, but also a column for Hogar, a woman's magazine akin to Ladies' Home Journal. He expounded on cultural phenomena such as machismo, verbal abuse, and the Germanophilia of the Buenos Aires bourgeoisie, as well as on national politics. Particularly revealing are Borges's attacks on Hitler, Fascism, and anti-Semitism published between 1937 and 1945. By including items on a gamut of subjects, Weinberger has sought to dismantle the myth of the detached, cerebral Borges, so lost in his intellectual world that he is oblivious to events around him.

Although he was one of the most prolific writers of nonfiction of his generation, Borges published few collections of essays, which makes the work of the compiler especially difficult. In the 1920s he issued three books, which he later disowned, and three more between 1930 and 1936. His...