SOURCE: “Jorge Luis Borges Big Man, Much to Say,” in The Economist, Vol. 350, No. 8104, January 30, 1999, p. 80

In the following review of the Collected Fictions, the writer sees Borges as a “master of intellectual subtleties.”

A single substantial book of short stories may seem a relatively modest output for a lifetime. But Jorge Luis Borges, the blind Argentine librarian who was probably the greatest 20th-century author never to win the Nobel prize for literature, was one of fiction's most playfully paradoxical spirits, and he would surely have disagreed. For Borges, an immensely erudite man whose whole life was consumed by a passion for books and the idea of bookishness, was a miniaturist who found no virtue in length for its own wearisome sake. He had no desire to write novels, for example. Much better to embed the summary of the plot of a novel within the framework of a...