Jorge Luis Borges and his ‘bitch’

When Jorge Luis Borges died in 1986, at the age of 87, he left behind 100-odd slender fictions and as many poems, but no novels. Compared with the blockbusting authors of our age, this was a small (if perfectly formed) output. Many of Borges’s glittering ficciones are mere ironic fragments, at best notebook jottings. To his detractors his work amounted to little more than a babble of sweet nothings. ‘Who is Jorge Luis Borges?’ Philip Larkin gruffly enquired. (Larkin had not seen Nic Roeg’s trippy film Perfomance, where Mick Jagger is shown reading the Argentine author in the bathtub.)

Born in Buenos Aires in 1899, Borges was acutely myopic as a child and in middle age he went blind. Inhabiting his own dark inner world, ‘Georgie’ led a bookish childhood haunted by dreams of Bengal tigers, gaucho knife-fighters, mirrors, masks, mazes and other exotica. From these juvenile imaginings he created the gems of laconic wit and invention contained in the volumes Ficciones and El Aleph, published in 1944 and 1949 respectively.