Other themes throughout his stories include: philosophical issues; deterioration and ruination; games of strategy and chance; conspiracies and secret societies; and ethnic groups, especially those in his own ancestry. A few months ago, I found myself purchasing Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges for the unsophisticated reason that it intrigued me.

Awkwardly, at the door, I tell him that I thought I imagined him, until a random man sent me a letter saying where he lived. There’s a twist to this tale, echoing the Irishman’s portentous comment that “[w]hat one man does is something done, in some measure, by all men. The space is not conceived as having duration in time, posterior stage of subject can’t affect universe, only prior stages can do.The main character is Juan Dahlmann, a mixture of German and Spanish ancestry, whose life is mundane but who dreams vaguely of a more romantic life, inspired by the Flores side of his heritage and the Flores ranch in the South that he owns but has never visited. Yu discovers that an MI5 agent, Richard Madden (an Irishman who also has equivocal feelings about the nation he is serving, due to his nationality) has captured another German spy and is on the verge of finding him.

It is only made larger by the penumbra, the symmetry, the mirrors, the years, my ignorance, the solitude. Tlön’s language resembles ours except that it does not contain any nouns, only “impersonal verbs qualified by monosyllabic suffixes or prefixes which have the force of adverbs.Steam rises from his mug in front of the book, obscuring some words, spinning others through a haze. As I said earlier, those two stories are mirror images of each other, and, what's more, The South is divided into two halves which are mirror images of themselves. Historias en las que las líneas de tiempo parecen fundirse, en que los sueños se vuelven realidad, las bibliotecas son infinitas y laberínticas, los más simples misterios ocultan mucho más de lo que jamás uno puede imaginar. We find that such spontaneous and playful attitude existed even in the most serious of his stories and readers unaccustomed to such techniques were constantly being made to feel just bit off balance.