[Eric]

I read the Penguin collection of his stories "Labyrinths" about thirty years ago, and have liked his stories ever since. Not that I've read them much recently, but I have happy memories of the sheer weirdness of his train of thought in some of the stories.

One of them posits the idea of rewriting Cervantes' "Don Quixote" by going through all the experiences of the author so that the book will be recreated identical to the way it is now, not by plagiarism or copying, but by allowing the experiences to channel the life of the new writer into the same paths as those followed by Cervantes.

Another story "The Secret Miracle" tells again of re-creation, this time the fulfillment of some unfulfilled wish that I don't remember, during the split second between the bullet killing a man being executed leaves the gun and the instant it kills him.

The stories all have this kind of strange intellectual underpinning, with perception, memory and the recording of literature playing important roles.
And so on.

As with Bruno Schulz, quite a diffferent short-story writer, once I'd read some Borges stories, I decided he was my kind of writer. It would be interesting to re-read them now and see if I still feel the same way about them.