He begins his writing career in the ranks of Ultraism, a position he left to undertake a very personal line whose main elements would be the quintessence of the Argentine and the deepening of the problem of man. His prose is seemingly naked, cold, but meaningful and powerfully suggestive. It is characterized by notes of very subtle irony. The narrative is precise and contains sudden poetic discoveries, such as unusual associations of words or concepts. 

His essays prove him to be an extremely keen meditator about culture, current affairs, and the most diverse problems. Whatever the subject, he always surprises the reader with unexpected approaches to the matter in question. It is his short stories t, such as El jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan (1941), Ficciones (1944), and El aleph (1949), that provide his narrative with a singular position over other storytellers. In these stories, he puts us in contact with a world of the exceptional and the unusual.

 His stories are so original that they hardly have any parallel in other literature. The structure of the stories is quite varied. Sometimes they begin as if it were a scholarly study, others part from an anecdote and take the appearance of an essay or a philosophical disquisition. Sometimes they are even false autobiographical confessions. Borges's objective is always to propose subtle mental games and complex metaphysical exercises that frequently produce real intellectual vertigo for the reader. The writer sees reality as a labyrinth made of ambiguities of the human personality and its strange unfoldment. Behind the game and the art, Borges modestly and elegantly hides a skeptical spirit anguished by the absurdities and enigmas of the human being.

El Aleph

El informe de Brodie

El libro de arena

La memoria de Shakespeare

Nueve ensayos dantescos

Historia de la eternidad

Perhaps inspired by the concept of mathematical relativism, with El aleph Borges he intends to describe the mythical point of the universe where all acts and all moments in time occupy the same point in existence, without overlap, representing the infinity of the universe.

Fiction

The Latin American boom is a literary phenomenon that emerged in the 1960s when a prodigious renewal of the Latin American narrative took place. Readers from all over the world discovered authors as representative today as Carpentier, Rulfo, Cortázar, Borges, Fuentes, Donoso, Vargas Llosa, and García Márquez. The works of these writers are characterized by a great thematic variety, with a preference for the urban novel (Cortázar, Fuentes) and a renewed treatment of the rural (Rulfo, García Márquez). 

Defining feature is the masterful fusion of the fantastic and the real, what is known as 'magical realism', the most representative example of which is García Márquez's extensive novel Cien años de soledad. These authors produce a total renovation of the structure of the story, often breaking the plotline, with habitual changes from the perspective of the narrator and jumps in the time during the action. The experimentation is so extraordinary that it ends up affecting the language itself, overlapping styles and registers and often distorting the syntax and lexicon, many of the authors of this time becoming icons of the history of literature.

Latinoamerican Literature

García Márquez writes Cien años de soledad, novel that recounts a century in the life of the Buendía family, today it is still considered a masterpiece of Latin American literature and one of the classic examples of magical realism.

Mario Vargas Llosa writes La ciudad y los perros, novel about the one related to the violent experiences of the interned cadets of the last three years of Secondary Education of the Leoncio Prado Military School in the capital of Peru.

Julio Cortazar writes Rayuela, a novel whose story puts the reader's subjectivity at stake and has multiple endings.

Carlos Fuentes writes La muerte de Artemio Cruz,  a milestone in the Latin American Boom.

María Luisa Bombal writes La amortajada,  novel that reflects the social conditions of the 1930s in Chile.

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El aleph (1945)

By Jorge Luis Borges

Time Period: Latinoamerican Literature

Genre: Fiction

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