Metaphysics and Machismo

By R. Z. Sheppard

THE BOOK OF SAND

by Jorge Luis Borges

Translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni

Dutton; 125 pages; $7.95

"Time is the substance of which I am made. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which mangles me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges."

The most charming characteristic of Jorge Luis Borges remains his modesty.

Even that ambitious passage from his 1947 essay A New Refutation of Time contains a self-effacing shuffle. Borges disarms that ancient foe, ineffability, by questioning his own existence. He has done so in dozens of fanciful tales bearing such tantalizing labels as Death and the Compass, Funes, the Memorious and Tloen, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. Despite his arcane references, the aging (78), blind, Argentine author has gained a worldwide readership. His ficciones have also attracted numerous imitators -- none of whom have the old man's grace, wit and almost magical skills of compression. A Borges story is like some spring-loaded plaything that unexpectedly scatters bright metaphors for what the author lovingly calls "philosophy's beautiful perplexities."

In The Book of Sand, those perplexities can be shadowed by pessimism. "Now things are going badly," says Borges in a conversation with his younger self. "Russia is taking over the world; America, hampered by the superstition of democracy, can't make up its mind to become an empire." In Utopia of a Tired Man, an in habitant of the future lives on a featureless plain, eats cornflakes and tells a visitor from another century, "We have neither dates nor history . . . rereading, not reading, is what counts. Printing -- which is now abolished, since it tended to multiply unnecessary texts to the point of dizziness -- was one of man's worst evils."

That point is sharpened to satire in The Congress, the story of an elite group that attempts to organize the world's wild profusion -- only to discover the embarrassment of the imitative fallacy: the more categories the Congress devises, the more it resembles an untamed world.

Yet mankind ever seeks some unify ing principle or vision. In a much earlier Borges collection, it took the form of the "Aleph," a tiny spot of light in which everything that occurred in the world could be seen simultaneously. In the new book, there is "undr, " a single word meaning wonder, which is an ancient tribe's entire body of literature. The Book of Sand is an other expression of this hyperidealism. A collector acquires a clothbound octavo volume bearing the title "Holy Writ." But he can never find the same place twice.

"The number of pages in this book is no more or less than infinite," explains the mysterious seller. "None is the first page, none the last. I don't know why they're numbered in this arbitrary way. Perhaps to suggest that the terms of an infinite series admit any number."

Borges includes a few of his gaucho stories: spare, Kiplingesque tales of hard drinking and knife fights in provincial Argentina, where, he says, there is no small town "that isn't exactly like all the others -- even to the point of thinking itself different." Such stories of pure action follow a ritual and rhythm -- like simple milongas and tangos -- that allow the author to dance briefly from the library stacks where he has spent most of his years. And where he truly belongs. For it is from the life of books that he discovered how to fit elegantly rigged philosophical models into the sparkling confines of his ficciones and become the great hobbyist of 20th century literature.

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