10 minutes to The Aleph — seventeen independent, uncanny short pieces

The Immortal moves to another world entirely: its first-person narrator is Marcus Flaminius Rufus, a Roman military tribune who pushes deep into the desert and climbs into a City of the Immortals built over an abandoned labyrinth. The House of Asterion leaps forward a few thousand years and gives the minotaur at the center of the Cretan labyrinth a monologue insisting he isn't mad. Emma Zunz jumps again, to Buenos Aires in 1922, and centers on a textile-mill worker named Emma Zunz. Each story builds its own stage; nobody crosses over.

Plot Walkthrough: The Title Story, "The Aleph"

The narrator uses his yearly visit as an excuse to stay close to Daneri, really just wanting to linger a little longer in Beatriz's world. Daneri gradually confesses the secret of the cellar: a small sphere, two or three centimeters across, almost unbearable to look at directly, that holds every point in the universe at the same instant, without any of them overlapping. The narrator goes down into the cellar and, in a spell of near-blinding vertigo, sees everything, including, to his shock, the private letters and photographs Beatriz once sent Daneri.

Jealousy drives him to a small act of revenge: he lies to Daneri that the old house is about to be demolished, and talks him into rushing over with an armload of useless drafts to have them photographed for posterity, a wasted errand for nothing. The irony deepens at the end: Daneri's ridiculous poem goes on to win second prize in a literary contest, and there's an offhand mention that a mosque in Cairo may hide another Aleph, of uncertain authenticity. That's Borges's signature move: hand you what feels like a philosophical answer, then quietly take it back.

Plot Walkthrough: "The Immortal"

A different map entirely. Rufus, a Roman tribune on the empire's frontier, hears of a river said to grant immortality, and pushes what's left of his men deep into the desert until they reach a city built above a ruined labyrinth. The cave dwellers he finds there are a crushing disappointment: ragged, crawling, barely able to speak.

Rufus drinks from the river and becomes immortal, and over the next two thousand years passes through countless lives as a soldier, a scribe, an antiquities dealer. Around 1929, near Tripoli, he finds another river, one that restores mortality; he drinks from it and sets down a confession of his two millennia of wandering, which he tucks inside a copy of Pope's translation of the Iliad that he had once sold to a princess, and which is how it comes down to us. The real detonation comes at the end: he realizes the cave dwellers in that city weren't some other race at all. They were the Immortals themselves, centuries after drinking from the river, their minds worn down to nothing and their bodies gone feral. One of the blind old men among them turns out to be Homer.

Plot Walkthrough: "The Zahir"

Late one June night, the narrator leaves the funeral of a society woman named Teodelina Villar and stops at a corner bar. In his change he receives a worn twenty-centavo coin stamped with the letters NT, the number 2, and the date 1929. The ordinary coin lodges in his mind and won't leave; digging through old texts, he learns of the Islamic legend of the Zahir, "the visible, the thing that cannot be forgotten," which in every age attaches itself to one everyday object. Once someone's eyes meet it, they sink deeper and deeper until that single object is all they can perceive.

The image of the coin starts to merge with Villar's face. He tries to spend it, give it away, throw it out; nothing works. The story ends with him sensing that the Zahir is about to swallow him whole. Borges never lets him actually break; he just leaves him standing at the edge of it.

Plot Walkthrough: "Averroes's Search"

In twelfth-century Cordoba, the great philosopher Averroes is bent over his commentary on Aristotle's Poetics, and gets completely stuck on two words: tragedy and comedy. Classical Arabic culture had no concept of theater, no living drama around him he could point to, so these words, which should have been mere symbols to gloss, become terms he can never match to any experience of his own. He spends his life stranded on this cliff of untranslatability.

At the end, Borges lifts the lid on his own trick: writing this story, he says, is itself an attempt to imagine an Averroes he can never truly reach, and the two predicaments mirror each other exactly. A writer and a twelfth-century reader, stopped by the same invisible wall. That's why a piece barely longer than a single idea stays with you long after you close the book.

Plot Walkthrough: "The House of Asterion"

A very short piece. A first-person voice keeps insisting he isn't mad, that he never receives visitors, that he's simply waiting for his redeemer to come. In just a few pages the reveal lands: this narrator is Asterion, the minotaur trapped in the Greek labyrinth, and his redeemer is Theseus, come to kill him, and Asterion goes to his death almost willingly.

Plot Walkthrough: "Emma Zunz"

On January 14, 1922, a textile-mill worker named Emma Zunz learns that her father has died in exile in Uruguay, and that the prison sentence which drove him there was a frame-up, engineered by the mill's manager, Loewenthal. She plans her revenge with total precision: she first sleeps with a strange sailor to produce physical evidence she can later pass off as rape, then arranges to meet Loewenthal and shoots him dead, before telling the police, in tears, that she fired only to stop him from assaulting her.