Funes el Memorioso – Jorge Luís Borges

What’s the smallest book you’ve ever read?
 
This edition of a Borges story is smaller than a teabag.
 
I found it in Buenos Aires, the best city on earth for books and bookshops of all shapes and sizes.
 
Following an accident, Funes is condemned to remember every detail of his life as a unique event that cannot be compared to any other, so that he is unable to generalize, see patterns, or make connections. He cannot, therefore, speak meaningfully of his experience.
 
Borges speculates on a language in which the perception of every animal and leaf and stone in its particular moment would have its own noun. Any such language would, of course, be an endless, indefinable accumulation.
 
The idea points interestingly to the insufficiency of language when faced with uncapturable reality. It is also quintessential Borges, who, in his obsessive pursuit of the idea of the perfection of knowledge, typically ends up creating abstract meta-libraries of the mind.
 
That’s quite a lot for a little book.
 
I’m just surprised that he didn’t take it one neurotic, philosophical step further and propose vocabulary for the experiences of the “gaps” between Funes’s focussed perceptions, seeing as there are no such gaps, only a continuous flow.
 
I don’t care for Borges myself. In fiction, I look for real-life characters, not ciphers for intellectual conjectures. Without depth or feeling, his craftsmanship remains another extremely clever yet lifeless language.
 
Ireneo Funes, by the way, is from Fray Bentos, which British readers may be curious to learn is not a corned beef factory but a city in Uruguay.
 
The green peppers are the first from the garden this summer and have gone into a chili con carne. The teabag is Yorkshire and made a very nice cuppa.