A Universal History of Iniquity (Penguin Classics)

The stories account for seventy-two pages of the book’s one hundred; the rest are notes, which may be useful in an academic sense. It is a slim volume, but it is Borges: a leviathan in a sea of plankton.

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The Borges that not enough ppl think to read. Adventure, stebbing, dancing, liars, thieves, boats--this book has it all.

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I have only read a few of Borges's stories before: the usual suspects like "The Library of Babylon" and "Tlön, Uqbar, Urbis Tertis". But I recently acquired a volume that supposedly contains all of his fiction, though it excludes collaborative works like _The Book of Imaginary Beings_ and _A Model for Death_.The first book contained herein, _A Universal History of Infamy_ (1935) is quite short, at 64 pages. (Though they are densely-populated pages: say 100 to 120 or so in an ordinary mass-market paperback, I would guess).In its original form, it was a collection of fictionalized biographies of famous Bad People.The best known of these bad guys in America would be "The Disinterested Killer Bill Harrigan," a fairly heavily fictionalized biography of Billy the Kid (though for some reason Borges does not change the name of Pat Garrett)."The Cruel Redeemer Lazarus Morell", the first story in the book, is about a White Southerner who helped enslaved persons to escape, the deal being that he would sell them to another slaveholder, help them escape again, and split the money with them. When they came to escape the second time, he would tell them that there had been "expenses" and the process would have to be repeated. He would never show up for the third escape plan, and so keep the cash from one-and-a-half slave-sellings."The Improbable Imposter Tom Castro" is a retelling of the story of the Tichborne Claimant."The Uncivil Teacher of Court Etiquette Kotsuke no Suke" is a retelling of the story of the 47 Loyal Ronin (also known as the Ako incident or the Chushingura)....et cetera. The only tale without a similar title is "Man on Pink Corner", about a local badman in Borges' native Argentina, who meets a badder man, who meets ... well, that would be telling, wouldn't it?In a later edition, Borges added a chapter called (of all things) "Et Cetera", which contains a few Arabian Nights' tales and a few others.The whole thing is compulsiely readable, at least in _this_ translation, even when it is (as it indeed is at a few points) rather grisly. Off to a good start, here.Now, off to read something else.

A UNIVERSAL HISTORY OF INIQUITY, the first story collection of Borges, provides an “Index of Sources”, which lists texts, mostly historical, that supposedly inspired the first eight stories in the original edition (1935) of this book. Borges claims, for example, that Herbert Asbury’s THE GANGS OF NEW YORK was the basis for the story “Monk Eastman, Purveyor of Iniquities”. Similarly, he states that Mark Twain’s LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI provided the raw material for “The Cruel Redeemer Lazarus Morell”. For these eight stories, in other words, Borges claims to ride the shoulders of other authors, whose work he has rewritten.In his preface to this collection’s second edition (1954), he describes this technique as “…the irresponsible sport of a shy sort of man who could not bring himself to write short stories, and so amused himself by changing and distorting (sometimes without aesthetic justification) the stories of other men.” Then, these “exercises in prose” enabled him to write “a straightforward short story—'Man on Pink Corner'”, which is Borges’s first discrete story and the ninth piece in this collection.No expert here. But according to Wikipedia, Borges had essays and surreal poems published in literary journals in the 1920’s. And he turned to fiction in the 1930s after he had already established his reputation as a risk-taking writer. My point is that the Borges’s “rewrites” in INIQUITY are engaging literary works with taut pace and rich texture and are not the work of an apprentice.Iniquity— immoral conduct, gross injustice, and wickedness—is a concept with many facets in Borges’s hands. In “The Improbable Impostor Tom Castro”, for example, iniquity is no worse than a brazen fraud. In contrast, iniquity in “The Disinterested Killer Bill Harrigan” takes the form of arbitrary viciousness. Meanwhile, iniquity has several guises in “The Widow Ching—Pirate”, with both Ching and the hapless Chinese government behaving wickedly.Even so, this collection shifts into a higher gear with its eighth story, “Hakim, The Masked Dyer of Merv”, which is a surreal tale of a veiled and false Persian prophet. IMHO, this is a watershed story since it shows Borges dropping his pretense of rewriting history and seems to release his imagination: Here’s a taste:“In the beginning of Hakim’s cosmogony there was a spectral god, a deity as majestically devoid of origins as of name and face. This deity was an immutable god, but its image threw nine shadows; these, condescending to action, endowed and ruled over a first heaven. From that first demiurgic crown, there came a second with its own angels, powers, and thrones, and these in turn founded another, lower heaven, which was the symmetrical duplicate of the first. This second conclave was reproduced in a third, and the third in another lower conclave, and so on, to the number 999. The lord of the nethermost heaven—the shadow of shadows of yet other shadows—is He who reigns over us, and His fraction of divinity tends to zero.”After his story “Man on Pink Corner”, Borges provides a section entitled “Et cetera”, which has seven stories in the 1935 edition of INIQUITY and these seven, plus three new stories, in the 1954 edition. These stories, some only a page or two, are beautiful and eerie and showcase Borges imagination after is liberation. While “A Theologian in Death” is great and suggests a fate for uncharitable souls, my favorites in this section are “The Story of Two Dreamers” and “The Chamber of Statues” with Borges, in the second story, leading his reader through a series of deeply imagined and fateful rooms.Next in my Borges meandering is FICTIONS, which has a 1944 publication date.

Jorge Luis Borges' short, fictionalised biographies of iniquitous villains make for varied, engaging reading. "Man on Pink Corner" is, in particular, a masterpiece. This slim volume is all the more remarkable for comprising some of the first extended prose Borges ever published.

The back cover claims that this expensive slim volume "brings together many of [Borges's] stories including'The Library of Babel', The Garden of Forking Paths', 'Funes the Memorius', and 'Pierrre Menard '.." It doesn't contain any of these - Penguin have reprinted the back cover of another book, Labyrinths, onto an overpriced, padded out collection of a few short pieces. This is unworthy of the publishers of such fine and honestly presented works by Borges such as Labyrinths and The Total Library.Norman Steele

Excellent Borjes as alwaysNice editionGood priceBought as had mislaid original copy really only wanted it for Madam Cheong the pirate

Amazing!!!

Highly disappointed by the quality of paper Penguin used to publish this book.Too substandard.Very poor buy for this amount.This book is for a life time. But the papers used evokes pity.