Jerry House mentioned that he loved Other Inquisitions in his comment on Jay Parini’s BORGES AND ME. I read Other Inquisitions in the late 1960s and didn’t fully appreciate it because I hadn’t read many of the books Borges wrote about.
Now, decades later, I reread Other Inquisitions and many of Borges’s essays make a lot more sense because of my years of reading the books he refers to. I took a doctoral seminar on Nathaniel Hawthorne, but Borges’s “Nathaniel Hawthorne” introduces more facts and analysis in just a few pages. That is the genius of Borges: he can distill mountains of books into a pithy essay. Highly recommended! GRADE: A
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Introduction — ix
The Wall and the Books — 3
Pascal’s Sphere — 6
The Flower of Coleridge — 10
The Dream of Coleridge — 14
Time and J. W. Dunne — 18
The Creation and P. H. Gosse — 22
Dr. Americo Castro is Alarmed — 26
A Note on Carriego — 31
Our Poor Individualism — 33
Quevedo — 36
Partial Enchantments of the Quixote — 43
Nathaniel Hawthorne — 47
Note on Walt Whitman — 66
Valery as a Symbol — 73
The Enigma of Edward FitzGerald — 75
About Oscar Wilde — 79
On Chesterton — 82
The First Wells — 86
The Biathanatos — 89
Pascal — 93
The Meeting in a Dream — 97
The Analytical Language of John Wilkins — 101
Kafka and his Precursors — 106
Avatars of the Tortoise — 109
On the Cult of Books — 116
The Nightingale of Keats — 121
The Mirror of the Enigmas — 125
Two Books — 129
A Comment on August 23, 1944 — 134
About William Beckford’s Vathek — 137
About The Purple Land — 141
From Someone to Nobody — 146
Forms of a Legend — 149
From Allegories to Novels — 154
The Innocence of Layamon — 158
For Bernard Shaw — 163
The Modesty of History — 167
New Refutation of Time — 171
Epilogue — 189
Index — 191
