[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by Toilet & Bowels

it's borges similar to calvino?

more the other way around but yes they are similarin the sense that their fictional worlds are often constructed from philosophical ideas--the OULIPO i think really followed after borges. borges was born in 1899 and his really good writing started around 1935 so he's a couple of decades ahead of calvino at least.

borges is perhaps less famous outside of latin america for 2 reasons: 1) he was politically conservative and that kept him from winning a nobel prize, 2) he never wrote a novel, in part because he was of teh conviction that one didn't need so many words to tell a story, in part i suppose because he was blind and that would make the revision process quite hard.

anyway, he was fucking brilliant, and has had many imitators-- i'm not saying that calvino was one of them by the way (calvino was great on his own merit), but i'd say calvino learned a more than a few things from borges-- he wrote about him in his posthumous "memos for the next millenium."