The Book of Sand
| "The Book of Sand" | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Author | Jorge Luis Borges |
| Original title | "El libro de arena" |
| Country | Argentina |
| Language | Spanish |
| Genre(s) | Fantasy, short story |
| Published in | The Book of Sand |
| Media type | |
| Publication date | 1975 |
| Published in English | 1977 |
"The Book of Sand" (Spanish: El libro de arena) is a 1975 short story by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. It has parallels to the same author's 1949 story "The Zahir" (revised 1974), continuing the theme of self-reference and attempting to abandon the terribly infinite.
The story was first published in 1975, in Spanish, as the last of 13 stories in a book of the same name. The first English translation – by Norman Thomas di Giovanni – was published in The New Yorker; the entire volume The Book of Sand () first appeared in English in 1977.
An unnamed narrator is visited by a tall Scots Bible-seller, who presents him with a very old cloth-bound book that he bought in India from an Untouchable. The book is emblazoned with the title "Holy Writ," below which title is emblazoned "Bombay," but is said to be called "The Book of Sand"..."because neither the book nor the sand has any beginning or end." Upon opening it, he is startled to discover that the book, which is written in an unknown language and occasionally punctuated by illustrations, is in fact infinite: if one turns the pages, more pages seem to grow out of the front and back covers. He trades a month of his pension and a prized "Wiclif Bible" for the "Book of Sand" and hides it on a bookshelf behind his copy of One Thousand and One Nights. Over the summer, the narrator obsesses over the book, poring over it, cataloging its illustrations, and refusing to go outside for fear of its theft. In the end, realizing that the book is monstrous, he briefly considers burning it before fearing the possibility of the smoke of an infinite book suffocating the world. Instead, he goes to the National Library where he once worked (like Borges) to lose the book among the basement bookshelves, reasoning that "the best place to hide a leaf is in a forest."
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Wikipedia