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Jorge Luis Borges
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A Universal History of Iniquity (Penguin Classics) Paperback – July 27, 2004

by Jorge Luis Borges (Author), Andrew Hurley (Translator, Contributor)
4.4 out of 5 stars 45
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In his writing, Borges always combined high seriousness with a wicked sense of fun. Here he reveals his delight in re-creating (or making up) colorful stories from the Orient, the Islamic world, and the Wild West, as well as his horrified fascination with knife fights, political and personal betrayal, and bloodthirsty revenge. Sparkling with the sheer exuberant pleasure of story-telling, this collection marked the emergence of an utterly distinctive literary voice.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Previous page
  1. Print length
    120 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Penguin Publishing Group
  4. Publication date
    July 27, 2004
  5. Grade level
    12 and up
  6. Reading age
    18 years and up
  7. Dimensions
    5 x 0.33 x 7.8 inches
  8. ISBN-10
    0142437891
  9. ISBN-13
    978-0142437896
  10. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Hurley’s efforts at retranslating Borges are not anything but heroic. His versions are clear, elegant, crystalline." —Ilan Stavans, The Times Literary Supplement

"[Borges’s] stories often take the outer form of some genre from popular literature, a form proved by long usage, which creates almost mythical structures." —Italo Calvino

About the Author

Jorges Luis Borges was born in Buenos Aires in 1899 and educated in Europe. One of the most widely acclaimed writers of our time, he published many collections of poems, essays and short stories, before his death in Geneva in June 1986. In 1961 Borges shared the International Publishers' Prize with Samuel Beckett. The Ingram Merrill Foundation granted him its Annual Literary Award in 1966 for his "outstanding contribution to literature." In 1971 Columbia University awarded him the first of many degrees of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa that he was to receive from the English-speaking world. In 1971 he received the fifth biennial Jerusalem Prize and in 1973 was given the Alfonso Reyes Prize, one of Mexico's most prestigious cultural awards. In 1980 he shared the Cervantes Prize (the Spanish world's highest literary accolade) with Gerardo Diego. Borges was Director of the Argentine National Library from 1955 until 1973. In a tribute to Borges, Mario Vargas Llosa wrote: "His is a world of clear, pure, and at the same time unusual ideas...expressed in words of great directness and restraint. [He] was a superb storyteller. One reads most of Borges' tales with the hypnotic interest usually reserved for reading detective fiction..."

Andrew Hurley is a translator of numerous works of literature, criticism, history, and memoir. He is professor emeritus at the University of Puerto Rico.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Publishing Group (July 27, 2004)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 120 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0142437891
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0142437896
  • Reading age ‏ : ‎ 18 years and up
  • Grade level ‏ : ‎ 12 and up
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 3.68 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5 x 0.33 x 7.8 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.4 out of 5 stars 45

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  1. Jorge Luis Borges

    Jorge Luis Borges

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    Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges KBE (/ˈbɔːrhɛs/; Spanish: [ˈxorxe ˈlwis ˈborxes] 24 August 1899 - 14 June 1986), was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature. His work embraces the "character of unreality in all literature". His best-known books, Ficciones (Fictions) and El Aleph (The Aleph), published in the 1940s, are compilations of short stories interconnected by common themes, including dreams, labyrinths, libraries, mirrors, fictional writers, philosophy, and religion. Literary critics have described Borges as Latin America's monumental writer.

    Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Grete Stern (1904-1999) (http://www.me.gov.ar/efeme/jlborges/1951-1960.html) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

    See more on the author's page
  2. Andrew Hurley

    Andrew Hurley

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Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5 stars
4.4 out of 5
45 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Jim
5.0 out of 5 stars The Borges that not enough ppl think to read. ...
Reviewed in the United States on July 5, 2015
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The Borges that not enough ppl think to read. Adventure, stebbing, dancing, liars, thieves, boats--this book has it all.
2 people found this helpful
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Jason
5.0 out of 5 stars good and fast
Reviewed in the United States on July 25, 2018
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good and fast
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archeteuthis rex
4.0 out of 5 stars Short but masterful.
Reviewed in the United States on June 13, 2021
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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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Tim Marshall
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United States on October 28, 2016
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Brilliant book, brilliant service from good old Amazon
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Jorge B. Pisarello
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United States on January 8, 2017
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great book!!
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Glenn Russell
5.0 out of 5 stars Let Jorge Luis Borges give you a guided tour of hell on earth
Reviewed in the United States on July 4, 2013
From his early years the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges lived among books and languages, classical literature from many civilizations and cultures: Chinese, Persian, Nordic, Spanish, to name several. His greatest childhood memory was his father's library; he was reading Shakespeare in English at age 11; by the time he was an adult, Borges turned his mind into one vast library. Therefore it is a bit ironic this bookish man chose to write an entire collection of tales about men of sheer action and where the action is immorality, wickedness, injustice and evil. Ironic, but fortunate for any lover of literature, since A Universal History of Iniquity is a jewel. Unlike Borges's complex baroque writing, these nine short tales are straight-forward and make for easy reading. For the purposes of this review and to convey the flavor of the book, here are quotes with brief comments on two of the tales.

The Disinterested Killer Bill Harrigan
At the very beginning, Borges writes, "The almost-child who died at the age of twenty-one owing a debt to human justice for the deaths of twenty-one men - "not counting Mexicans." Yes, this is a tale of Billy the Kid. Iniquity, indeed. Borges gives us several vivid, memorable images of what it is like to kill for the hell of it. For instance, one notorious Mexican gunslinger and outlaw walks into a bar, a shot rings out, (no need for a second shot) and Billy picked up the conversation where he left off. And then in the words of Borges, "That night Billy lays his blanket out next to the dead man and sleeps - ostentatiously - until morning."

Monk Eastman, Purveyor of Iniquities
Here is a description of noted personalities from this urban tale, "The chaotic story takes place in the cellars of old breweries turned into Negro tenements, in a seedy, three-story New York City filed with gangs of thugs like the Swamp Angels, who would swarm out of the labyrinthine sewers on marauding expeditions; gangs of cutthroats like the Daybreak boys, who recruited precocious murderers of ten and eleven years old; brazen, solitary giants like the Plug Uglies, whose stiff bowler hats stuffed with wood and whose vast shirttails blowing in the wind of the slums might provoke a passerby's improbable smile, but who carried huge bludgeons in their right hands and long, narrow pistols; and gangs of street toughs like the Dead Rabbit gang, who entered into battle under the banner of their mascot impaled upon a pike. Its characters were men like Dandy Johnny Dolan, famed for his brilliantined forelock, the monkey-headed walking sticks he carried, and the delicate copper pick he wore on his thumb to gouge out his enemies' eyes: men like Kit Burns, who was known to bite the head off live rats; and men like blind Danny Lyons, a towheaded kid with huge dead eyes who pimped for three whores that proudly walked the streets for him."

I have included the long quote above for a specific reason: Borges was fascinated by the image and concept of labyrinths his entire life. However, such a labyrinth of unending perversion, violence and sex was one Borges would never himself experience directly; rather, as a bookish, literary man, Borges entered this twisted human sewer through his imagination and writing. Keep in mind that by the time he reached his mid-thirties and authored this collection, Borges was strongly influenced by the nineteenth century German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer. The nastiness and brutality of life outlined by Schopenhauer made an indelible impression on the sensitive author.

My guess is anyone reading this review is light-years away from entering a world where teenagers kill for the hell of it or cutthroat gangs hack and slice one another to pieces under the banner of an impaled dog or rabbit. But such worlds existed aplenty in the early 20th century and they still exist today. How to experience such world for yourself? One easy answer is to order this book and let Jorge Luis Borges give you a guided tour.
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Lonya53
5.0 out of 5 stars "Corrupt are they, and have done abominable iniquity
Reviewed in the United States on July 27, 2005
there is none that doeth good."

Jorge Luis Borges is thought by many to be the 20th century's greatest Spanish-language writer. Borges was a poet, essayist and short story writer. Although born in Argentina in 1899, Borges spent most of his early years in Europe until his family returned to Buenos Aires in 1921. "A Universal History of Iniquity", originally published as "A Universal History of Infamy" was published in 1935. The stories represent a collection of stories originally published in the Argentine newspaper Critica between 1933 and 1934. The stories were a huge success for the newspaper and established Borges as a writer of the first rank in Argentina.

Each of the stories in Universal History of Iniquity was designed by Borges to give his newspaper readers a small glimpse of the evil that men (and sometimes women) do. They vary from slave owning states in the pre-U.S. Civil War south in "The Cruel Redeemer Lazarus Morell", to the China Seas in "The Widow Ching - Pirate", to feudal Japan in "The Uncivil Teacher of Court Etiquette Kotsuke no Suke", Turkistan in "Hakim, the Masked Dyer of Merv" and the mean streets of Buenos Aires in "Man on Pink Corner". Borges acknowledges that these stories were all loosely based on little known historical treatises, the Arabian Nights, and other pieces of fiction. Lazarus Morell was clearly an homage to Mark Twain's Mississippi River stories.

Although this is Borges earliest work one can already see the creative, almost whimsical approach he takes to the art of telling a story. He constantly throws the reader off balance and engages in little acts of mis-direction, perhaps starting a story by telling the reader he will not set out the facts behind a story and then proceed to do just that. In the Preface to the First Edition, Borges writes that certain techniques are "overly used: mismatched lists, abrupt transitions, the reduction of a person's life to two or three scenes." While these are certainly valid self-criticisms the reader should remember, as Borges was no doubt aware, that these stories were written for publication in newspapers with severe word limitations. I thought the condensed nature of the stories heightened their impact and think that perhaps Borges was engaging in yet another act of misdirection.

I came to this book after reading Danilo Kis' "A Tomb for Boris Davidovich". The structure and theme of Tomb for Boris Davidovich was intended by Kis to be part of a literary polemic between Kis and Borges, specifically concerning the title of Borge's Universal History of Iniquity. Kis seven stories all involved iniquities performed by those involved in the Stalinist purges of the 1930s, a horror that Kis felt made Borges' iniquities look quaint by comparison. Kis asserted that the universal infamies related by Borges were those of gangsters, pirates and highwaymen. Kis argues that as far as infamy was concerned, "infamy is when in the name of the idea of a better world for which whole generations have perished, in the name of a humanistic idea, you build camps and destroy both people and their most intimate drams of a better world." Now that I have read both books I think this may be something of an apple and oranges comparison. Nevertheless, reading one book enhanced the experience I got from reading the other. If the reader likes Borges' stories they might also enjoy Kis.

I think "A Universal History of Iniquity" is a wonderful entry point for anyone wishing to discover the work of a wonderful, compelling writer.
22 people found this helpful
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Alvie Hackle
4.0 out of 5 stars Cover choice creates new reality
Reviewed in the United States on February 13, 2008
I don't really need a separate copy of A Universal History, since I already own the Collected Fictions. But I am fascinated by Penguin's use of M.C. Escher's prints as cover art for English editions of Borges' various short collections, and especially the pairing of this particular Escher with this particular Borges. Escher's "Snakes" has the serpents twined through chain mail. Perhaps Quixote has at last been devoured by his demons? (Borges' fictions are footnotes to Cervantes but take place in realities that might have been carved by Escher.)

The snakes also outline a hollow crucifix and suggest three 6's. Behind this cover, deep within those thin vignettes, Borges' villains are hollow inside the crust of legend and reputation that gives them shape. Probably neither Borges nor Escher would have admitted liking this iniquitous juxtaposition, but they might have tolerated it for those of us who appreciate an occasional obvious image. Certainly Borges would have appreciated a revisionist rumor that Escher secretly carved this image, his last, to illustrate the cover of Borges' work.

So let us begin our reimagining of all of human history, which is to say the history of iniquity, with this newly created fact!
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Top reviews from other countries

Adam
5.0 out of 5 stars A Masterpiece
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 7, 2022
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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.
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Pratheesh V B
5.0 out of 5 stars Great Book. Good Cover. But very poor quality paper.
Reviewed in India on May 21, 2014
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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.
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GEORGE WASHINGTON
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Borjes as always Nice edition Good price Bought as ...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 22, 2017
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Excellent Borjes as always
Nice edition
Good price
Bought as had mislaid original copy really only wanted it for Madam Cheong the pirate
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Marcos Saboya
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 24, 2014
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Amazing!!!
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Norman, Cheese Harp
1.0 out of 5 stars Doesn't contain what it claims
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 30, 2015
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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
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