Review: The Circular Ruins

The Circular Ruins by Jorge Luis Borges
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

When is a short story, not a short story? Do you include a short story as a ‘book read’ on Goodreads, or does the collection include one book? We had a family debate on this over Christmas and concluded that if a book is worthy of a separate review, it counts as a book.

I sometimes must reread Borges's short stories three or more times to understand them. In some ways, the books seem as recursive as some of the motifs included.

The narrative arc, where there is one, continues to increase like a Shepard-Risset glissando (the audio illusion where the pitch of the ensemble of frequencies is ever-increasing).

“The Circular Ruins” is a case in point: a mysterious meditation on creation, consciousness, and the nature of reality. Borges crafts a world where a lone dreamer attempts to bring a man into existence, only to confront the possibility that he is merely a dream. The circular ruins in the title refer to the amphitheatre-like-temple and the narrative's circularity. The imagery of the amphitheatre, where a single student is chosen from many, also evokes a sense of natural selection or cosmic refinement—an echo of larger forces at play. The references to fire, destruction, and renewal hint at further cycles of creation and collapse, like an expanding and contracting universe or an infinite chain of dreamers shaping each other’s realities.

Reading this story felt like staring into a hall of mirrors—each reflection leading to another, infinitely. It reminded me of Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, where Macondo is described as a city of mirrors and mirages, capturing the same dreamlike instability of existence. Borges’ engagement with mythology is also evident. There are traces of Prometheus in the dreamer’s fire, echoes of Orpheus in the blurred boundary between dream and reality, and a sense of fate unfolding with the weight of an ancient epic.

Borges’ prose is deceptively simple but packed with grand, mind-bending ideas. Like The Library of Babel and The Book of Sand, this story plays with the paradox of infinity within the finite, a concept that feels eerily relevant in an age of endless digital information. This story lingers in the mind long after reading, leaving the unsettling question: are we the dreamers, or are we the dream?

I gave the book three stars.



View all my reviews