Labyrinthine life, fictions of J.L. Borges

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In 1960, prior to his astonishing swift ascendance to literary fame, Jorge Luis Borges must have seemed an unlikely candidate for the unofficial title of World's Most Influential Fiction Writer.

Borges, born in 1899, seldom ventured far from his home in Buenos Aires; when he left Argentina to lecture at the University of Texas in 1961, it was the first time, says Edwin Williamson in his exhaustively researched and richly detailed biography "Borges: A Life," that the writer "had set foot outside the region of the River Plat since 1924."

Frail, balding, and timid, Borges had written practically nothing of interest even to Buenos Aires literary salons since 1953. In truth, he hadn't written much before then. His oeuvre consisted of a few darkly elegant poems, some provocative and idiosyncratic essays, and a few slim volumes of what he called "ficciones" that even his most ardent admirers were unsure whether to place under the category of fiction or nonfiction.

Then, in 1961, Borges' life and Western literature were both changed forever. As Mr. Williamson phrases it, "a stroke of luck that came like a bolt from the blue" arrived in the form of the International Publishers' Prize, which a handful of European writers, including British Iris Murdoch and Italian Alberto Moravia, had lobbied for him to win. Borges had never heard of the prize or of many of the writers who championed him.

The IPP was to be awarded to an author "of any nationality whose existing body of work will, in the view of the jury, have a lasting influence on the development of modern literature."

They had no idea.

"As a consequence of that prize," said Borges, "my books mushroomed overnight throughout the Western world." Much to the astonishment of Borges and his Argentine colleagues, within 10 years he had become the most influential fiction writer since James Joyce, having wide effect, in the words of the great Italian novelist Italo Calvino, "On creative writing, on literary tastes and on the idea of literature itself."

He was read avidly by college students, lionized by rock stars, and, on one bizarre occasion, at a reading, mobbed by (or so reported the Argentinean press) "an audience of London hippies . . . hairy, disheveled, wildly enthusiastic young people."

Such dazzling short works as "The Aleph," "The Circular Ruins," "The South," "The Dead Man," "Borges and I," and, most famously, "Pierre Menard, Author of 'Don Quixote'" redefined and redirected the course of fiction. "Metaphysical fantasies," as Mr. Williamson calls them, they followed the outline of traditional genres such as detective and adventure stories but were laced with symbols and allusions to philosophy, myth, and legend from all of the world's literatures.

By the end of the 1970s, the little man who nearly gave up writing three decades earlier for failure to find an audience was being studied and imitated by writers in North and South America, then Europe.