Borges appears before us with the modest but cheerful demeanor of a stage-magician performing small acts of legerdemain with rapid confidence. Linguistically his surfaces are plain, not to say ordinary; his mode is eminently common-sensical, or at most owlish and scholarly. Far from being the mad scholar beloved of fiction-writers since Rabelais, he is reluctant and skeptical. But the train of his in vestigation leads as abruptly as may be to a logical crux, impasse, or surprise, involving more often than not a second order of nature, a cunning imitation of nature, or an esoteric order in nature.

Apart from Borges himself, there are few characters in his stories who amount to more than stick-figures. Like Erik Lonnrot the detective in "Death and the Compass," they tend to be wholly without background or features; or else they are unidimensional, like Vincent Moon in "The Shape of the Sword...