I find the way you captured not only the themes of Borges, but, at least in places, also his cadence and style very impressive. The work of Borges does indeed inspire a certain temptation to recreate it. I myself have long aspired to assemble an Orbis Tertius of sorts, to write the encyclopedia of our own Tlön. However, by Marcel's example, my failure so far might be for the better.
Hmmm, a good story, though the ending is perhaps purposefully, very un-Borgesian. An alternative way of ending it, that I thought of while reading, would have been if the first letter itself was actually the story, written by M- (Marcel), the second letter describing how he spends his time in a sanatorium, writing ever more intricate variations on the same letter. And then you might find out that the second letter is actually.... at which point there is a note showing that the frame story is actually a story written by ... etc.
On the other hand, with the spirit of Borges, I agree it hinges a lot on labyrinths and recursion, but there is one built in escape route in his philosophy: The rejection of identity. All Borge's stories to some extent revolves around this rejection that there exist such thing as an 'identity' of a writer, there is only the story, which is an object on its own, which the writer will not understand any better than the reader. Realizing this, the poor Marcel will see that he is no more Marcel than he is Shakespeare (even should he accidentally get Shakespeare's memory handed to him).
I find the way you captured not only the themes of Borges, but, at least in places, also his cadence and style very impressive. The work of Borges does indeed inspire a certain temptation to recreate it. I myself have long aspired to assemble an Orbis Tertius of sorts, to write the encyclopedia of our own Tlön. However, by Marcel's example, my failure so far might be for the better.
Hmmm, a good story, though the ending is perhaps purposefully, very un-Borgesian. An alternative way of ending it, that I thought of while reading, would have been if the first letter itself was actually the story, written by M- (Marcel), the second letter describing how he spends his time in a sanatorium, writing ever more intricate variations on the same letter. And then you might find out that the second letter is actually.... at which point there is a note showing that the frame story is actually a story written by ... etc.
On the other hand, with the spirit of Borges, I agree it hinges a lot on labyrinths and recursion, but there is one built in escape route in his philosophy: The rejection of identity. All Borge's stories to some extent revolves around this rejection that there exist such thing as an 'identity' of a writer, there is only the story, which is an object on its own, which the writer will not understand any better than the reader. Realizing this, the poor Marcel will see that he is no more Marcel than he is Shakespeare (even should he accidentally get Shakespeare's memory handed to him).