Collection: El informe de Brodie

Overview
Published in 1970, El informe de Brodie gathers short fictions that shift Borges’s focus from metaphysical puzzles to an austere, almost oral storytelling grounded in Argentine settings, honor codes, and the fatal pull of violence. The pieces are brief, lucid, and stripped of baroque ornament, yet they preserve his taste for apocrypha, doubles, and the ambiguities of memory. Streets, knives, and neighborhood legends replace libraries and labyrinths; the extraordinary enters through rumor, ritual, and the stubborn persistence of myth in everyday life.

Form and Voice
Many tales are presented as testimonies, secondhand recollections, or recovered documents. The narrator often recedes, allowing compadritos, old neighbors, or a 19th‑century missionary to speak. This framing invites doubt about what is remembered, embellished, or deliberately concealed. The language is economical and colloquial, creating the illusion of a story told at a table or doorstep, where pride and fear edit the facts as much as time does.

Key Stories
El evangelio según Marcos follows a university student stranded during a flood on a provincial ranch. Reading the Gospel aloud to the illiterate Gutre family, he unwittingly teaches them a script they then reenact with dreadful literalness, turning faith into sacrifice. The tale fuses simplicity of plot with a chilling inevitability and a critique of interpretation taken to its end.

La intrusa condenses jealousy and fraternity into a brutal parable. Two brothers, fiercely devoted to each other, buy and share a woman; love threatens their bond, and the solution they choose safeguards fraternal loyalty at an unforgivable cost. Borges observes without moralizing, letting the starkness of the act define its horror.

El encuentro stages a gathering where two antique knives are displayed. When two men handle them, an old feud seems to reawaken in the steel itself; the weapons, not the men, dictate the outcome. The idea that objects bear a memory and a will threads through other pieces, like Juan Muraña, where legend and steel outlive their bearer, and where a mother’s version elevates a thug into a myth.

Historia de Rosendo Juárez revisits and reverses an earlier Borges story about a famous brawl. Here the supposed coward speaks, recasting his refusal to fight as a superior understanding of fate. The correction challenges authorship, truth, and the way tales create the very reputations they claim to report.

El duelo portrays the lifelong rivalry of two society women, artistically gifted and mutually obsessed. Their competition becomes its own art, outlasting talent and fashion until reputations fade, leaving only the stubborn memory of enmity. The paired pieces El fin del duelo and El otro duelo transpose honor-feuds into different registers, showing how vendettas outlive reasons and how the end of a duel can feel like the loss of meaning itself.

El informe de Brodie, presented as a discovered manuscript by a Scottish missionary, describes a primitive tribe with customs both alien and disquietingly familiar. The cool ethnographic tone exposes cruelty, hierarchy, and ritual without exoticism, reflecting a Swiftian mirror in which so-called civilization recognizes its own image.

Themes and Motifs
Honor, fatalism, and the seduction of violence recur, often mediated by objects, knives, keepsakes, that seem to remember. Borges explores how stories overwrite lives and how alternative tellings unsettle certainty. Faith, whether religious or secular, appears as a potent script that compels action. The collection’s realism is porous: superstition, chance, and rumor shape outcomes as forcefully as will.

Place in Borges’s Work
The book marks a late style, plainer, more Argentine, and more openly narrative, without abandoning intellectual play. It complements the earlier labyrinths with stark parables of conduct and memory, offering some of Borges’s most accessible and disquieting fictions.