As I’ve noted before, reading the story a few years later and with whatever experience I’ve managed to retain and utilize since, and in view of the previous stories in this collection, I enjoyed the adventure of the story as much as the twists and questions with which Borges infuses his tales.
The idea of a labyrinth represented by a book is of course, pure hypertext without the ease of highlighted words to click upon. There were some other things I noticed this time around that I missed in the initial readings.
"I do not think that your illustrious ancestor toyed idly with variations. I do not find it believable tht he would waste thirteen years laboring over a never ending experiment in rhetoric. In your country the novel is an inferior genre; in Ts’ui Pen’s period, it was a despised one. Ts’ui Pen was a fine novelist but he was also a man of letters who, doubtless, considered himself more than a mere novelist." (p. 99)
This struck me particularly because of the intimacy with which this anthology is written; Borges has inserted himself as first person narrator in most cases. Is he then, aside from his usual unusual treatment of what we take for granted and Borges instead questions, telling us as well that this is in fact how he considers his own work?
Borges may be clearly pointing out to the reader by this commentary by one character on the work of another that the idea of the labyrinth, the idea of different endings that change and grow in number as each decision in life is made much as a reverse pyamid effect, is the purpose of the story.
The spy adventure is merely the medium or vehicle. Luckily, it is nearly as engrossing and interesting as the ideas that Borges explores in the labyrinth of his mind.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology