Borges Marathon, Part 4: Monk Eastman, Purveyor of Iniquities

Welcome back to this slow process of reviewing every short story written by Jorge Luis Borges. So far, we’ve looked at the stories of Lazarus Morell, Tom Castro, and the Widow Ching. Today it’s a story of another villain, the New York gangster Monk Eastman.

Reading these stories again made me wonder why I enjoyed them so much. These first stories, from the 1935 collection A Universal History of Iniquity, are essentially just biographies of various villainous characters, cribbed from other books. Borges doesn’t even bother with much scene-painting or dialogue, and there are none of the wildly imaginative infinite libraries and labyrinths of his later work.

So what is there? Well, first of all, they’re dramatic stories. Monk Eastman’s journey from petty street thug to bouncer to Tammany Hall enforcer to the head of a criminal gang of 1,200 people is worth following. Then there are the eye-catching descriptions:

“Eastman would leave his house to inspect his gangster empire with a blue-feathered pigeon perched on his shoulder, like a bull with a heron on its hump.”

On his blog A Writer’s Life, British novelist Andrew Blackman shares book reviews, insights into the writing process and the latest literary news, as well as listing short story contests with a total of more than $250,000 in prize money.