Now I get why they say Borges is a writer's writer.
“I had wondered how a book could be infinite. The only way I could surmise was that it be a cyclical, or circular, volume, a volume whose last page would be identical to the first, so that one might go on indefinitely.”
His FICTIONS is filled with these kinds of narrative hypotheses, a variety of which are sometimes presented on the very same page.
In all fictions, each time a man meets diverse alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the work of the virtually impossible-to-disentangle 'Ts'ui Pen', the character chooses—simultaneously—all of them. He creates, thereby, 'several futures,' several times, which themselves proliferate and fork. That is the explanation for the novel's contradictions.
Some story hypotheses are even given diagrams. Like this one:
But it is not the worlds proposed by 'April March' that are regressive, it is the way the stories are told—regressively and ramifying, as I have said. The book is composed of thirteen chapters. The first reports an ambiguous conversation between several unknown persons on a railway station platform. The second tells of the events of the evening that precedes the first. The third, likewise retrograde, tells of the events of another, different, possible evening before the first; the fourth chapter relates the events of yet a third different possible evening. Each of these (mutually exclusive) “evenings-before” ramifies into three further “evenings-before.” all quite different. The work in its entirety consists, then, of nine novels, each novel, of three long chapters.
It isn't so much a book of stories as much as it's a collection of thought experiments about what can potentially be done with stories, without actually attempting to put any of it to the test, not really. The influence on Calvino is very obvious, as is certainly the influence on, say, a Christopher Nolan. Especially in regard to his structurally interesting stuff: MEMENTO, INCEPTION, and INTERSTELLAR. And you can even see it a bit in his earliest work, FOLLOWING.
I'm beginning to think I'm not smart enough for Borges though, because only 86 pages into this unassuming volume and I can already feel my brain bleed.