“The Garden of Forking Paths”
by Jorge Luis Borges

The reading was so rich with vocabulary that I had trouble trying to understand what it meant so I used the context to help me understand the meaning. To be honest, I read it twice; the first time just passed my mind in a blur and the second time out loud so the words entered my own ears.

Firstly, I loved how the author described every single detail seen by the narrator from the environment to objects and from people’s clothes to their expressions. I had a sense of the story being an investigation narrative where I, as a reader, was trying to piece up the puzzle through what the narrator was encountering at different scenes (a reader going through a diverging and converging paths of the labyrinth). It also seemed like an ‘adventure’ as he was saving himself from Madden’s pursuit.

In terms of the storyline, I could not help but notice a lot of mazes in the story that linked each other up. Although I had difficulties trying to grasp everything, I had a gist of what it was about. As the story progresses, the plot took many unexpected turns that I had to follow aimlessly until I got back on track.

It was an interesting reading as the author explored the use of labyrinth as a metaphor which not only applied to the garden.