I Remember Him… (Lo Recuerdo…)

This is how Jorge Luis Borges starts the story of Ireneo Funes:  with a memory.  We soon discover, however, that this is not a narrative about our ordinary recollections.  The narrator immediately reveals that the word remember, for him, “is a sacred verb,” which he “scarcely has the right to pronounce.” The retelling of his encounters with Funes becomes a conduit through which he can deliver a more deep-rooted paradox about the nature of memory.  For Funes, the young Uruguayan farm boy whose life is altered forever by a terrible horse riding accident, the ideal of a perfect memory is cast against the impossibility of repetition. 

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