Milton Hatoum, a reader of Jorge Luís Borges

Abstract

Milton Hatoum constantly writes about his creative process. He revealed in a chronic, “Tantos anos depois, Paris parece tão distante …”, published in the volume Um solitário à espreita (2013), that he outlined the strategy of the romance novel Relato de um certo Oriente (1989), between the end of 1980 and the beginning of 1981, in a short story format. In 2005, at Casa do Saber, in the city of São Paulo, Milton Hatoum presented a “Seminar about the novel” and made comments about his presentation in an interview given to Julio Dias Borges, from Suplemento Literário de Minas Gerais in February, 2006, where he showed his ideas about the movements of his narratives and the way he reads short stories by Edgar Allan Poe and Jorge Luís Borges. On the same year, in a short article, written for the magazine EntreLivros, Hatoum left a highly complementary comment on the short story O caminho dos jardins que se bifurcam (1941), written by Jorge Luís Borges. In this work, we can delve into the strong presence of this short story by Jorge Luís Borges in the structuring of the novel Relato de um certo Oriente (1989).