Franz Kafka-The Trial
Jorge Luis Borges-La libreria de Babel("The Library of Babel")
Borges had a love affair with information and ideas, very likely to the detriment of his kind of stunted emotional/personal life. I think one of the joys of reading him is the "lazy pleasures of useless, out of the way erudition" or however he said it. And I don't think that's all he did either. For all his downpours of the esoteric and fantastic, there are always austere thickets of raw humanity. That's a juxtaposition I admire a whole bunch.
His work is both amazingly diverse and yet still thoroughly hermetic. Maybe hermetic because of that diversity. He was a librarian and it was a librarian's work. Looking out to look in. Or vice versa.
Borges knew more about the world than you and I might find out in two lifetimes.
And don't get me started on Kafka. I'm completely obsessed, don't get me started, I'll babble tell your ears bleed.
