In an interview on Psychoanalysing Argentina

Tell me about Doctor Brodie’s Report by Borges.

Well, many of his books are very psychoanalytic and full of mirrors, labyrinths, tigers and alter egos. He always had a sense of being shadowed by another self. Borges is famous for his metaphors and conundrums but the stories in this book are much less allusive and somehow more complete than those in some of the other, better known, collections. These are all about Buenos Aires and feature duals, mythical figures, places with patios and grilled windows, and are full of a sense of his native Palermo. He sets ‘The Gospel According to St Mark’ out in the province – in the Pampas – another region he loved to imagine. Borges’s fiction amounts to a metaphorical universe and he evokes a place I dream of visiting when I’m homesick for Buenos Aires.

He was a strange man, Borges, a bookish man and an Anglophile and possibly a virgin for many years. When he was around in the 1930s and 40s he was the ugly, clever one in the city’s literary circles, and was not successful with women. He was not a typical Argentine man – anti-Peronist, Anglophile, an original in Buenos Aires. If you put him on the couch he’d probably…well, he’d probably tell his stories again.

They sound very Jungian with all the symbols.

Yes, he’d probably be the one for the Jungian couch, though Argentina is much more Freudian/Lacanian. In some ways the symbols are slightly crude and they do recur again and again and again. Lots of people have tried to copy him. In fact, I’m reading a Martin Amis book now [The Pregnant Widow] with a scene set in a bathroom with mirrors that reflect beauty back infinitely – it’s straight out of Borges, a fact I know Amis would readily admit. He’s a big Borges fan.

Infinity beguiled him and the metaphor of the labyrinth expresses that. Of course, that comes from Greek classical literature but I think it might also be a simple way of articulating the grid-like layout of Buenos Aires, a city surrounded by the infinity of the Pampas, an urban labyrinth. He doesn’t write strictly topographically about Buenos Aires but distils it into a metaphoric landscape.