The Book of Sand

“The Book of Sand” opens with the Epigraph “...thy rope of sands...” from George Herbert’s poem “The Collar,” which discusses the restrictions placed on a person by their beliefs. The speaker in Herbert’s poem ultimately appreciates the guidance offered by God, but the Epigraph contrasts this comfort with the distress and fear the Book of Sand provokes by the end of the story. The Epigraph and the opening paragraph of “The Book of Sand” highlight the subjectivity of personal experience. While Herbert questions his own perceptions, digging into the “ropes of sand” that bind him, Borges’s narrator takes a broader view of the concept of subjectivity, noting that even within a finite space, an infinite number of points exist.

The narrator of “The Book of Sand” admits from the beginning that he is not entirely sure how to open his story, noting that the geometric commentary is not quite correct. This kind of self-referential discourse is common in modernist and postmodernist works, and Borges further plays with metatextual ideas by having the narrator comment on the cliché of claiming that a story is true. He points out that authors’ introducing their texts with a claim that their stories are true has become “convention,” but his narrator does so anyway. Having his own text follow this practice that he identifies as trite subtly mocks it and calls into question the authenticity of the story and of the Book of Sand.

Within the first paragraph of Borges’s actual story, the narrator reveals that he is nearsighted, which leaves the salesman’s appearance a bit imprecise and undefined. Combined with the narrator’s insistence upon the truth of the story, this information creates an unreliable narration in which his words are not necessarily—or not entirely—true. Further, the narrator is “misled” by the salesman’s blond hair, which is difficult for him to see; he initially thinks that the man is old and losing his hair or that he is Scandinavian, which suggests that the narrator was misled in other ways.

The discussions between the narrator and the salesman, in which they both profess an in-depth knowledge of rare Bibles and share their knowledge of countries on three continents, mark them each as worldly and intelligent. However, both men are taken in by the Book of Sand, which leaves them with “an air of melancholy” (480). The similarities between the men identify each of them as archetypal hermits, not in the sense that they do not leave home, but as sages who are brooding and solitary by nature. Their shared inclination toward knowledge and spirituality lends itself to an obsession with the Book of Sand.

The foreign nature of the book and of the salesman intensify its air of mystery and exoticism; it is neither native to the narrator’s country nor to Scotland, the salesman’s home. Specifically, its arrival in Argentina from India by way of Scotland underpins the book with traces of Orientalism, an othering view of Asia that also traveled to the colonies from Europe. The implicit spirituality and danger of the book are fundamentally tied to its foreign origins, creating the alternately enticing and repulsive feelings that both the narrator and the salesman have toward it.

The Book of Sand is mystical in more ways than one, with pages that seem to “[grow] from the very book” and with randomly numbered pages, which the salesman speculates show that “the terms of an infinite series can be numbered any way whatever” (481-82). The salesman goes on to note that, like the book, “we are anywhere […] we are at any point in time” (482). This upsets the narrator, who is clearly still in the early stages of a growing obsession with this new acquisition that the salesman is about to abandon.

Borges seems to be commenting on these musings with the story itself, as the Book of Sand is a representation of infinity and of infinite possibilities. When the salesman muses that everyone is experiencing their own slice of an infinite reality, he also reveals the nature of the narrator’s obsession with the Book of Sand. It contains infinite possibilities, but the narrator is truly fixated on finding a solution to the riddle of subjectivity in which he cannot be “misled,” eliminating the need to establish that the story is true.

The narrator trades his entire pension and his Wycliffe Bible for the Book of Sand, showing how valuable the premise of a resolved infinity is to him. However, instead of displaying the book in the place of honor left open by the Wycliffe, he hides it behind “some unfinished volumes of the Thousand and One Nights” (483). This suggests a hierarchy of value within the story. On one hand, it appears that the Wycliffe may be the most valuable book that he owned, followed by One Thousand and One Nights and then the Book of Sand. However, it is also possible to invert this interpretation of the narrator’s hierarchy of texts; the Book of Sand may be the most valuable, making it the most in need of a good hiding spot. By this logic, the Wycliffe was left out in the open because he considered it his least valued text.

The narrator’s obsession with the book develops quickly, mirroring a trajectory of emerging addiction. He becomes alienated from his friends and haunted by paranoia while attempting to find order in the nook. His fear that burning it would produce infinite flame and smoke, thus ending the world, reflects the terrifying nature of infinity, as foreshadowed in the musings that open the story and irritate the narrator. His eventual choice to leave the book in the basement of the National Library evokes a comparison of the infinite pages of the book to the “nine hundred thousand” volumes of the library (483). This also reveals his need to relinquish the text rather than continue his pursuit of the infinite.

The story’s conclusion highlights the unachievable nature of complete knowledge, as the narrator must rid himself of the book rather than continue to delve further and further into the abstraction of infinity. Though he can discern some order to the pattern of the images, he must accept, in the end, that the book and the abstraction it represents are beyond comprehension.