The Book of Sand

“The Book of Sand” by Jorge Luis Borges is a short story dealing with humankind’s inability to grasp the infinite, whether in spirituality or in physical reality. Borges is one of the most well-known Latin American authors, as well as one of the most notable postmodernists of the 20th century. Like much of Borges’s work, “The Book of Sand” contains themes and motifs of the infinite, the nature of literature, spirituality, and postcolonial thought. “The Book of Sand” is about a narrator who has a clear love of abstract and lofty ideas and has the unique opportunity to buy an Indian book with an infinite number of pages from a Scottish salesman. The man predominantly sells Bibles, and the contrasting versions of the Bible, the Book of Sand, and the narrator’s obsession with the abstract and the absurd undergird Borges’s discussion of truth and reality.

This guide uses the version of “The Book of Sand” found in the Collected Fictions anthology of Borges’s work translated by Andrew Hurley and published by Viking Books in 1998. The anthology contains all of Borges’s short stories, including those from the collection titled The Book of Sand, which was published in 1975. It also includes an afterword by Borges in which he refers to this text as a story about an “unlucky and inconceivable object […] a volume of innumerable pages” (485). “The Book of Sand” opens with an epigraph from George Herbert’s “The Collar,” published in 1633, which reads just “thy rope of sand” and notes Herbert’s birth and death years, 1593 and 1623.

Following the Epigraph, the first-person narrator muses on the nature of infinity, noting that a line has an infinite “number of points” (480). He also notes that geometry is not the correct way to open the story and comments that although it is almost cliché to claim a story is true, this story is true.

The story takes place predominantly in the narrator’s apartment on Calle Belgrano—Belgrano Street—in Buenos Aires, Argentina. A salesman comes to the narrator’s door hoping to sell him a Bible, and the narrator identifies him as possibly Scandinavian; he learns later that the man is Scottish. The narrator explains to the salesman that he already possesses a Wycliffe Bible (a 14th-century Middle English version); a Cipriano de Valera (a 16th-century Spanish translation); a Luther Bible (a 16th-century German translation); and a Latin Vulgate. He has no need for more Bibles. The salesman, though, offers to “show [him] a sacred book that might interest a man such as [himself]” (480) that he found in Northern India.

The narrator attempts to identify the book by noting its inscriptions from Bombay, guessing that it is from the 19th century, and assuming its language is an older form of a Hindu language. The salesman does not know any details about the book. He traded some rupees and Bibles for it with a man that could not read but valued the book “as an amulet” (481).

The text is called the Book of Sand, according to the salesman, because “neither sand nor this book has a beginning or an end” (481). The narrator attempts to find the first and last pages but is unable to do so; each time he tries, there are still some pages between the beginning and the page he selected. He also notes that the pages are out of order, and the numbers of the pages are as large as eight digits, though they also dip as low as 999. In addition, there are images in the book, like illustrations in a dictionary. As the narrator finds an image of an anchor, the salesman comments: “Look at it well. You will never see it again” (481).

The salesman muses on the numbering of the pages as infinite and out of order, connecting its presentation of pages to space and time, but the narrator resents his musings and changes the topic to Scotland. The narrator offers the entirety of his pension and his Wycliffe Bible in exchange for the Book of Sand, and the salesman accepts. The narrator notes that the salesman does not haggle or even count the money before handing over the book, and the two men continue to chat about India and Scotland until nighttime. Then, the narrator is left alone with it.

The narrator considers placing the Book of Sand in the place left by the Wycliffe Bible but chooses to place it behind “some imperfect volumes of the Thousand and One Nights” instead (483). However, he cannot sleep, and he gets out of bed that night to read through random pages of the Book of Sand. His obsession grows, and he withdraws from the few friends he had to further study his new “treasure,” which he shows to no one.

As summer comes around, the narrator’s obsession turns to revulsion; he realizes the book is “monstrous.” He is unwilling to burn it, as an infinite book might create infinite smoke and end the world. Ultimately, he resolves to hide it in the basement of the National Library, taking care to avoid noticing too precisely where he placed it. The story closes with the narrator’s note that he is still careful not to walk on the same street as the library.