“In Pauls’s account, Borges wanted to be a classic, he wanted the grand esteem of his beloved nineteenth-century writers, like Dumas or Dostoyevsky. But instead of writing fictions of a grand plenitude, like these classic authors, Borges instead performed a side-step: he wrote slim stories that recounted the critical reception of classic works that did not exist. This was the great strategy of lightness that Borges invented, and that has shadowed a certain mutant strain of literature ever since (“Borges is inexhaustible,” wrote Roberto Bolaño, a near contemporary of Pauls).”