Borges never wrote a work of fiction longer than fourteen pages. “It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one,” he wrote in 1941, “the madness of composing vast books—setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes.”
(…) His characters—including the one called Borges, the recurring protagonist of so many of his fictions—tended to be ciphers. They were fictions made from fiction, drawn from reading, not from life. (…) “Why on earth,” he asks in another of these conversations, “should I worry what happens to Borges? After all, Borges is nothing, a mere fiction.”

    Two New Books About “Borges”