The Fictions of Borges · Novel
April March
Herbert Quain
A novel that runs backwards and splits: thirteen chapters, nine possible books, one railway platform at the end — or the beginning — of all of them.
Ts’ui Pên built a labyrinth that was a novel. Herbert Quain built a novel that is a timetable.
April March — the title is a pun, not a name: April, then March, the year running the wrong way — is thirteen chapters long and nine novels wide. You start with strangers talking on a platform and move, always backward, into mutually exclusive yesterdays. Borges, pretending to write Quain’s obituary, gives you the architecture and withholds every scene except that first (last) conversation, which he also withholds. The essay is a review of a structure.
This is the Garden of Forking Paths as a parlour game, and Borges is honest enough to let Quain call it one. Symmetry, arbitrary rules, tedium: the features of every game. The forking-paths story, published the same year, is what happens when you put a spy in the structure and let him feel the infinite. April March is the structure without the spy. It belongs here as the blueprint.
Quain also wrote a detective novel whose solution is wrong, a play in which the first act is a character’s fiction, and a book of stories that refuse to complete themselves. He is Calvino, twenty years early, and a worse novelist, which is why the essay is the right form.
On the readability rating. The branching is described with enough precision to reconstruct a table of contents. Not a chapter is quoted. Quain claimed tedium as a feature. Borges took him at his word and spared us the pages.
In-world history
Published, according to the essay, in 1936, as the third and only part of a larger design. The first chapter is an ambiguous conversation among strangers on a platform. Each preceding chapter offers a different previous evening; each of those ramifies again. One branch is a detective novel, one supernatural, one communist, one anti-communist. After publication Quain wished he had chosen two forks rather than three. Demiurges and gods, he said, would choose the infinite.
Why it matters
Borges describing the book he did not write, so that "The Garden of Forking Paths" could be a story instead of a diagram. Quain wanted symmetry, arbitrary rules, and tedium. He got two out of three, and regretted not using a binary split, which would have been purer.
Appearances
- An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain (1941) — Jorge Luis Borges A fictional obituary-essay surveying Quain's books; April March is the regressive, ramified novel
Connected volumes
- Related to The Garden of Forking Paths · The Fictions of Borges
- Related to Pierre Menard's Quixote · The Fictions of Borges
- Related to Morelli's Novel · Hopscotch
- Related to The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim · The Fictions of Borges
- Related to The God of the Labyrinth · The Fictions of Borges
Also from this world
- The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim · Novel
- The Book of Sand · Impossible object
- Den hemlige Frälsaren · Theology
- A First Encyclopaedia of Tlön · Encyclopaedia
- The Garden of Forking Paths · Labyrinth novel
- The God of the Labyrinth · Detective novel
- The Map of the Empire · Map
- Pierre Menard's Quixote · Novel
Catalogue record
- Category
- Novel
- World
- The Fictions of Borges
- Imagined by
- Jorge Luis Borges
- Language
- English
- First appearance
- "Examen de la obra de Herbert Quain", Sur, April 1941
- Readability
- Described
Sources
- Jorge Luis Borges, "Examen de la obra de Herbert Quain", Sur No. 79, April 1941; collected in Ficciones (Sur, 1944). English translations include Anthony Bonner's and Andrew Hurley's.
Added by house · last checked 2026-09-01