"Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" by Jorge Luis Borges

I guess, on the one hand, the easiest response to this story would be to write, "What the hell just happened on those pages?"  The story was detailed and complicated, contained what seemed like far too many particulars, and managed to jump around like crazy while still moving chronologically.

I think the postscript was the most interesting aspect of the story.  Even though I'd read the entire "article," I still was not entirely sure that I was reading fiction and not some radical and/or underground article from the '40s when I reached this section.  This had to be intentional, as Borges plays up this potential by naming a relatively innocuous, generic publication (Anthology of Fantastic Literature(1940)) in the first paragraph, making statements that were entirely in keeping with what an author might say about a now-dated piece, right down to addressing that he used different tones and metaphors for the "article."  This was his own form of "breaking the pattern" we talked about with Barthelme, totally throwing the reader before plunging back into the myth of "the Tlon conspiracy/takeover," going even more over the top than he had before AND incorporating his own philosophical conclusions about man's seemingly greatest achievement.

I liked Borges' form of story-telling.  I thought that the precise manner in which he diverted the reader's (or at least my) attention, by both overloading the reader with imagined particulars such as names and dates and on occasion using what would typically just be the end of sentences to go off on brief-yet-vivid anecdotes about individual instances both within Tlon and in the human creation and "discovery" of the imagined Tlon, were brilliant.  Though the piece is certainly difficult and confusing to the reader, such absurdity feels meticulously constructed.