After reading other people's responses, I feel a little better about Borges' "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"--not because I understand it any better, but because I'm kind of relieved I'm not the only one who doesn't really feel like I get it. I enjoyed the story well enough on a superficial level; the premise interested me, and I thought the writing was very good. It throws out a lot of information in a short space, but to me it felt manageable, and I think I enjoyed the early stages of the story better than the later ones, in fact, because they felt more story-like than the simple descriptions of the way of life in Tlon. The philosophical discussions that got brought in with the recitation of what was in the encyclopedia entry were mind-twisting, and I don't think I really understood them yet--the explanations they come up with for the nine coins, their ideas about language, etc.

Even that, though, didn't make me feel completely overwhelmed by the story until I finished it. It feels... Big, like it's supposed to be a story with Meaning. And I feel like whatever greater Meaning it has, I have completely missed it. I got so convoluted somewhere over what was real and what wasn't, and what might it mean that this part is true and this part is completely false, that it became hard to come up with any greater significance to it than showing the reality and fiction are closer than we think, or that one creates the other perhaps. It left me enjoying the story while I read it--and not liking it very much at all once I actually finished and had to sit down and think about what I read. I didn't connect with it, in the end, because it largely lacked characters, and the plot was minimal--the main body of the story was establishing the fictional planet, with just the bare bones to make a story around that. I think that fact was what made it feel very heavy and Meaningful--like there was some huge philosophical significance, simply because there wasn't much there that wasn't heavy and philosophical.