Any reader who has been introduced to Jorge Lewis Borges universe, will see the title and know Ocampo has found his way through his labyrinths. The stories are reborn from the mathematical, and looping universe, ashes of pages turned phoenix. It’s worth noting, there actually isn’t a story called “The Infinite Library,”; I believe the inclusion is an ode to Borges, the ultimate librarian.
It is, as the title suggests, a collection of short stories. However, collectively, it is also one novel that spans infinite time. Each story carries elements of the previous, building upon each other, like the expanding shelves of the Infinite Library. The stories carry us into the deep future, where the failed experiment of a soul’s algorithm brings about unintended consequence, only to have the last story bring us back to the middle. (Of course in a circle, there is no middle.) All at the heart of it, is the question of identity – how much of our identity is culture, how much of that culture is shaped by environment and genetics? Or history? The Spanish names of Ocampo’s Filipino culture strangely play into the continuation of the Argentinian Borges’s universe; the names serving as a connection of the two remote cultures and time. I feel we are seeing the making of the book with an infinite spine. My personal favourites are: “Here Be Dragons,” “I m d 1 in 10”, “Big Enough for the Entire Universe” and “Brother to Space, Sister to Time.”
Ocampo writes of my dreams. Ever since college I have been frantically chased by the sound of millions of monkeys banging away haphazardly at their typewriters to recreate Shakespearean sonnets. And while I fruitlessly try to grasp the fragments of dreams and language, Ocampo writes it down with seeming ease, eloquence, and meditative understanding. (He groks). I can only say it is a relief to have it written down. Ocampo might say it was the monkeys’ doing…
‘Maps can show more than just continents and oceans,’ the boys said. ‘There are maps to heaven and hell; to happiness and sadness; maps of music, of loves lost and loves found. There are maps to imaginary places known only to dreamer and mapmakers like me. I can even make a map of you, if you’d like.’ -Here Be Dragons
After all, he thought, true love was more than equal to the finest works of both gods and men – and twice as fragile. Love needed to be preserved as well. -Resurrection 2.0
‘Can I wish for everyone to be happy?’
‘Alas my poor baby, that is not up to you. With your bough of mind-flowers, like Icarus you will fly. I twist them into a crown today, and tonight they die,’ she continued. ‘Make a wish, little mannikin. Your pain is fodder for creation. Wish for a brand new universe.’ -Brother to Space, Sister to Time.
JohannaAirth 
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