[aaroninsf]

Most people is an interesting marker.

In my academic circles he was a demigod, alongside other giants of South American and SA diaspora literature like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortazar, Isabella Allende, and was considered more or less on par with Franz Kafka in terms of significance. Familiarity with all his major work was taken for granted.

I participated in a thread recently about the relative merits of attending college. I opined in it that contrary to the OP's presumption, jumping immediately into bootcamp or into a startup etc., there are things to be had from a broad liberal arts education that you're unlikely to pick up elsewhere in any comprehensive away. The broader intellectual landscape of your culture is one; less important than intimate familiarity with any particular writer or canon is a sense that such things exist; and are always evolving in response to cultural currents.

Borges is so important a figure it is striking that he would be considered esoteric.

I imagine the same is true now for other giants of world literature, like Milan Kundera, or, Stanislaw Lem, or, Italo Calvino, all of whom still have a lot to offer a contemporary audience.