Borges And The Eternal Orang-utans

I haven’t turned a page yet, but going by the dust-​jacket precis, Borges And The Eter­nal Orang-​utans, by Brazi­lan author, satirist and car­toon­ist Luis Fer­nando Veris­simo, just has to be a fab­u­lous novel:

Vogel­stein is a loner who has always lived among books. Sud­denly, fate grabs hold of his insignif­i­cant life and car­ries him off to Buenos Aires, to a con­fer­ence on Edgar Allen Poe, the inven­tor of the modern detec­tive story. There Vogel­stein meets his idol, Jorge Luis Borges, and for rea­sons that a mere pas­sion for lit­er­a­ture cannot explain, he finds him­self at the centre of a murder inves­ti­ga­tion that involves arcane demons, the mys­ter­ies of the Kabal­lah, the pos­si­ble destruc­tion of the world, and the Eliz­a­bethan magus John Dee’s “Eternal Orang-utan”, which would end up by writ­ing all the known books in the cosmos.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a blurb that lists quite so many things and people by which or with whom I have been hor­ri­bly, hor­ri­bly obsessed over the years. (Even Orang-​utans! I loved those cheeky Suma­tran hominidae, and they taught me never to say out loud words I have only read, after a child­hood humil­i­a­tion expe­ri­ence prompted by my repeat­edly refer­ring to them as orange you-​tans.)

This, of course, means that the book is as likely to be a hideous dis­ap­point­ment as it is the per­fect novel for me.

We shall see.

Posted at 9am on 14/06/04 by Jack Mottram to the books category.
Permalink · Add to del.icio.us
Tags: books, borges, literature