Guided by Poe

Luis Fernando Verissimo’s “Borges and the Eternal Orangutans” is a perfect novel. I’ll say it again: This book is a perfect novel. A perfect novel must be just-so from the opening sentence, taking readers into another world, as happens here: “I will try to be your eyes, Jorge. I am following the advice you gave me when we said goodbye: ‘Write, and you will remember.’ I will try to remember, with more exactitude this time, so that you can see what I see, so that you can unveil the mystery and arrive at the truth. We always write in order to remember the truth. When we invent, it is only in order to remember the truth more exactly.”

The speaker is the book’s narrator, Vogelstein, and the “Jorge” in question is none other than Jorge Luis Borges, who’s a character in the novel. Vogelstein has traveled from Brazil to Buenos Aires to attend a meeting of the Israfel Society, a group devoted to the works of Edgar Allan Poe. During the conference, a German Poe expert is murdered inside a locked room. There are three suspects, along with a bumbling police officer. Of course, there are also three knives, one of which is blood-stained. When Vogelstein meets his idol Borges at the conference, they join to solve the murder.

Blind for most of his life and famous for his interest in the esoteric, Borges provides expert commentary on the course of the murder investigation. (His love for the scrupulously fantastic and the works of Poe, among others, make him well-suited for this.) The narrative abounds with references to the occult, to Poe and H.P. Lovecraft, to arcana of all sorts and to orangutans. (Readers who know their Poe may remember that an orangutan was involved in what is called the first detective story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.”)

The reader will mourn because the novel is so short, and it’s only the second by Verissimo to be translated into English (the other is “The Club of Angels”). But that only means you can quickly read it again and revel in the spell it casts. “We all have ambitions to be sorcerers,” Borges says at one point. *