Borges, Jorge Luis with Adolfo Bioy-Casares - Six Problems for Don Isidoro Parodi (1942)
There are so many cooks associated with this particular effort (and all with so many names!) that it is hard to know who to blame for the spoiled broth. Is it Borges, who is on record as a fan of detective fiction but shows himself here to have missed the point entirely? Is it his collaborator Bioy-Casares, who also wrote as 'H. Bustos Domecq'? Is it the translator, Norman Thomas Giovanni? Let's not overlook the cover designer, James McMullan, who depicts the title character as tall and thin when he is described as short and fat; or the nameless person who suggested including a bogus Foreword and an equally bogus Biography which both contain exactly nothing of interest. Blame them all; there is plenty of blame to go around, because this is a real stinkeroo. The last time I encountered anything with this level of florid ineptitude was The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor.
Don Isidro is imprisoned for life in an Argentine jail for murder -- falsely, we discover, although this has no bearing on the book. Visitors come and talk randomly at him for several hours, and so great are his powers of concentration that he can not only stay awake but also remember enough of their drivelling conversation to explain briefly at the end of each story why certain events took place. There are one or two out of the six episodes here that might stand up as detective stories, but unfortunately Borges -- let him stand trial for the whole gang -- has got the genre back-to-front. Instead of presenting a simple narrative of inexplicable events and then explaining them in terms of plausible behaviour, he presents a complex narrative of banal events and then 'explains' them in terms of some bizarre and highly implausible behaviour. The only use the poor reader has for Occam's Razor is to cut his own throat. There are very few books I leave unfinished; but this was one of them.
Here is a random sample of the kind of thing which one hears in an Argentine jail:
"Where do you come from, my dear friend Parodi? Don't you know that the Pan-American runs nonstop from Bolivia to Buenos Aires? Let me continue. That evening the conversation was boring. No one wanted to speak of anything other than Bibilioni's disappearance. Indeed, some passenger or other remarked that the much-touted safety that Anglo-Saxon capitalists claim for railway trains was open to doubt after this turn of events. Without disagreeing, I pointed out that Bibilioni's action might well have been the result of absentmindedness, which is so typical of the poetic temperament, and that I myself, in the thrall of a chimera, was often in the clouds. These hypotheses, which seemed plausible by the sober light of day, began to fade with the last pirouette of the sun, When night fell, everything was tinged with melancholy. From time to time out of the blackness came the insistent complaints of an unseen owl, mocking the dry cough of a sick man. It was the moment perhaps when in his mind each passenger turned over distant memories or experienced some vague dark fear of the nether life. In unison all the wheels of the train seemed to drum out Bi-bi-lioni-has-been-killed, Bi-bi-lioni-has-been-killed, Bi-bi-lioni-has-been-killed."
I shall never be rude about John Dickson Carr's prose style again.
Jon.
Comments (0)
You don't have permission to comment on this page.