Verissimolitude

On a whim, and partly out of my great love for Borges (and partly because it was short!) I recently bought Borges and the Eternal Orangutans by Luis Fernando Verissimo.  It's a murder mystery - the crime is committed at an international convention on the writings of Poe - in which Borges is one of the men attempting to track down the killer, which he does by sitting and thinking.  Its full of fun, and clearly is written by a man whose love for and understanding of Borges is very great indeed, yet it's very disappointing.  It's very (overly) complex, symbolic and cabbalistic, and while the ending is satisfying (although you will know the answer, I suspect, before you are told - but not too far before), the bulk of the book is a bit hard to digest.  One of the ironies of this judgement is that the writer who is the first person narrator makes much of his own clumsiness and inability to write like Borges ... I rest my case.  What the great man had is given only to one man in a generation, and we should leave him be, and read him, not make pastische of him.  I wouldn't recommend this book either as a mystery thriller, or as Borgesiana. 

But there's always one line that's worth remembering, and in Borges &c its the narrator explaining why he has never married:

"I had always thought of a permanent domestic commitment ... as an intellectual threat.  Not that [she] would steal my soul, but she would fatally interfere with the organisation of my books".

Comments

[Karen]

Your last remark is echoed by Anne Fadiman in "Ex Libris - Confessions of a Common Reader":
"Sharing a bed and a future was child's play compared to sharing [our libraries]."
It can be done!