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Borges and the eternal orangutans (Paperback, 2005, New Directions) 3 stars

Entertaining little book

3 stars

Read this book because I'm just back from Buenos Aires which totally charmed me and where the action of this novel is located.

A thriller a la A.E.Poe the goal is to find who murdered one of the participants to a Poe convention that has been moved at the last minute to Buenos Aires.

Allow me to quote to give you a better idea of the tone: "And you told us what the story would be like if you had written it. Urquiza was to kill Johnson. Urquiza was to invoke the powerful beings from the South, Azathoth and Yog-Sothoth, and to be the embodiment of Hastur, the destroyer, he who walks in the wind, so as to prevent Johnson from revealing even more than he already had, quite innocently, revealed of the language of the Necronomicon and of the secret code concealed in Poe’s literature. Everything had been set up with that end in mind. The conference was moved to Buenos Aires in order to bring Johnson to the South, where Urquiza would invoke the powers of Azathoth and Yog-Sothoth as well as Hastur’s lethal skill with “the slicer” to eliminate him without leaving any traces..." As you can see Poe is not very far but diverted by Jorge Borges and the result makes for a light but nevertheless interesting reading. Maybe I'm still under the spell of this beautiful city...?