Borges and the Eternal Orang-Utan

This work is a hilarious spoof on literary/academic conferences, and a brilliant ‘Borgesian’ mystery. 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 Allan Poe, the inventor of the modern detective story. There Vogelstein meets his idol, Jorge Lu-s 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 Kabbala, 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. Author Bio: Luis Fernando Verissimo is one of Brazil’s most popular writers thanks to his satirical columns in the national weekly Veja. He is also a celebrated novelist and cartoonist, and he plays the saxophone in a jazz band. His novel The Club of Angels was published by Harvill.