Customer Reviews

Six Problems of Don Isidro

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As a great lover and admirer of the writing of Borges I look forward to every new piece of writing I can find. However to my surprise this book of six detective-parody stories co- authored with his friend Adolfo Bioy- Casares was to me a great disappointment. Perhaps part of the reason is my inherent distaste for the mystery and crime, the detective and murder genre. In other words it may well be me who is at fault here.
Still I can only report on my experience of the reading. It was difficult to get into the stories. Literary- references abound, and there is a sense of a total lack of credibility from the beginning. It is clear we are reading about a literary game.
With Borges the literary games are often metaphysical and reflective ones. Perhaps they are here too. I didn't get it.
For me however what was most disappointing came in the second story , "The Nights of Goliadkin". For the first time ever in reading Borges I felt a kind of stereotypical characterization. But then perhaps I did not get the parody.
Identity- games are of course of the essence of Borges. And he plays them better than anyone else. But they become alive only when they seem to somehow illuminate our reality. Here the game seems more like mental gymnastics undertaken for dry- minded literary stakes. It is almost as if Borges and Bioy- Casares the authors become like the literary characters they mock, absurd non- credible figures who it is hard to believe in and impossible to sympathize with.