Borgesian Conundrums: SIX PROBLEMS FOR DON ISIDRO PARODI (1942)

Originally posted May 1, 2024.

Is mystery fiction anti-art? Jorge Luis Borges didn’t seem to think so: a mystery enthusiast, he encouraged translations of various European novels into Spanish. In fact, Borges’s first work in English translation was the short story ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’, which appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, translated by mystery novelist and editor Anthony Boucher.

While that story is better-known when you think “Borges” and “mystery”, Borges also produced a volume of humorous detective stories alongside his friend and collaborator Adolfo Bioy Casares, writing under the pen name H. Bustos Domecq. The Don Isidro Parodi stories are an affectionate, well, parody of the genre, and a satire of cosmopolitan Buenos Ares—anti-art in a different sense.

Don Isidro is a stationary consulting detective, the ratiocinating kind, who solves problems brought to him merely after having them described. In a turn that the foreword tongue-in-cheekily describes as “an Argentine hero in a purely Argentine setting,” don Isidro is not an old man in a corner, but a convicted felon, imprisoned on trumped-up charges for political reasons by corrupt government officials. So when a parade of baffled witnesses come to him with their conundrums, it’s not as if he can leave. The book contains six stories, each parodying different aspects of the genre.

The Twelve Figures of the World: An arrogant journalist tries to convince the local Druze sect (a closed religion) to allow him into the group, but his initiation ends in a murder. Don Isidro explains not only who the killer is, but the series of inexplicable events during the “rites”. This story was featured in the LRI anthology The Realm of the Impossible, where I’d read it previously, and I have to wonder if there isn’t an element of self-parody here, given Borges’s own preoccupation with mysticism.

The Nights of Goliadkin: A spoof of Murder on the Orient Express, featuring a dime-store Father Brown among other genre caricatures, in which a professor fails to notice the significance of strange events on a train until he is accused of a crime.

The God of the Bulls: A “telluric” poet and his sycophantic protégé search for some not-so-compromising correspondences with a wealthy woman, whose rancher husband is later found murdered. Elements of ‘The Purloined Letter’ and ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’.

Free Will and the Commendatore: A complex revenge tale that, in all honesty, went completely over my head. Part of the joke is that the petitioners claim to be less long-winded, but go on about irrelevant details (which made it kind of tough to follow). The basic premise would be an interesting one for a serious story—actually, now that I say that, I seem to recall a Borges piece that does use it.

Tadeo Limardo’s Victim: A homeless man performing odd jobs around a hotel is shot. This one was a bit of a reach. It put me in mind of some Sherlock Holmes adventures, but I wasn’t sure whether it’s referencing something specific.

Tai An’s Long Search: A detective from China pursues a thief in Buenos Aires’s Chinatown. The NYT review I link below seems to think it’s a satire of both the Charlie Chan novels and Yellow Peril stereotypes (Charlie Chan himself was conceived as a sort of ‘positive representation’ opposite to some of these racist depictions). And I guess there are worse depictions out there, but even if that was the intention, I still found it a little cringe-inducing coming from two white Argentinian authors.

These are not dismissive joke stories, but legitimate puzzles by two authors who clearly have a lot of respect for their predecessors. The mysteries are fair-play, with some genuinely clever solutions, but they’re underscored by a strong element of social commentary (some of which, not being a Buenos Aires cosmopolitan writer of the 1940s, flew way past me). Parodi’s visitors are pompous blowhards who place a lot of weight on being a “true Argentinian” (i.e. a white or mestizo person of Spanish descent). They brag about how cultured and literate they are while demonstrating deep ignorance towards the actual cultures that make up their multicultural, immigrant city. They are patronizingly antisemitic and orientalist. They are xenophobic towards Italians, but pepper their speech with Latin and French, and equally dismissive of the working class while LARPing as gaucho horsemen and gushing over terrible pastoralist poetry (in the manner of the emperor and his new clothes) to prove their artistic bona fides. Parodi’s simple explanations therefore have a distinctly undercutting quality. As the NYT review of the English edition from Borges reviewer John Sturrock puts it, “Parodi, in short, deflates: his is the solo voice of truth following the chorus of bad fiction.”

This was interesting to read as someone who mostly knows Borges for his magical realist fiction, though I felt like the first two stories encompassed the best of everything in the book. The later ones feel like they descend increasingly into in-jokes, and Borges’s usual problems with women are evident throughout. This is my first exposure to the co-author, Bioy Casares, but apparently, he wrote another parody novel with his wife (and fellow collaborator) Silvina Ocampo, entitled Where There’s Love, There’s Hate. That novel was translated relatively recently, and I might track it down in the future.