A couple of months ago I posted a review of this fabulous Brazilian novel, Borges and the Eternal Orangutans. I hadn’t read it in English and so couldn’t vouch for the translation, but today I stumbled on a collection of reviews of the English translation and they are glowing!
I’ll pass on two quotes:
“Luis Fernando Verissimo’s Borges and the Eternal Orangutans is a perfect novel. I’ll say it again: This book is a perfect novel. (…) The reader will mourn because the novel is so short, and it’s only the second by Verissimo to be translated into English” – Thomas McGonigle, The Los Angeles Times
“In the end, Verissimo’s pleasure in his own absurd intertextual universe is infectious: the two-way-mirror trickery of his conclusion is as satisfying as it is utterly predictable. As Borges wrote of Poe: “we might think that his plots are so weak that they are almost transparent”. Luis Fernando Verissimo’s is decidedly threadbare; but he knows, with his heroes, that a predictable detective story is not necessarily an imperfect one.” – Brian Dillon, Times Literary Supplement
More at The Complete Review
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