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There Is No Borges might be described as an epic mystery, for the elusive subject of the narrator's quest is the great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, creator of brilliant imaginary worlds. To the narrator, the world of literature means more than reality, a sentiment echoed by Borges: "Nothing is more precise than fiction". If this is true, perhaps Borges is one of his own fictive creations. The narrator, a German professor of "Lusitanics", both the science of loss and the history of Portugal, is invited to Macao for a lecture tour; professionally and emotionally at life's end, he travels under the auspices of Borges, Cervantes, Conrad's Almayer, and other more or less esoteric and imaginary literary figures. If Borges is fiction, then how much of the future is, as Borges self-consciously writes, a series of memories of the past? As the professor considers the Lusitania, sunk by German torpedoes in 1915, he wonders about the limits of governmental greed, about Tiananmen Square, and World War II. In the inverted mirror of his own Borgesian vision, the professor confronts his country's past, his family's past, and the degree to which we are condemned to repeat history. "Every book is a mirror of the face bent over it", writes Kopf's professor. There Is No Borges, written with kaleidoscopic brilliance and wonder, is full of conclusions and suggestions, leads and dead ends. Among the many questions it poses is whether we should not examine the ghosts that lie as much in books as in our own histories.

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