There Is No Borges

The narrator, a German professor of "Lusitanics," the science of loss, is invited on a lecture tour of Malaysia, where he contemplates the past and the future

Making his American debut, a German novelist offers up a densely allusive but energetic discourse on the distinctions between life and literature. Kopf's narrator is a German professor and a self-styled Lusitanist (after the Lusitania ), one for whom kitsch is a "religion," who is "proud of being doomed." We meet him aboard a plane, where a fellow passenger, an Argentinian, argues that the writer Borges is an invention, "just stories, nothing but stories." The Argentinian finds a sympathetic audience in the narrator, who explains the purpose of his own voyage: he has been invited to give lectures in Malaysia after publicly theorizing that Don Quixote was written not by Cervantes, but "rather possibly" by William Shakespeare. Planting any number of belletristic "clues," Kopf escalates the pace and switches focus, delving into the narrator's dissatisfaction with his parents, now dead; a messy love affair; Germany's Nazi history; and his own depression. Occasionally chaotic, the novel ends where it begins, with the assertion that "only books remain."
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Quirky flights of fantasy and the literary imagination--in which Borges is alternately a figure of substance and a fabrication--occupy this surreal tale of a disenchanted academic on a lecture tour of the Far East, from German novelist K”pf in his US debut. Books are the only reality for the professor, whose area of specialization is ``Lusitanics,'' which he succinctly describes as ``the science of loss.'' He measures all that exists by its superior formulation in literature, and has a special affinity for the works of Borges, Cervantes, and Conrad--to such a degree that his own travels evoke comparisons with those of Don Quixote or Conrad's Almayer. An airborne discussion with an Argentinean traveler and fellow admirer of Borges, who believes that the writer was actually an impersonation, the work of a talented actor, fails to be greatly disturbed when the plane loses engine power and begins a rapid descent. That adventure safely concluded, other speculations follow in which Cervantes and Shakespeare are declared one and the same person, and the narrator's family is analyzed for character flaws, while the professor himself is unable to decide whether he should exist in first- or third-person in his narrative. The teeming backdrop of the Portuguese colony of Macao adds to the m‚lange of impressions, contributing to the sensory overload of the real and the speculative that culminates in a series of dreamlike encounters with Borges--or his doppelg„nger--in a dimly lit hotel corridor, as each man attempts to use the toilet undisturbed. A literary curiosity: intricate enough to be challenging, but ultimately too full of itself to sustain more than an academic interest. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.