Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations Read Online Free PDF Page B

brand of detective stories which inevitably outdoes even Dr. Watson and heightens the horror of human life as it is found in the most respectable boardinghouses of Brighton.” Before him, Mr. Cecil Roberts had blasted Bahadur’s book for “its unaccountable double influence of Wilkie Collins and of the famed twelfth-century Persian, Ferid Eddin Attar”—a simple enough observation which Guedalla merely parrots, though in a more angry jargon. Essentially, both reviewers are in agreement, pointing out the book’s detective-story mechanism and its undercurrent of mysticism. This hybridization may lead us to suspect a certain kinship with Chesterton; we shall presently find out, however, that no such affinity exists.
    The first edition of The Approach to al-Mu’tasim appeared in Bombay toward the end of 1932. The paper on which the volume was issued, I am told, was almost newsprint; the jacket announced to the purchaser that the book was the first detective novel to be written by a native of Bombay City. Within a few months, four printings of a thousand copies each were sold out. The Bombay Quarterly Review , the Bombay Gazette , the Calcutta Review , the Hindustani Review (of Allahabad), and the Calcutta Englishman all sang its praises. Bahadur then brought out an illustrated edition, which he retitled The Conversation with the Man Called al-Mu’tasim and rather beautifully subtitled A Game with Shifting Mirrors . This is the edition which Victor Gollancz has just reissued in London, with a foreword by Dorothy L. Sayers and the omission—perhaps merciful—of the illustrations. It is this edition that I have at hand; I have not been able to obtain a copy of the earlier one, which I surmise may be a better book. I am led to this suspicion by an appendix summarizing the differences between the 1932 and the 1934 editions. Before attempting a discussion of the novel, it might be well to give some idea of the general plot.
    Its central figure—whose name we are never told—is a law student in Bombay. Blasphemously, he disbelieves in the Islamic faith of his fathers, but on the tenth night of the moon of Muharram, he finds himself in the midst of a civil disorder between Muslims and Hindus. It is a night of drums and prayers. Among the mob of the heathen, the great paper canopies of the Muslim procession force their way. A hail of Hindu bricks flies down from a roof terrace. A knife is sunk into a belly. Someone—Muslim? Hindu?— dies and is trampled on. Three thousand men are fighting— stick against revolver, obscenity against curse, God the Indivisible against the many Gods.
    Instinctively, the student freethinker joins in the fighting. With his bare hands, he kills (or thinks he has killed) a Hindu. The Government police—mounted, thunderous, and barely awake—intervene, dealing impartial whiplashes. The student flees, almost under the legs of the horses, heading for the farthest ends of town. He crosses two sets of railroad tracks, or the same tracks twice. He scales the wall of an unkempt garden at one corner of which rises a circular tower. “A lean and evil mob of mooncoloured hounds” lunges at him from the black rosebushes. Pursued, he seeks refuge in the tower. He climbs an iron ladder—two or three rungs are missing—and on the fiat roof, which has a blackish pit in the middle, comes upon a squalid man in a squatting position, urinating vigorously by the light of the moon. The man confides to him that his profession is stealing gold teeth from the white-shrouded corpses that the Parsis leave on the roof of the tower. He says a number of other vile things and mentions, in passing, that fourteen nights have lapsed since he last cleansed himself with buffalo dung. He speaks with obvious anger of a band of horse thieves from Gujarat, “eaters of dogs and lizards—men, in short, as abominable as the two of us.” Day is dawning. In the air there is a low flight of well-fed vultures. The student, in utter