This pieces seeks to describe and asses the merit of a lost original version of a novel; the novel and its author is Borges's invention. The themes and images are about reflections, how goodness penetrates mire, and light darkness -- that lost first edition is a source of light in the story. There are multiple fictional contexts, giving it a funhouse effect.
Detective novels: this story asks you to actively engage your intelligence to solve a problem; unlike a detective novel, it's not clear what kind of question we're trying to solve. Game-playing, effortful working-out, piecing together isn't the characteristic pleasure most of us take from reading. What is? Flavor: things like "the evil and lean pack of moon-coloured hounds." Borges can deftly get vivid fictional effects in the confusing welter of intelleectual games.
The unsurpassable pinnacle of snark achieved in 1936: "one of those islamic allegorical poets that seldom fail to interest their translators" in reference, I think, to The Parliament of the Birds.
Mirrors: we don't ever see goodness directly in Bahadur's novel. Similarly, he can't see the original text directly, he can infer its goodness from descriptions of how it varies from the front.
The best person, better even than a saint, is a helpful persian bookseller.
Why does this review come up with two criteria to judge the book and find the version that he has wanting with respect to the second of them?
That the novel has parallels with one by Kipling is no coincidence, says Bahadur, its author. They are both reflecting the same reality (although of course the Bahadur one is a fictitious book that reflecting the same reality). Back in 2017 context: An interesting coincince (these notes on The City Wall)[http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/rg_oncitywall1.htm] says that the narrator of the story is not Kipling but someone that Kipling would like to be -- making the historical Kipling posited by the reviewer another possible reflection of an ideal.
Why a law student? Why an apostate?
ibbur or ibbรปr is not made-up-by-borges; the footnote to it is one of the several non-sequiters, or too-smart-for-me-sequiters.
