Chronicles of Bustos Domecq

Literature is a solitary craft. There are very few collaborative works that can aspire to become part of the literary canon. In fact, almost none. One such collaboration worth highlighting is that between Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares. In 1967, the two wrote "Cronache di Bustos Domecq". “We shall be good friends of the truth but, even more so, friends of Plato,” they say. Honorio Bustos Domecq is a writer – invented by the two Argentinians using the surnames of two of their great-grandfathers – who stopped writing detective novels after his character, the barber-detective Don Isidro Parodi, was imprisoned for a crime he did not commit, following adventures involving cults, Russian princesses and murdered butchers. And so Bustos Domecq began working as a literary and art critic, writing these columns for the newspaper *Última Hora*. It is a divertissement, a parody, and it is evident how much enjoyment the two authors derived from this game; yet, with its baroque language peppered with expressions dating back two decades, it also constitutes a genuine critique of criticism, a mockery of the art of reading by the pompous, a ribbing of self-important intellectuals, and the creation of bogus artists and writers (or perhaps not, who knows) with their biographies, long before Roberto Bolaño’s *Nazi Literature in the Americas* was published thirty years later. Are the ‘prestigious commentators’ such as Carlos Alberto Prosciutto, artists and architects, and people like Farrel du Bosc and Nierenstein Souza real or fictional? Do their pamphlets and volumes really exist, or are they invented – the poetry collections subtitled Bouquet of Fragrant Stars or the novel Presto, which ‘came second in the municipal competition’, the treatise The Paladión-Pound-Eliot Line or ‘the ambitious historical novel The Gomensoro Fiefdom, repudiated on his deathbed by the author’? In the afterword, Francesco Fava meticulously traces the references used by the two pranksters to create these hybrids, these characters, these books that perhaps exist only in a metaverse, in order to ‘provide an essential guide to the most significant allusions and cryptic quotations’ that might have meant something to those who frequented that world in the 1960s, in Argentina, whilst leaving us a little mystery so that we might have fun finding them, or simply enjoy the ‘gross blunder’ and the ‘virtuosic mise en abyme’. Ultimately, through their playful musings, Borges and Bioy Casares make us realise that the truth is not really that important; so much so that one conspiracy theory is based on the idea that Borges himself was a fabrication – merely an elderly actor hired by a group of writers, whose face and figure lent themselves perfectly to playing the part of a scholar who loved Dante and Norse legends.

   

Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares
, "Chronicles of Bustos Domecq
", Adelphi, 143 pp., 12 euros