"It is a brave moment in the literary annals of a nation when it gives birth to its first indigenous private eye. Until it does, local devotees of the murder story must endure the indignity - to say nothing of the expense - of having their sleuths shipped in from abroad and then perfunctorily translated into the vernacular, where they figure as alien bloodhounds nosing along even more alien trails. Murder may know no frontiers, but is the same true of detection? How much does the born-and-bred Argentinian make of Agatha Christie or Erle Stanley Gardner, as the quaint Miss Marple hikes genteelly around the English shires, or the stainless Perry Mason outsmarts the District Attorney in a California courtroom? Why, confound it, can Argentinian whodunitomanes not be provided with an Argentinian detective solving good Argentinian crimes?
Well, they can, and here we have him: Don Isidro Parodi, dreamt up in a patriotic hour by two sly and staunchly cosmopolitan Buenos Aires writers, Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy-Casares, lifelong students both of Anglo-American crime fiction and with a rare grasp of its essentials. They did not at once put their names to these caustic tales, which appeared as the work of a composite author called H. Bustos Domecq. But their cover was blown long ago, and it is the names of Borges and Bioy-Casares which now crown the cover of this welcome translation, with that of Borges three times the size of Bioy-Casares, which is unfair, since they wrote the stories as partners.
A detective with the name of Parodi, invented by two jocular writers whose second language is English, promises some sort of literary jape, and that is what these "Six Problems" very amusingly are. Don Isidro is the parody of all fictional detectives who ever set eye to magnifying glass, unique among even that weirdly diverse company for being a jailbird. He has been framed, it goes without saying, after some political skullduggery at election time, but sent down nonetheless on a 21-year stretch for homicide. Incarceration has made a new man of him. Before being locked up, this awesome rationalist and cryptographer of his native city's black secrets had been nothing more sensational than a barber. But now Parodi is the last word in detective brilliance who can unravel the knottiest mystery..."
/The New York Times, March 29, 1981/
“Borges, more than anyone, renovated the language of fiction and thus opened the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish American novelists.” This is what J. M. Coetzee, a Nobel Prize winner, said about him.
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo (August 24, 1899 – June 14, 1986), best known as Jorge Luis Borges, was an Argentine writer, essayist, and poet born in Buenos Aires. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland where he attended school and traveled to Spain. On his return to Argentina in 1921, Borges began publishing his poems and essays in surrealist literary journals. He also worked as a librarian and public lecturer. In 1955 he was appointed director of the National Public Library (Biblioteca Nacional) and professor of Literature at the University of Buenos Aires. In 1961 he came to international attention when he received the first International Publishers' Prize, the Prix Formentor. His work was translated and published widely in the United States and in Europe. Borges himself was fluent in several languages. He died in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1986.
His work embraces the "chaos that rules the world and the character of unreality in all literature." His most famous books, Ficciones (1944) and The Aleph (1949), are compilations of short stories interconnected by common themes: dreams, labyrinths, libraries, fictional writers and works, religion, God. His writings have contributed significantly to the genre of magical realism, a kind of Hispanic American fiction that reacted against the realism/naturalism of the nineteenth century. Scholars have noted that Borges's progressive blindness helped him to create innovative literary symbols through imagination since "poets, like the blind, can see in the dark". The poems of his late period dialogue with such cultural figures as Spinoza, Luís de Camões, and Virgil.
* The website www.colibri.bg is optimized 
