The Imagined Library Books that were never written

The Fictions of Borges  ·  Novel

The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim

also known as The Conversation with the Man Called Al-Mu'tasim; El acercamiento a Almotásim

Mir Bahadur Ali

Can I actually read this? Not really. You are told what it contains, but never shown it. Described

A Bombay detective novel, reviewed in detail, in which a law student hunts a man he has never seen — and the hunted man may be God, or the hunter, or a series of mirrors.

He published it as a review. People looked for the book.

That is the entire method of this library, stated in 1935, before he had admitted he was writing stories. A Bombay barrister; a riot on the tenth night of Muharram; a student who kills, flees, and begins to detect, in the people he meets, a brightness that must come from someone better, deeper in. He follows the brightness. The man called Al-Mu’tasim is always one conversation further on. The second edition, Borges complains, turns that man into an allegory of the unitary God, which is a failure of nerve. The first edition — which the reviewer has not got, and which never existed — was better.

Gollancz did not publish it. Dorothy Sayers did not introduce it. The jacket line about Bombay is a sentence Borges wrote and then attributed to a printer. The hoax is kind: he wanted the pleasure of criticism without the labour of the novel, and he wanted you to feel, for a moment, the specific disappointment of a book that has sold out.

Lem took this door and never came back. Gigamesh is Al-Mu’tasim after thirty years of practice. The difference is that Borges still sounds as if he might, if you asked him at a party, produce the Bombay address.

On the readability rating. The plot is summarised, the editions collated, the theological mistake diagnosed. No chapter of Bahadur’s novel is given. The review is the work.

From the book

the first detective novel to be written by a native of Bombay City The jacket of the 1932 Bombay edition, as reported in Borges's review

In-world history

According to the review, the first edition appeared in Bombay in 1932 on paper close to newsprint, billed as the first detective novel written by a native of Bombay City, and sold out four printings. The 1934 illustrated edition, retitled The Conversation with the Man Called Al-Mu'tasim and subtitled A Game with Shifting Mirrors, was issued by Victor Gollancz with a preface by Dorothy L. Sayers. Gollancz and Sayers were real. The novel was not.

Why it matters

Borges's first fully formed trick: a fake review of a fake book, given a real publisher and a real preface-writer, so that the boundary between criticism and fiction would not quite close again.

Appearances

  • The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim (1936) — Jorge Luis Borges First printed as if it were a review, in Historia de la eternidad; collected as a story in Ficciones

Connected volumes

Also from this world

Catalogue record

Category
Novel
World
The Fictions of Borges
Imagined by
Jorge Luis Borges
Language
English, in the reported Bombay editions
First appearance
Historia de la eternidad (1936); written 1935
Readability
Described
Books Within Books Lost Manuscripts

Sources

  • Jorge Luis Borges, "El acercamiento a Almotásim", in Historia de la eternidad (1936); reprinted as a story in Ficciones (1944).
  • Borges's autobiographical note: the piece is "both a hoax and a pseudo-essay," and the pattern for the tales that followed.

Added by house · last checked 2026-09-06