The Imagined Library Books that were never written

The Fictions of Borges  ·  Detective novel

The God of the Labyrinth

Herbert Quain

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

A detective novel whose printed solution is wrong. A last paragraph lets the reader notice, go back, and outsmart the detective.

April March is the diagram. This is the trap.

Quain’s first book behaves like a detective novel for as long as a detective novel is supposed to, and then a single sentence — two chess players, an encounter everyone thought accidental — tells you the solution you have just accepted is false. The reader who goes back and finds the other solution has done the one thing Quain’s other books also require: become cleverer than the detective, which is to say cleverer than the book.

Borges, who spent the late 1930s reviewing crime novels for El Hogar, knew exactly how much of a slight the Christie comparison was. He also knew that a detective story whose last page unwrites itself is not a parody of the genre. It is the genre taken at its word. A mystery is a machine for producing a second reading. Quain just made the machine visible.

Saramago, forty years later, put a copy in Ricardo Reis’s hands in Lisbon, which is the right afterlife for a book that only exists as a plot someone has forgotten the details of. The narrator of the essay cannot get his copy back. That, too, is the form.

On the readability rating. A purified plot, one quoted sentence, and the instruction to reread. Not the novel. The method.

From the book

Everyone thought that the meeting between the two chess players had been accidental. The retrospective paragraph of The God of the Labyrinth, as reported in Borges, 1941

In-world history

Published, the essay says, in the last days of November 1933, and killed by Ellery Queen's Siamese Twin Mystery appearing in the same fortnight. The Spectator compared it to Agatha Christie, which would not have pleased Quain. The narrator lent his copy irretrievably to a woman and can only reconstruct a purified plot: an indecipherable murder, a leisurely middle, a solution, then a retrospective sentence that undoes it.

Why it matters

Quain's other famous book in this catalogue is April March, which splits backwards. This one looks ordinary until it isn't. Borges is describing the kind of reader he wants: not a consumer of solutions, an accomplice who catches the author out.

Appearances

  • An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain (1941) — Jorge Luis Borges Examen de la obra de Herbert Quain, Sur, April 1941; Quain's first book, issued late November 1933
  • The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1984) — José Saramago Ricardo Reis, in Lisbon, spends time with a copy of Quain's novel

Connected volumes

Also from this world

Catalogue record

Category
Detective novel
World
The Fictions of Borges
Imagined by
Jorge Luis Borges , José Saramago
Language
English
First appearance
"Examen de la obra de Herbert Quain", Sur, April 1941
Readability
Described
Books Within Books Lost Manuscripts

Sources

  • Jorge Luis Borges, "Examen de la obra de Herbert Quain", Sur, April 1941; collected in Ficciones (1944).
  • José Saramago, O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis (Caminho, 1984), in which Reis reads Quain.

Added by house · last checked 2026-09-06