[Cheuse is an American novelist, short story writer, and critic. In the following mixed review, he maintains that Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi holds little interest for a general audience and is of greatest value to the Borges scholar.]

For the self-selected few, here is vintage Borges from the cellars of E. P. Dutton, part of a plan to publish in English translation all of the major Borges. Nearly 40 years old, [Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi] contains the first collaborative effort between Borges and his fellow Argentinian Adolfo Bioy-Casares, but only recently has Borges' official translator, Norman Thomas di Giovanni, worked the material into English.

The book consists of a mock-foreword by Gervasio Montenegro, a member of the fictional Argentine Academy of Letters whom Borges fans in the U.S. will recognize as a figure in later satires by the Borges-Bioy Casares collaboration; then come six send-ups of the ratiocinative tale as invented by Edgar Allan Poe, and finally a brief mock-life of the imaginary author to whom these tales were originally ascribed, the Argentinian educator and man of letters, H. Bustos Domecq. Four of the tales have already appeared in U.S. journals and three have been dramatized for radio broadcast on the BBC.

Don Isidro Parodi sits in cell 237 of a Buenos Aires prison, a Poe-esque Buddha. In each story confused and sometimes accused murderers and victims come to him with tangled stories, delivered in hope of clarity and explanation, or even expiation. In the first, for example, a confused and accused Argentinian named Molinari comes for help in sorting out the details surrounding the death of an Arab mystic; in the second, a priceless jewel smuggled into Latin America on the person of a Russian immigrant becomes the motive for a slaying—the "tall, distinguished, bland" and "romantic" Gervasio Montenegro himself may be accused; we see intricate mysteries unraveled by the unparalleled logic of the incarcerated Don Isidro.

The others follow the same pattern, a Poe-etical scheme that reads like the comic inversion of such marvelous Borges stories as "The Garden of the Forking Paths," which the master of 20th-Century short fiction was writing around the same time. This rarified volume is for the completist or literary historian more than anyone else. Such folk will most probably already have read it in Spanish.