[In the following review, Rankin provides a positive assessment of Chronicles of Bustos Domecq, describing the collection as "conservative satire."]

In "The Sartorial Revolution (I)" [in Chronicles of Bustos Domecq] Eduardo S. Bradford, dandy of the Necochea seaside promenade from 1923 to 1931, is revealed as an impoverished fake. His millionaire's hat, horn-rimmed glasses, moustache, collar, necktie, watch chain, white suit with set of imported buttons, gloves, handkerchiefs and boots have been painted on to his body. Even the malacca cane. It is Argentina that parades its banality beneath the Emperor of Europe's cultural clothing in Chronicles of Bustos Domecq, twenty satirical sketches by Borges and his friend and collaborator Bioy Casares.

The two men met through Ocampo's Sur magazine around 1931; they shared the same passion for books. Their early collaborations included a commercial brochure for Bulgarian foodstuffs, written in a week at a Pardó estancia, and an anthology of Fantastic Literature, compiled while they were annotating Sir Thomas Browne. They wrote comic detective stories under noms de plume: H. Bustos Domecq penned Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi (1942) and many of the characters from that book recur in the Chestertonian spoof A Model for Death (1946) by B. Suarez Lynch (not yet translated).

Originally written as pieces of journalism, the Chronicles were collected in 1967 into a book dedicated to Picasso, Joyce and Le Corbusier with an introduction by one Gervasio Montenegro, who recommends it as an "indispensable vademecum" to "the depths of the novel, the lyric, the essay, conceptualism, architecture, sculpture, the theater and the whole gamut of audio-visual media". An important index compiled by the "author" himself rounds the book off.

The Chronicles mark the apotheosis of H. Bustos Domecq from pseudonym to persona. The author of Now I Can Read! (City of Rosario School Board), once referred to in a Parodi mystery as "that man from Santa Fe who got a story published and then it turned out it had already been written by Villiers de L'Isle Adam", is now a champion hack on the pretentious fringes of Buenos Aires. Eight of the Chronicles are literary jaunts through the cosmopolitan groves of Parnassus. Ramon Bonavena's nouveau roman "North-Northeast" features the northeastern quadrant of his table, where a 2B pencil is brilliantly described in "only twenty-nine pages". For F. J. C. Loomis, the title is the work: "The text of Pallet, for example, consists solely of the word 'pallet'." Words mean what Santiago Ginsberg wants them to, but Tulio Herrera's art scrupulously eschews them—along with sentences, characters, scenes, etc. Review a book? Hilario Lambkin Formento reproduces the blurb on the jacket, and ends by copying whole volumes.

The sketches are not all whimsical ideas taken to grotesque extremes, for something of Argentina glares through them. There is more truth than humour in the rise of mediocrity being chronicled in a language rich in orotund bombast, from the land where inflation became part of the economy only long after it was a birthright, a state of mind. Ironies turn into prophecies, or perhaps it is just that a blind man's vision is less deceived by age. "A Brand-New Approach" is about historical revisionism; Bustos Domecq asks "Does a military defeat suit a nation of patriots?" and replies "Certainly not." So-called "pure" history has become an act of faith, or honest revenge. "Mexico has thus recovered, in print, the oil-wells of Texas, and we here in the Argentine … have recovered the South polar cap and its inalienable archipelago."

H. Bustos Domecq began in the timelessly dated world of whodunnits, and Chronicles has mysteries that cannot be revealed here. The reader must find alone the secret of G. A. Baralt's shoes ("The Brotherhood Movement"), the thing in Chubut sheep-rancher don Guillermo Blake's shed ("The Immortals") and why the last game of soccer was played in Buenos Aires on June 24, 1937 ("Esse est Percipi")….

Chronicles of Bustos Domecq is conservative satire, the humor ingles of funny names and the avant-garde rendered absurd. Characters such as the architect Hotchkiss de Estephano, gastronome Ishmael Querido and the sinister Dr Narbondo could almost appear in the newspaper columns of Beachcomber or Peter Simple. Pot-boiling, of course, but even the diversionary sketch-books of a master are interesting. "Addicts" of Borges's "jokes and puzzles" (the phrase is V. S. Naipaul's) will find irresistible fun in this book.