There is No Borges

Making his American debut, a German novelist offers up a densely allusive but energetic discourse on the distinctions between life and literature. Kopf's narrator is a German professor and a self-styled Lusitanist (after the Lusitania ), one for whom kitsch is a ``religion,'' who is ``proud of being doomed.'' We meet him aboard a plane, where a fellow passenger, an Argentinian, argues that the writer Borges is an invention, ``just stories, nothing but stories.'' The Argentinian finds a sympathetic audience in the narrator, who explains the purpose of his own voyage: he has been invited to give lectures in Malaysia after publicly theorizing that Don Quixote was written not by Cervantes, but ``rather possibly'' by William Shakespeare. Planting any number of belletristic ``clues,'' Kopf escalates the pace and switches focus, delving into the narrator's dissatisfaction with his parents, now dead; a messy love affair; Germany's Nazi history; and his own depression. Occasionally chaotic, the novel ends where it begins, with the assertion that ``only books remain.'' (July)