LITERATURE: Ficciones – Death and the Compass

Not as impressive, this detective story, with murder contrived within numerical calculations left in clues for Detective Lonnrot to plot out to its sequential conclusion.   Beginning with indications of alphabetical hints and messages left at the scene of the crime, stating, "The First Letter of the Name has been spoken" the clues are then geometrically resolved in Lonnrot’s research as a triangle turns into a four-sided figure.

The murderer, a ne’er do-well named Scharlach, is correctly assumed by Lonnrot as being involved in the puzzle-play, and Lonnrot arrives at the strange mirrored, mazed residence of Scharlach only to find he has been duped into following a trail meant to entrap him. Scharlach’s carefully laid out mapping of clues has been precisely all done for the single purpose of killing Lonnrot in revenge for the death of his brother.

Borges seems to enjoy most his revelation of the intricacy of the plan in this storyline.  A bit overtelling for me.  The plot is fairly simple: killer leads victim on a merry path to his death.  The elaborate structure appears to be overdone to accomplish this.  But there is this bit of wonder that is pure Borges:

(Lonnrot): "In your labyrinth there are three lines too many," he said at last.  "I know of a Greek labyrinth which is a single straight line.  Along this line so many philosophers have lost themselves that a mere detective might well do so too."  (p. 141)

The simplest becomes complex; anything can be a question. And this:

(Lonnrot): "Scharlach, when in some other incarnation you hunt me, feign to commit (or do commit) a crime at A, then a second crime at B, (etc.)

"The next time I kill you," said Scharlach, "I promise you the labyrinth made of the single straight line which is invisible and everlasting."  (p. 141)

Borges, for me, often brings in the question of the spiritual soul or mind–whichever it may (or not) be–as another layer of his unusual world.  Perhaps he is a believer in an afterlife of some sort; perhaps he believes it runs not after, but concurrent.