Coincidence is destiny. Had I not forgotten my security card as I left the office early on Friday, I would never have been back on Stureplan in the late afternoon, facing Hedengrens, where I noticed I very much wanted to read fiction.

Inside, I headed for the English-language titles. I passed over the newest Umberto EcoEco is no longer translated by William Weaver, I noticed. It turns out he is ailing, sadly. and the latest Julian Barnes, and then my gaze locked onto a sprite of a book half-hidden behind much thicker tomes — it was called Borges and the Eternal Orangutans. There was only one copy.

WaPo review
Guardian review

I immediately suspected foul play. If it were anyone’s intention to subvert my free will, compelling me to buy a particular book, they’d do so by titling it Borges and the Eternal Orangutans. And they’d make it short, just like the book in my hands. They know I hate long books.That’s because they’ll have read this post.

Had it been placed there specifically for me? Was this the beginning of a plot, with me as its unwitting protagonist? In any case, no other book in the store could compete. I made my purchase, and had finished the first chapter by the time I stepped out of the Tunnelbana on my way home. I would end up reading the book in one sitting, in the dying light at the water’s edge on Norr Mälarstrand, amid the joggers and the couples.

Borges features prominently in Borges and the Eternal Orangutans, a Holmes to the narrator’s Watson in a succinct detective story. I was delighted to see various orangutans discussed — including the one that types out all possible literary works, prompting Borges to note that it would leave The Swedish Academy no choice but to award that orangutan the Nobel Prize in literature.This is ironic of him to say so, of course, though I don’t think the narrator noticed.

I encountered more references to Stockholm as I read on, amid a dawning realization that I was indeed being manipulated — that I was the target of hidden purposes.

By then I didn’t mind. This novel is an autological marvel — superficially a detective story, it is also an homage to Edgar Allan Poe, and yet a parody of the genre he inventedSorry to be so vague, but I don’t want to give anything away..

Borges and the narrator also theorize at length about H. P. Lovecraft and his Necronomicon, and how the location of Stockholm matters crucially in this regard. Quite by coincidence, MiskatoniCon, the first-ever Scandinavian H. P. Lovecraft convention, will be held in Stockholm this coming November. And as coincidence is destiny, I now know precisely what Borges and his eternal orangutans are instructing me to do.