What if you found a mysterious book that contained infinite wisdom? What would you hope to find in the pages? I like to think that this is a simple treatise on the power of books, but it’s more than that. The story is about a man who acquires a book such as the one I’ve described. He becomes obsessed with it and spends all of his time with it. Until handling the book becomes too much to grasp.
First published in Spanish 1975 as part of a short story collection of the same name. The English translation first appeared in The New Yorker in 1976 and can be found here, and the entire collection was published in 1977.
A Personal Anthology 