The Paper House
By Carlos María Domínguez,
Harvill Secker, £ 6.25

This is a novella about books and obsession. Yet it is a story that all book lovers must read and read obsessively.

It begins with the premise that ?books change people?s destinies.? This profound and indubitable observation follows the curious death of Bluma Lennon, professor of literature in Cambridge, who, on a spring day in 1998, stepped out of a bookshop in Soho having bought a secondhand copy of Emily Dickinson?s poems and was knocked down dead by a car at the first street corner as she was reading the second poem.

Thus begins a strange and poignant book chase. The narrator is Bluma Lennon?s friend and successor. One day he received a package addressed to his late predecessor. It came from Uruguay without a sender?s address. The package contained an old copy of Joseph Conrad?s The Shadow-Line. The book had a filthy crust on its front and back covers and the page edges had cement particles on them. Inside was a dedication from Bluma to a man called Carlos, recalling those ?crazy days? in Monterrey.

The author decided to track down the mysterious Carlos. He turned out to be a bibliophile from Uruguay with the surname Brauer, who, during a conference in Monterrey, had been, according to the grapevine, Bluma?s lover.

The trail led first to Buenos Aires, where from Carlos?s friends he discovered bits and pieces of his life. He was a book collector on a grand scale. Books were his passion. Vast bookcases filled every room in his house and he was forced to live in the attic. He had an indexing system but the reader in him did not quite approve of the existing methods of classifying and shelving books. He decided to devise his own.

The governing principle of his new system, he said, would be the question of affinities. He explained to his friends that it was ?unthinkable to put a book by Borges next to one by Garcia Lorca? And given the dreadful accusations of plagiarism between the two of them, he could not put something by Shakespeare next to a work by Marlowe. Nor, of course, could he place a book by Martin Amis next to one by Julian Barnes after the two friends had fallen out, or leave Vargas Llosa with Garcia M?rquez?Kindred books should be grouped together according to criteria other than a vulgar thematic one.? Carlos wanted to classify by real affinities.

It was clear that the passion was leading to a surreal world. That world?s arrival was hastened by a fire that destroyed the better part of the new index. Carlos could no longer locate his books. He decided to retire with his books to a small village on the Atlantic. Pursuing him there, the narrator discovers that he had built himself a hut whose walls were made up of his books which were then cemented over. When Bluma asked for Conrad?s volume, he broke down the walls to find it.

The author solves the mystery of the cement particles. He also discovers how the love for books had dramatically and tragically altered the life of a man. But for all that readers will continue to be obsessive about books.