The visible work left by this novelist is easily and briefly enumerated. Impardonable, therefore, are the omissions and additions perpetrated by Madame Henri Bachelier in a fallacious catalogue which a certain daily, whose Protestant tendency is no secret, has had the inconsideration to inflict upon its deplorable readers–though these be few and Calvinist, if not Masonic and circumcised. The true friends of Menard have viewed this catalogue with alarm and even with a certain melancholy. One might say that only yesterday we gathered before his final monument, amidst the lugubrious cypresses, and already Error tries to tarnish his Memory . . . Decidedly, a brief rectification is unavoidable. —source

So begins Borges’s Pierre Menard, a fine piece of false document-based appropriative writing which I acquired at Antwerp book store Demian today, inbetween a haircut and a philharmonic concert (Wagner’s Tannhäuser and G. Holst’s The Planets (whose Mars theme was used in British cult tv series The Quatermass Experiment).

The keyword that I find in many works by Borges is fallacious which translates in my Dutch version as bedrieglijk. Fallacious are concepts which are based on fallacies.

More on fiction within fiction:

Fictional books and authors figure prominently in several short stories by the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges. A few of Borges’s fictional creations include The Book of Sand, Herbert Quain (author of April March, The Secret Mirror, etc.), Ts’ui Pen (author of The Garden of Forking Paths), Mir Bahadur Ali (author of The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim), as well as the imaginary Encyclopædia Britannica of the story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” Borges’s most famous and beloved fictional book, however, is Don Quixote! This Don Quixote is written by the fictional symbolist poet Pierre Menard in Borges’s “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” In this story, Menard undertakes an independent word-by-word and line-by-line recreation of Cervantes‘s classic novel. The story itself takes the form of a review of Menard’s work for a literary journal; though Menard’s Quixote is still unfinished, the imaginary reviewer concludes that Menard’s circumstances and the intervening history between Cervantes’s 16th century Spain and Menard’s fictional present produce a Quixote that is more pleasurable to read and deeply richer in meaning: though Menard’s Quixote is identical on a word-for-word basis to Cervantes’s original, Menard’s is superior! This ironic conclusion is often read as a commentary on the nature of accurate translation, but more significantly as an illustration of the manner in which the meaning of a text is determined as much if not more by the reader than the author. –fictional books at Wikipedia