The Puerto Rican, who has died at 81, was one of the great experts in Borges' work.

The Puerto Rican Arturo Echavarría Ferrari (1938-2020) visited Spain for the last time in June 2019, when he presented at Casa de América in Madrid the definitive edition of Como el aire de abril (1994/2019), a wonderful novel that he ministered and mastered for a quarter of a century as a watchmaker, a goldsmith or a bonsai master.

 In reality, Arturo Echavarría became the Chinese gardener of his own novel, creating new textual spaces or sowing flowers and trees, carefully chosen, in a book of stories -The island on the horizon (2015) - destined to dialogue with the version end of Like the air of April.

If Coetzee built three narrative levels in a single novel -Diary of a bad year-, Arturo Echavarría disseminated those same levels through the first edition of his novel in 1994, the stories of The Island on the Horizon and the definitive edition of Como el aire de abril. So far the magic, because now I propose to talk about the magician.

Read more here: El País