The latest addition to my website is Pierre Senges‘ La réfutation majeure (The Major Refutation). This is a brilliant pastiche, allegedly the French version of a sixteenth century work by the very real Franciscan monk Antonio de Guevara. No manuscript of this work has been found and, even if it did exist, it is not sure that De Guevara was the author. I wonder if Senges was inspired by the quote from Alain Resnais’ My American Uncle, in which a character says America doesn’t exist. I know. I’ve been there.. The basis of the refutation, written thirty years after Columbus and after other subsequent explorers, is that the whole discovery of the Americas was a fraud. There is no such continent. De Guevara proves this by showing vested interests who want it to exist, previous accounts, the fact that if it is so big someone, lots of people, would have discovered it before and so on. His arguments are brilliant and ingenious and the book is incredibly erudite and well-written, even if entirely tongue-in-cheek. Who knows, perhaps Donald Trump is just the figment of some Hollywood mogul’s imagination?