The latest addition to my website is Sergio Pitol‘s El tañido de una flauta [The Tune of a Flute]. The basic plot concerns an unnamed Mexican film director/producer who, in his younger days, had made a film about Carlos Ibarra, his friend and a budding novelist. Ibarra has drifted around the world, never finishing his novel, slowly going downhill and eventually dying, with the two friends having fallen out. However, the Mexican producer sees a Japanese film at the Venice Film Festival, which seems to be about Ibarra and, indeed, about his last days. Much of the book is about Ibarra, the producer and a painter, Ángel Rodríguez, and how they link up, and their stories, with the book more or less culminating with the how and why of the Japanese film and Ibarra’s last days. It is a somewhat rambling first novel but still makes fascinating reading. Like, Pitol’s other novels, it has not been translated into English.