Author of The Revolution (Original Flash Fiction)

 

Jorge Luis Borges is considered one of the greatest and most influential writers of the twentieth-century. Yet he never wrote a novel. His reputation is based on a canon of elegant, intellectually adventurous and highly provocative short stories. Borges is famously quoted as stating: “Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness – expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could perfectly be explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend those books already exist …”

That idea, along with the strange-but-true saga of fake economic expert Ron Vara, inspired the story that follows. (Recall that a White House economic advisor was discovered to have been citing a fictional  authority whose name turned out to be simply an anagram for his own).

 
Author of the Revolution by James C. Clar © 2026

 

Consider, if you will, a small country high in the folds of a forgotten mountain range. It would be a country found on only a few maps and barely spoken of beyond its borders. The time would be the second or third decade of the twentieth century. An age reverberating with revolution and filled with the smoke of burning cities. It would also, of course, be an era of bold manifestos and betrayals, of midnight assassinations and morning parades.

 

In the nameless capitol of this country lived a man named Navarro. Navarro was a forger of singular genius. He knew the subtle alchemy of inks and parchments the way a master guitarist knows the strings of his instrument – intimately, instinctively. He could mimic the hand of earlier centuries with such precision that even the most erudite scholars faltered before declaring his creations to be fabrications.

 

For years, Navarro worked in the shadows, supplying counterfeit relics to greedy collectors and to more than a few corrupt antiquarians. As time dragged on, job after listless job, a restlessness began to gnaw at him. Navarro grew weary of simply copying the past. He longed to create it.

 

And so it was that Navarro set his sights on a phantom, a chimera – a legendary manuscript said to contain the divine charter of his nation’s origins. This was a tome lost to time but rumored to outline a just and enlightened government long since suffocated by tyranny. Scholars sought this text. Politicians feared it. The forger determined to invent it.

 

For over a decade, Navarro worked tirelessly piecing together a fiction so elaborate, so painstakingly disguised as truth, that even he began to believe it to be ‘real’. It was written in the language of saints and rebels, heretics and martyrs. The work sang with authority. He aged the vellum and concocted the ink with carefully selected pigments and resins. The forger built a provenance for his creation the way a medieval master-builder constructed a cathedral – stone by stone. When Navarro was done, he held in his hands not a book, but an incendiary.

 

The text was purchased quietly by a wealthy collector. It then found its way into the library of a local university. There, it ignited metaphorical fire. Students and scholars quoted it. Politicians panicked. The book’s message – radical, erudite and sacred in tone – sparked protests, then movements, then outright revolt. It became holy writ to the disenfranchised and the marginalized. It was, in short, a blueprint for egalitarian rebirth.

 

The government was slow to react. Eventually, predictably, it responded with brutality. Protestors were shot, writers and intellectuals disappeared. Still, the movement would not be quelled. The masses were armed now, not with weapons but with ideas. Ideas, of course, once born, are notoriously difficult to kill.

 

Desperate, the ruling regime convened its ministers. One man, the steely-eyed Minister of State Security, proposed an audacious solution: if the revolution began with a book, perhaps it might be squashed by a book. State Security, he revealed, had long been aware of the work of a master-forger named Navarro. Navarro, he continued, “is a master of illusion, a craftsman of lies. I’m certain that. if properly motivated, he could be ‘persuaded’ to create a work that repudiates the text that sparked the uprising in the first place.”

 

In due course, Navarro was summoned to the airless, utilitarian halls of the Ministry.

 

“Mr. Navarro,” the minister began, “we know all about you. We have allowed you to pursue your trade unhindered. Now, however, the time has come for you to do something that actually benefits the state.”

 

Navarro remained silent. He doubted that anything he could say would alter the plot of the pre-arranged drama into which he was being cast. He was relieved that the minister seemed unaware of his role in the current unpleasantness.

 

The minister outlined his plan. He required a counter-text. A holy correction. A sober revelation of errors in the original “lost” manuscript. It would be a gospel of submission, a call for obedience, order and stability.

 

Navarro was trapped, and he knew it. He nodded his head.

 

“I will do what you wish. Not for the compensation you offer but to prove to myself that it can be done, could only be done, by me. My pride shames me and will, undoubtedly, prove to be my undoing.”

 

“Take your money and leave, Navarro,” the minister commanded. As the forger left the hall, the minister exchanged a furtive glance with one of his underlings.

 

Navarro worked like a man possessed. The second forgery – crafted to undo the first – was even more brilliant. It bore the patina of age. It rang with the cadence of prophecy. It glowed with a terrible authority.

 

Within days of the text’s release, it was cited in official speeches. Newspapers praised its discovery. The movement that had shaken the country began to fracture. Order was ultimately restored. The revolution ended not with gunshots but rather with the strokes of a pen.

 

A short time later, state run media (and all such countries have state run media) reported that a certain ‘Navarro’ was found murdered in his modest apartment. Both the police and State Security were quick to inform the public that the perpetrators had already been apprehended and “dealt with.”

 

The miscreants were, the report concluded, vestigial elements of the wholly unlawful and misguided uprising that had until recently so troubled the country. Movements of that type were, as everyone knew, inevitably accompanied by such anti-social behavior.

 

The End