The latest addition to my website is Moacyr Scliar‘s Os leopardos de Kafka (Kafka’s Leopards). This is a clever fable, whose unlikely hero, known as Mousy, is a Jewish tailor. He was born near Odessa and, in 1916, is entrusted with a mission by his dying friend, on behalf of Trotsky, to obtain a coded message in Prague. The mission goes wrong but he does meet Franz Kafka and obtains one of his aphorisms, which may or may not be a coded message. After the Russian Revolution, the family emigrate to Brazil and the Kafka aphorism turns up again, this time when Mousy’s great-nephew is arrested by the Brazilian police. It is very cleverly and wittily done, particularly with the Kafka aphorism twice being mistaken for a coded message.