Set in Spain in 1941 during the rule of General Franco and the Falangists, with their connections to the Nazis, and again in 1981, in the run-up to the first real democratic elections, debut author Victor del Arbol creates a whirlwind of mysteries within mysteries that will keep even the most demanding reader entertained. Filling the novel with twists and turns, surprises, and action that doubles back on itself, the story line constantly changes, rewriting the information we think we already know, and creating new complications to ponder as we try to reconstruct what we think is happening. The interrelationships among the main characters and their families continue for the forty years of the time span, becoming ever more complex as motivations, betrayals, lies we have accepted as truth, and characters who are not who we think they are become central to the action.Complex and challenging in its plotting, the novel is also energetic and fast-paced. The characters are memorable, in part because none of them are perfect, and several are trapped into committing terrible acts because they believe they have no choice. The interrelationships between guilt, innocence, chance, and fate keep the reader engrossed, and though the violence is sometimes excessive and melodramatic, the author avoids neat “fictional packaging” in his ending. Fate rules.
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An author revered as much for the controlled lyricism of his prose as for his careful attention to details of the natural world, his uncompromising characterizations, and his ability to incorporate subtle symbols, Swiss author Jacques Chessex (1934 – 2009) was the first foreign citizen to win the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary award. In this dramatic novel, he tells the story of Jean Calmet, a thirty-eight-year-old schoolteacher, whose physician father has just died and with whom he has had a fraught relationship. The youngest of five children, Jean both loved and feared his father, with good reason, and he is glad that his father has been cremated, rather than buried. “The doctor would be reduced to ashes. He could not be allowed any chance of keeping his exasperating, scandalous vigour in the fertile earth,” Jean thinks. “Make a little heap of ashes of him, ashes at the bottom of an urn. Like sand. Anonymous, mute dust.” As the family gathers to choose an urn, Jean meditates on his father’s relationships with the whole family, and especially on his own chances for a life of his own. With no emotional resources of his own to sustain him, even by the age of thirty-eight, he is a completely lost soul, someone ready to become a victim of others, if not himself.
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Opening with a brief preface, purportedly written in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, and in Barcelona between 1973 and 1974, the novel’s author describes himself as a “copyist,” asserting that he is trying to make sense of daily notes found in a soldier’s old green canvas rucksack containing “dog-eared exercise books, leaflets, bits of cardboard, scraps of paper covered with an untidy scrawl.” Jakob Bergant-Berk, the soldier who penned these notes during Slovenia’s World War II battles against the Germans and Italians has also included “several selected sayings, quotations, maxims, [which he] entered in the notes, sometimes for no apparent reason, and sometimes as a integral part of them.” The novel itself evolves from this introduction, and battle scenes from 1943 alternate with scenes which take place in Barcelona in 1973, sometimes shifting time and place without transitions. It becomes clear that the soldier and the man in Barcelona are the same person, and it is in Barcelona, on vacation many years later, that this man, Berk, meets a former German soldier, Joseph Bitter. In a series of local bars and tourist destinations, they discuss the war, its objectives, and its Machiavellian strategies, a technique which allows the author to expand on some of the many themes to which Berk, the soldier, has referred, however briefly, in his notes. Images of war as a dance of death – a macabre minuet – accompanied by the “twenty-five shot guitar,” mentioned in the opening quotation, are matched with the ironic rat-a-tat-tat of Barcelona flamenco dancers, accompanied by the throbbing of Spanish guitars in the background as the two men talk.
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An early novel written in 1989 and found among the papers of Roberto Bolano after his premature death in 2003, The Third Reich, is an odd but often mesmerizing story of obsession—specifically with the playing of a war game based on the actions taken by the German Reich during World War II. Udo Berger, the German national champion of this highly competitive and addictive game, is a young man, barely out of his teens, when he and his lover, the gorgeous but shallow Ingeborg, take a vacation to the Costa Brava, where Udo used to vacation as a child. Shortly after their arrival, they meet Charly, a mechanic, and Hanna, fellow Germans also on vacation, who are staying at a hotel nearby. Their meeting seems fortuitous for Inge, since Charly and Hanna are out for a good time, with non-stop drinking and partying, and Udo would rather stay in his room. He has demanded a five foot table so he can set up a game, The Third Reich, where he pores over strategy while trying to write an article for publication in a magazine for those addicted as he is. Ultimately, the novel takes on some of the themes and, certainly, the tone of the German Faust legend, in which an academic sold his soul for unlimited knowledge and pleasure.
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Setting his latest novel on the Oronsay, a passenger ship going between Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), and London in 1954, Michael Ondaatje writes his most accessible, and, in many ways, most enjoyable novel ever. Having grown up in Ceylon, from which he himself was sent to England to be educated as a boy, the author certainly understands what it feels like to be a child on a ship for three weeks, like his main character here, but author Ondaatje says that all the characters in the book are fictional, including the main character. The novel has such a ring of truth and Ondaatje’s depiction of the characters is so true to the perceptions of an eleven-year-old traveling on his own, however, that it is difficult to remember that the boy in the book is imagined and not real. Since the boy grows up and becomes an author like Ondaatje, his adult conclusions as he looks back on the importance of these events and what they have meant in the grand scheme of his life become even more vivid.
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