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 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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Julio Llamazares will win many new readers with this powerful and richly atmospheric novel, a classic in Spain for the past twenty years, but only recently available in English translation. Capturing the love of an old man for his land and for the village in which he and his ancestors were born, it is also a study of the inexorable effects of time and the pressures it exerts on isolated communities and the human inhabitants who lack direct connection with a wider world. Told from the point of view of a now-elderly man who, along with his faithful, unnamed dog, is the last remaining inhabitant of Ainielle, a crumbling village in the Pyrenees, the novel details his physical and emotional deterioration as he observes the parallel collapse of the town, “whole buildings kneeling like cattle,” the village itself a mangled and sad “unburied corpse.” His wife Sabina, who had remained with him after all the other inhabitants gradually departed, has now been dead for ten years, and as the novel opens, Andres believes that this is the last day of his life.
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The Spanish Civil War (1936 – 1939), with its terrible effects on residents of the Basque country, was a complex and brutal war in which soldiers, sometimes neighbors, often found themselves fighting for different sides. Author Manuel de Lope, who grew up in Burgos, not far from the Basque Country, obviously knows the landscape and the culture well, describing the overwhelming beauty of the land and mountains with an obvious love of nature, and the characters in his story with understanding and affection. Not a traditional war story, the author focuses instead on three characters who, though affected by the war in terrible ways, are peripheral to that bloody action—Maria Antonia Etxarri, the daughter of a former innkeeper from a nearby town; Dr. Felix Castro, a young, crippled doctor; and Isabel Cruces Herraiz, the bride (and soon widow) of a young officer, all living in the village of Hondarribia. Miguel Goitia, a young law student studying for his exams, arrives at Las Cruces sixty-five years after the Civil War, and stays in the inn which was once the home of his grandmother, Isabel Herraiz, becoming the catalyst for the novel.
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Last week, if someone had told me that I’d be able to take only one book of short stories with me on a long trip to a desert island, I’d have looked first at all the powerful and intriguing stories by Andre Dubus II. Then I’d have thought about the stories of John Updike, another favorite story writer, pausing for a long time over the volume which contains “Pigeon Feathers,” one of my favorite stories. Today, however, I’d be gravitating toward this book, completely different from any collection of stories I’ve ever read, a volume containing so much variety and color in its subject matter, so many overlapping themes, such strange and ultimately intriguing characters (who peek in at various points throughout the book and revisit us in new stories throughout), and so much fascinating discussion about the nature of stories and story-writing that ultimately, I’d probably choose this one for the island trip. The Dubus and Updike collections are among the best in the world, but on my desert island I think I’d want the stimulation, excitement, humor, uniqueness, and, especially, the sense of wonder that are all contained in this one volume.
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