Daily Archives: November 4, 2010

Review: Southwesterly Wind by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza

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The 20th of 21 books I am reading to complete the Global Reading Challenge is set in Brazil which completes the South American leg of my virtual tour. There is only the wildcard book to go before I can claim my extreme reader badge.

At his 29th birthday party Garbiel Alzira is told by a psychic that by his next birthday he will have killed someone. As the date of Gabriel’s birthday looms he becomes increasingly agitated at the thought the prediction will come true and so he begins to trawl Rio de Janeiro looking for the psychic and also asks the police, in the form of Inspector Espinoza in the Copacabana district of the city, to investigate the murder which has yet to be committed. Eventually someone connected to Gabriel does die but there’s no evidence that the person was even murdered let alone by Gabriel. Has a crime been committed and if so was Gabriel responsible?

One of the things I have enjoyed most about reading so widely for this challenge is discovering how the diversity of narrative traditions from different parts of the globe are being woven into the crime fiction genre. In terms of crime fiction as the English-writing/speaking world knows it, this book would barely register on the genre’s scale, owing far more to the Latin American literary, often poetic narrative style though there are only fleeting glimpses (thankfully for me) of the magical realism that has been prevalent in other Latin American books I’ve read for this challenge.  It doesn’t seem to feel the need to finish all the threads very neatly and much more of the ending is left up to the reader to imagine than would be the case with a more traditional procedural.

The characters are depicted in an observational style but there is depth to them too. When we’re introduced to Gabriel’s widowed mother, who he lives with, she is sitting in her ground floor apartment’s window watching for her son to come down the street as she does every single day and she almost hyperventilates when he is 40 minutes late. She is making herself a cushion to aid in her window-watching and has fashioned herself a ladder to help her climb up to her perch which shows, in words other authors would take two chapters to describe while Garcia-Roza takes about a page, how obsessed she is with her son and how pivotal her relationship with him is to her daily life. Espinoza is almost her exact opposite being fairly cynical, having no close family living in the country and not being remotely interested in domestic pursuits. He is however very funny and does have some nice relationships including one with his 13-year old neighbour who he allows to convince him to acquire a puppy. With all the characters Garcia-Roza kept me wondering whether they are who they appear to be on first acquaintance and I loved that. In fact the least successful person in the book was the central character of Gabriel who was a little more predictable from my point of view than the others.

Southwesterly wind really is quite a simple story but it captivated me so completely I managed to read the last half of it while at the hairdresser’s (one of the few places I normally don’t bother to try and read due to the cacophony created by the blaring radio, shouted conversations and duelling hairdryers). I really had no idea what would come next but I had a rather desperate need to find out and the writing style lent itself to the book being quickly devoured. It is one of those crime fiction novels that I can imagine recommending to all sorts of readers, not just fellow mystery lovers, as it is first and foremost an intriguing yarn about intriguing people. It just happens to have a crime at its core, or the possibility of one at any rate.

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I haven’t been able to find much in the way of other reviews of this one but Glen at International Noir Fiction provides some thoughts on the entire series including Southwesterly Wind.

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My rating 4/5
Translator Benjamin Moser
Publisher Picador [this translation 2004, original edition 2009]
ISBN 031242454X
Length 242 pages
Format trade paperback
Source I bought it

Review: The Messenger of Athens by Anne Zouroudi

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The main reason I chose this book was that I was in the mood for something a bit light and the series has, more than once, been compared to Alexander McCall Smith’s Number One Ladies Detective Agency books, several of which I have enjoyed. I should have known that these comparisons would be completely bogus.

The Messenger of Athens did have the same approach as an Alexander McCall Smith tale in that it told its story as a by-product of an examination of the minutiae of every day life in an exotic location. But there the similarities end as this was a tome of unending loneliness, depression and entrenched misogyny with half a dozen episodes of crude, violent sex and one gruesome description of a goat slaughter to round out the misery. Essentially it is the story of the inhabitants of what I think (indeed fervently hope) is a small fictional Greek island called Thiminos. These people are the sorriest bunch of selfish, small-minded, insular, bigots you could ever wish not to meet.

Among the island’s population lived Irini Asimakopoulos whose body was found at the bottom of a cliff and whose death was attributed to suicide. However Hermes Diaktoros, referred to throughout the book as The Fat Man, arrives on the island to determine whether in fact Irini might have been killed. He is an enigmatic, almost omnipotent character whose role is never really explained. He claims to have been sent from Athens but by whom? The Police? The woman’s family? The Gods? It’s not much of a spoiler to let on that I was no clearer on this subject by the end of the book (though this could be because I am particularly obtuse) (or could have something to do with my not paying close attention when I was supposed to be studying Greek mythology).

We learn that there were several people with a motive for Irini’s murder because she was thought to be having an affair with one of the married men on the island. The Fat Man takes us through a series of conversations with relevant island inhabitants to reveal the truth (or otherwise) of the island’s gossip and these are interspersed with flashbacks from key people’s perspectives including Irini’s, her husband’s and so on. For me the strongest part of the novel is the wrap up of this main thread because I didn’t see it coming, it depicted a truly ugly event but contained jolly good story telling and there was justice, of a kind, handed out. It took an awfully long time to get there though.

Even if I had not been looking forward to something lighter and happier I doubt I would ever have been fully enthralled in this tale as it’s a bit slow and lacking in tension for me. and the relationship between Irini and Theo is a bit too much like a bad gothic romance. For example there’s sequence in which Irini blathers on at considerable length about her attraction to the part of Theo’s arm which is hanging outside his truck window that made me want to poke my ears out with a compass but which I suspect the more romantically inclined reader would have found charming. However, I do admire the imagery of the writing and the way Zouroudi has created such an unpleasant cast of characters including the island itself. I’m sure it takes as much, if not more, skill to create hated characters as loved ones, and these people and this place are not easily forgettable.

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My rating 3/5
Narrator Sean Barrett
Publisher BBC WW [this edition 2010]
ISBN N/A (downloaded from audible.com)
Length 8 hours 50 minutes
Format audio (mp3)
Source I bought it