VENGEANCE IS MINE by Marie NDiaye

The translator of this novel tells us that Maitre is the title given to French lawyers, and Maitre Susane is the main character here.  She agrees to take as a client a woman, Marlyne, who drowned her three children, but that crime does not seem to bother her as much as the fact that she may have met the woman’s husband as a child, and that encounter may not have been totally innocent.  Remembrances of this encounter causes a rift between Maitre Susane and her parents—her father in particular—the reason for which I never grasped.  Another case she is pursuing is that of her housekeeper, Sharon, who is seeking legal residency status.  Sharon is an enigma in more ways than one but stubbornly refuses to provide her marriage certificate to Maitre Susane, who requires that document for Sharon’s case.  These two puzzles are never resolved, nor is the title, as far as I am concerned.  Vengeance is whose and for what?  I have to say that I was intrigued by Marlyne the most, especially the two radically different reasons she gives for murdering her children.  Both motives are equally unhinged, and in one description of her motivation, she describes her crime as premediated, but in her other explanation, she claims that she had no plans to kill them until the moment that she decided to do it.  She is a monster but still a more fascinating character than Maitre Susane.

OUR SHARE OF NIGHT by Mariana Enriquez

When I think of horror stories, I think of Stephen King, but this book is not on a par with his stuff at all.  In fact, it is Dull with a capital D and totally lacks suspense.  Maybe some of its punch was lost in translation, but I doubt it.  The first part of the book is about Juan Peterson, whose parents sold him as a child to the Order—a privileged group of sorcerers.  Juan is a medium who can summon the Darkness—a supernatural presence which supposedly has the power to grant immortality.  The Darkness, however, gets hungry, and the members of the Order are happy to supply the Darkness with human sacrifices.  Yep.  Also, anyone who ventures too close to the Darkness is likely to lose a limb.  Summoning the Darkness takes its toll on Juan’s fragile physical health, and the Order wants his son Gaspar to take over his duties.  Juan does everything in his power to protect Gaspar from becoming the Order’s puppet, and sometimes his protection techniques are violently abusive, causing Gaspar to be quite conflicted about his relationship with his father.  The dynamic between Gaspar and Juan was, for me, what gave the novel some heart, but otherwise it’s just a long and unpleasant slog through cemeteries, mass graves, and houses that are bigger on the inside than on the outside.

EASTBOUND by Maylis de Kerangal

Aliocha is twenty years old and has been conscripted into the Russian army.  And if that’s not bad enough, he is on the Trans-Siberian Railway, headed to an unknown destination.  After being attacked by another conscript, he decides that escape is the only answer.  Easier said than done, but he enlists the help of a French woman, Helene, who has left her Russian lover, with no particular destination in mind.  Here are two people who don’t know where they are going, but this train is going to take them there.  Helene sees another spontaneous fugitive like herself in Aliocha, a total stranger, but Aliocha is not above using intimidation in his frantic effort to convince Helene, or even a child, to assist him.  Packed with tension, everything about this book is small—the number of pages, the timeline of just a few days, and the cramped space of the train, contrasting with the vast Siberian landscape on the outside.  The setting is perhaps a bit claustrophobic intentionally, adding to the feeling of desperation that Aliocha is experiencing.  However, Helene’s plight, serving as his accomplice, is just as dire.  This book speeds along at a much faster clip than the 60 kph train.

SUDDENLY by Isabelle Autissier

This intense book was exhausting to read, and I had to keep reminding myself that it was fiction.  Louise and Ludovic enjoy a months-long sailing trip and decide to explore a remote island on which visitors are forbidden.  A violent storm comes up, and the unthinkable happens.  Actually, it is quite imaginable, given the circumstances, but Louise and Ludovic are ill-prepared for it, in either experience or equipment.  This pair is deeply in love, but they could not be more different in temperament or stature.  Ludovic is tall, handsome, charming, affable, dangerously optimistic, and has zero common sense.  Louise, although a very petite woman, is an experienced climber, and she knows when the conditions dictate caution.  Despite being the sensible one of the two, she yields to Ludovic, frequently against her better judgment, with life-threatening results.  At one point she makes every effort to do what obviously needs to be done, but he thwarts her with his own ill-conceived, impossible plan.  She ultimately faces a moral dilemma and makes a fateful decision that is her decision alone, in order to maximize the chance of survival.  This decision is the crux of the entire plot, and I would argue that she makes the right one.  However, her actions afterward are hard to endorse.  Even when she later grapples with guilt about the decision, I don’t believe that she ever confronts the horrific and selfish mistake she makes afterward.

WHEN WE CEASE TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD by Benjamin Labatut

This book makes me wish I had studied Physics.  If you’re a science nerd, don’t miss this blend of fact and fiction, but even if you’re not a science nerd, this book is spellbinding.  The only downside is that I will never remember which scientist made which discovery, particularly in the area of quantum mechanics, in which subatomic entities behave both as particles and as waves.  Einstein, Oppenheimer, and Niels Bohr are bit players here, while Schrodinger (of Schrodinger’s cat fame), Heisenberg, de Broglie, Schwarzschild, Mochizuki, and Grothendieck steal the limelight here.  Unfortunately, the only part of this book that I am likely to remember is the beginning when the author recounts the various drug addictions of Hitler, Goring, and other Nazi bigwigs.  He goes on to talk about cyanide and its original development as a pigment for paint.  Apple seeds contain cyanide (who knew?), and half a cup of them contains enough cyanide to kill a human.  This book is not exactly dripping with little-known facts like that, but fascinating stuff abounds.  One would assume that brilliant scientists would collaborate, but apparently they were just as likely to feud, each convinced that his (no women here) theory offered the truth about the behavior of matter.

DOCTOR ZHIVAGO by Boris Pasternak

What’s with Russian authors and characters committing suicide by throwing themselves in front of a train?  In this case, the suicide is that of the title character’s father.  The son, obviously, goes on to become a doctor but has lots of other adventures against the backdrop of the Bolshevik Revolution.  The civil war was extremely confusing to me, trying to keep up with who was fighting for which side, but the Russian names were even more confusing.  Plus, sometimes a character has more than one nickname, and none of these names are remotely similar.  Case in point:  “This was Zlydarikha or Kubarikha, a soldier’s wife who was a cattle healer, a veterinarian, and also, secretly, a witch.”  All that aside, Dr. Zhivago’s first name is Yurii, and he marries his childhood friend Tonia.  However, while serving as a medic during WWI, he meets Lara, a beautiful nurse.  Their relationship is the basis for what is considered to be a great love story, but, actually, their time together is relatively short, interrupted for a while when Yurii is captured by a faction of the Red Army to serve as their medic.  The passion of their relationship certainly does not jump off the page, and that could be due to the era in which the book was written or to flaws in the translation.  I think that the David Lean movie or the miniseries with Keira Knightly would be more up my alley.

HOUSE ON ENDLESS WATERS by Emuna Elon

Yoel Blum is a well-known Israeli writer who returns to Amsterdam, the city of his birth, to research a novel about his past.  We know that his mother Sonia escaped the Holocaust with her daughter Nettie, and Yoel, who has discovered that Sonia apparently left another child behind.  Some reviewers have called this a family mystery, but the mystery is not so much about what happened, as that seemed obvious to me, but how it happens.  Yoel has prodded his sister for details after his mother’s death, and her explanation fuels Yoel’s imagination in the writing of his novel, although we readers are enlightened only by the text of Yoel’s novel as it progresses.  He rents a small hotel room in the neighborhood where Sonia lived so that he can immerse himself both physically and emotionally in her story.  This book, then, is actually two stories—Sonia’s and Yoel’s—with almost seamless switching between the two.  Sonia’s life deteriorates little by little into a harrowing existence as she endeavors to save her family from a demise that she can hardly believe is coming.   A revelation at the end explains why Yoel’s mother was so secretive about the past, but that was not particularly surprising, either.  What makes this book special is how personal the story feels.  Sonia’s heartbreak as she wrestles with impossible decisions is palpable and so gut-wrenching that I was immensely glad to know from the beginning that she survives.  This book is a true reminder that the experiences of Sonia’s family, grappling with life and death choices regarding the welfare of themselves and their children, were not unique.  I cannot begin to imagine what their lives were like, but this book provides a small window into that horror.

THE PERFECT NANNY by Leila Slimani

Myriam, has returned to work as a lawyer for the usual reason: her two small children have totally usurped her life.  Now she has gone to the opposite extreme, in which she works late hours, as does her husband Paul, who is a music producer.  The title character is Louise, whose job as their nanny is her life.  She lives alone in a small Paris apartment where the shower no longer works.  She spends so little time there, though, that it doesn’t really matter, as she has established herself as vital to her employers. She is more than a nanny; she cooks and cleans and organizes way beyond the point of mere fastidiousness.  Eventually Paul and Myriam come to the conclusion that Louise may be wired a little too tightly, but they have become so dependent on her that they procrastinate taking any action.  I kept expecting some sort of twist that never materialized.  After finishing the novel, I had to reread the beginning, in which the children have been murdered in rather grisly fashion, and the nanny is hanging on by a thread after having slashed her own wrists.  The rest of the novel is an absorbing backstory, primarily Louise’s, and I do have one question.  I don’t know how much it costs to hire a full time nanny in the U.S., but we learn at the beginning that all of Myriam’s salary will be used to pay Louise, but Paul considers the tradeoff to be worthwhile if it will make Myriam happy.  My question is why, if Louise is making as much money as an attorney, has she not been able to pay off some of her late husband’s debts?  I wasn’t sure if the debts were contributing to Louise’s mental deterioration or if her mental state rendered her too immobile to make strides toward resolving her financial problems.  In any case, I would not recommend this book for working mothers.

THE REDEEMER by Jo Nesbo

This is my first Jo Nesbo thriller, and I found it to be a little challenging.  Not only are the Norwegian names sometimes hard to keep up with, but as each section ends and another begins, the setting changes as well, and the he or she in the narration is someone entirely different from the character in previous section.  Sometimes I figured out who the author was tracking, and sometimes the author provides a name or some other clue.  Then there are other times when you don’t know who was being referenced until the book wraps up.  I don’t know if this abrupt shift in narration is a hallmark of Nesbo’s work or if it is something he tried in this novel only.  This is basically a murder mystery involving a Croatian hitman and a cast of characters who work for the Salvation Army, plus Harry Hole and the Oslo police, of course.  Since they have military ranks in the Salvation Army (is that true here, too?), I sometimes confused them with the police officers.  All of my disorientation aside, the big question is who hired the hitman, and I never would have figured that out.  Some of the side mysteries were a little easier to solve, despite the author’s heavy-handed attempts to lead the reader in the wrong direction.  Inspector Harry Hole is the heart of the story, with an estranged wife and a problem with alcohol.  Too many of this type of novel, and not just the Scandinavian ones, have a melancholy detective with a boatload of flaws.  Except for his line of work, the assassin is in many ways more sympathetic than Harry Hole.  This ambivalence that the author apparently intends with regard to the hitman is probably the best thing about this novel.

MIND'S EYE by Hakan Nesser

Janek Mitter wakes up to find his wife Eva dead in the bathtub after a night of serious drinking for the two of them.  Janek is certain that he did not kill his wife, but he cannot remember what happened the previous evening.  He soon finds himself arrested and convicted but is placed in a mental institution.  Inspector Van Veeteren has a hunch that Janek is not the murderer, and a subsequent murder convinces him completely.  Since Eva and Janek both taught at the same school, Van Veeteren and his staff spend a good deal of investigative energy checking out the alibis of the school’s employees and students.  They also drop in on some of Eva’s old friends and discover several deaths in Eva’s realm—her father, a classmate, and her young son.  Are these deaths, originally ruled as accidents, really homicides related to Eva’s?  I enjoyed the speedy pace of this novel, which accelerates toward the end when Van Veeteren sets his own deadline by booking a vacation trip to Australia, and I have no complaints about the writing, the translation, or the dialog.  However, none of the characters came sufficiently to life for me, perhaps because they all seem to be loners to some degree.  The novel is driven by the quest to solve the crime, rather than any sympathy for the police or the victims.

THE KEEPER OF LOST CAUSES by Jussi Adler-Olsen

Carl Morck is a curmudgeonly Copenhagen police detective mourning the death of one colleague and critical injury of another in an ambush.  Now he has been relegated to the basement to tackle cold cases, along with a new eager assistant, Assad, who also serves as his department’s janitor.  Carl and Assad are the only employees in the newly formed Department Q, and Assad has unexpected skills from an undisclosed prior life.  Carl is obviously suffering from PTSD and drags his feet for a while but eventually begins investigating the disappearance of Merete Lynggaard, a beautiful liberal politician who eschewed social interaction in order to care for her disabled brother.  She has been missing for five years, and her brother has been institutionalized.  Gradually Carl and Assad begin to unravel the mystery of her disappearance, while Merete struggles to maintain her sanity in isolation in an impenetrable room.  We follow her imprisonment in detail and try to solve the puzzle, as she does, of what she has done to deserve such torture, including having to pull her own abscessed tooth.  Her plight motivates us as readers to hope that Carl and Assad will hurry up and rescue her, while they are not even aware that she is alive.  This novel is a treat in every way with twists, suspense, and a smidge of humor to keep you reading and wishing for more at the end.  In fact, for once I succumbed to the temptation to read the sneak peek for the next book in the series.  I have to say that Assad basically steals the show here, and I look forward to learning more about his background in the sequels.

WAKING LIONS by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen

The opening to this novel revived old memories of The Bonfire of the Vanities.  However, the hit-and-run accident takes place in Israel, and the victim is an Eritrean immigrant, making this book also a little reminiscent of The Tortilla Curtain.  The driver, Eitan Green, is a neurosurgeon who knows that the victim will die anyway and elects not to turn himself in, despite the fact that his wife is a police detective.  The victim’s wife, Sirkit, decides to exact penance from Green by blackmailing him into treating ill and injured immigrants in a makeshift clinic.  Green carries out this activity without the knowledge of his wife or his superiors at the hospital, but we know that his lies about his after-hours whereabouts will surely eventually catch up with him.  Obviously, Green is no saint, but neither is Sirkit, as we learn more and more about her oppressed life and her not-so-charitable motivations.  These two characters have a love-hate relationship, and their uneasy attraction to one another builds.  Meanwhile, Green’s wife develops an interest in investigating the hit-and-run accident and stirs up even more trouble.  I really liked this book, even though it’s a translation, with all its ethical lapses and sinister undertones.  The author tackles a smattering of hot topics—race, immigration, the illegal drug trade, police brutality, domestic violence—without losing sight of Eitan’s personal struggles.  There were several points in the novel where I thought his deceit was finally going to be revealed, costing him his marriage, his job, and his reputation, but he improbably manages to string everyone along for months.  Things get more than a little crazy at the end, but I really found the outcome nifty and satisfying, in a twisted sort of way.

THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES by Roberto Bolaño

Arturo Belano, a stand-in for the author, and Ulises Lima are two poets who call themselves visceral realists but seem to make a living selling Acapulco Gold.  The original visceral realist was Cesarea Tinajero, who published a poem in the 1920s that was essentially a series of three line drawings.  Lima’s and Belano’s adventures are told through the voices of more narrators than I could possibly count or keep track of.  These narratives are like journal entries that span several decades (from the 1970s to the 1990s), and either Lima or Belano appears in most of them.  Ulises Lima disappears for a while in Managua, Nicaragua, while on a writers’ junket.  Belano, a Chilean, travels the world; we meet him in Barcelona, Tel Aviv, Mexico City, Paris, and Africa.  There’s a duel with swords on a beach in Spain, an ambush in Liberia, an interesting use of the counting of seconds with “one Mississippi,” etc., a murderous pimp, some muggings, weird odors, a magazine named Lee Harvey Oswald, and two narrators who speak from mental health facilities.  Belano and Lima are dismissive of famous Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and especially Mexican poet Octavio Paz, who also puts in an appearance in the book.  The first narrator, who doesn’t show up again until the last chapter, is a young man who stockpiles a bit of cash by betting on soccer pools using numbers that come to him in visions.  Given all that happens in this novel, it should not be boring, but it was for me, not to mention too wacky and disjointed.

ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVICH by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Ivan Denisovich Shukhov is a Gulag prisoner in Siberia in 1951.  The day in which this book takes place is actually one of his better days, despite the frigid cold, meager gruel, endless body searches, and back-breaking work.  Shukhov has figured out a few tricks to survival, including hiding tools and bread, but what he’d really like is a sick day.  I thought at first that he must be a political prisoner, but actually he was released from a German WWII POW camp and then arrested in his homeland on suspicion of being a German spy.  If this misconception isn’t ludicrous enough, consider the state of the prison camp.  Incomplete buildings and broken machinery abound.  One of the reasons that everything is in disrepair is because the work reports, in which productivity is always exaggerated, are apparently more important than the quality of the work.  The convicts break off a railing to use as firewood, thus giving us another glimpse as to why the camp is in disarray.  Shukhov periodically has to reassess the value of his dignity, as he considers how low he is willing to stoop to survive.  This dysfunctional prison camp is perhaps a microcosm of the USSR in many ways—unable to feed itself with a workforce unmotivated to build an infrastructure.  This novel may be a standout as social commentary, but as literature, it underwhelmed me somewhat.

THE AGE OF REINVENTION by Karine Tuil

The beginning of this novel is a little confusing because the two main characters’ names are similar—Samir and Samuel.  There’s a reason for this.  Samir, a Muslim, adopts some of Samuel’s history as his own and even succeeds in passing himself off as a Jew, in order to further his career.  The two men were friends in law school in France, along with Nina, who is adored by both men.  She stays with Samuel, a struggling author, who threatens to kill himself otherwise, while Samir, now known simply as Sam, launches a lucrative law career and marries a very wealthy woman.  Years later, Nina and Samuel reconnect with Samir, who persuades Nina to return to the States with him and become his mistress.  The wild card in all this is Samir’s real family, especially his half-brother Francois, kept secret from his wife, her family, and his colleagues.  Samir has to tread carefully to avoid exposure of his real roots, but nothing in the book prepared me for what happens in the second half.  In fact, the storyline fairly gallops to its conclusion, and I would have given this book five stars if the first half were nearly as riveting.  One other minor quibble I have with this book is that, although the author is a woman, the female characters—Samir’s wife, Samir’s mother, and especially Nina—are given short shrift.  This is basically a story of two men in a rollercoaster of role reversals and rivalry on several levels.  Samir is not the only one who reinvents himself; the same can be said for Francois and Samuel as well.  I’m quite surprised that this novel hasn’t received more attention, particularly given the timeliness of the plot, which loses nothing in the translation.  As for the footnotes, I would recommend that readers ignore them.  I found them to be an attempt at humor by supplying a brief backstory for insignificant characters that really isn’t necessary, given the irony that is already at work here.

THE VEGETARIAN by Han Kang

This unusual novel is told from the perspective of three characters, none of whom is the title character.  The book is divided into three parts, so that each narrator has his/her own section.  The vegetarian in question is Yeong-hye, a South Korean woman who has a frightening dream that persuades her to stop eating meat immediately.  Her husband narrates the first section and confesses that he chose Yeong-hye as his wife especially for her lack of distinction.  Even after throwing out all of the meat in the freezer and adopting a vegetarian diet, she continues to have nightmares, and her weight loss drives her father to try to force feed her at a family dinner.  After a brief stay in a mental hospital, she attracts the attention of her sister’s husband, an artist who narrates the second section.  He takes advantage of Yeong-hye’s fragile emotional state for his own warped artistic purposes.  Yeong-hye’s sister narrates the final and most poignant section, in which she laments the fact that Yeong-hye has lost the right to make decisions about her own body.  Finally, in this section, we get a few cryptic clues as to why Yeong-hye has made this transformation, but I felt that by diminishing in size she was increasing in distinctiveness.  Not that I think she was trying to get attention, but especially in the middle section of the book, she sheds her mediocrity and becomes her brother-in-law’s erotic obsession.  She is the catalyst not only for the demise of her own marriage but also her sister’s, so that she becomes a force for radical change in the lives of other people.

MY BRILLIANT FRIEND by Elena Ferrante

Elena and Lila are girls growing up in Naples, Italy, in the 1950s.  Both come from poor families, and both are excellent students.  Clearly, Lila is more gifted, but her formal education ends with elementary school, while Elena continues on through middle school and high school.  Still, Elena feels inferior to Lila in both appearance and intelligence.  She has a few minor self-esteem breakthroughs, especially when she spends a summer helping out at a B&B on the island of Ischia.  However, that adventure ends badly, through no fault of her own.  She suffers through the usual adolescent angst, ignoring the boy she likes and choosing the boy who adores her.  Lila, on the other hand, has bigger problems.  A wealthy but unpleasant young man pursues her, but she fends him off, despite pressure from her parents to accept him.  There’s only one way out of this predicament, and that is to find another wealthy boy who is more tolerable.  Since Elena is a first-person narrator, I assumed that the brilliant friend was Lila, but Elena proves herself to be no slouch academically and more savvy about what’s important, although Lila seems to be making the best of a very unfortunate situation.  I did not particularly enjoy this book, and so I have mixed feelings about reading the other three books in the series.  On the one hand, I’m not wild about attempting to reacquaint myself with a huge cast of characters, although the index at the beginning does help.  On the other hand, I’m curious about what happens to the relationship between these two girls whose lives are sharply diverging as they approach adulthood.

THE LOST DAUGHTER by Elena Ferrante

Leda’s two grown daughters have moved to Toronto to live with their father, and Leda is feeling surprisingly unburdened.  While at the beach on vacation, she encounters a beautiful young woman, Nina, with her small daughter Elena and a bunch of extended family members.  This is a very short novel, dark and full of shocking revelations, and I don’t want to give too much away.  Some of the revelations come up in conversation, and at first I wondered if Leda was making stuff up.  Suffice it to say that this novel is about two women for whom motherhood is not all sweetness and light.  They both try to maintain their responsibilities to their children while retaining some sense of self, with limited success.  In fact, they lean so far in the selfishness direction that they risk more than just a few raised eyebrows from family and friends in response to their actions.  Leda readily admits that she can’t really explain why she’s done some of the things she’s done, while Nina seems to be stuck in an unhappy marriage.  Nina may be somewhat obscure, but Leda is the real enigma here, though.  She struck me as just being in an eternally bad mood, doing mean things for no apparent reason.  Even though, she’s the narrator, I never quite figured out what made her tick.  She illuminates one small piece of the puzzle late in the novel, which just left me even more puzzled than ever.  And who is The Lost Daughter?  Leda does enlighten us a bit about her own childhood, and I assume that she is the title character, for she is indeed lost, in many ways, but especially to herself, as exemplified by her inability to explain her own behavior.

WOLF TOTEM by Jiang Rong

Chen Zhen is an educated young Chinese man in the 1960s who, with many other young urban intellectuals, goes to live with sheep herders in the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, at the behest of the Chinese government.  Thanks largely to Bilgee, a wise old nomad who understands the delicately balanced ecology of the area, Chen comes to appreciate how vital the wolf population is to the continued success of the herders.  The sacrifice of a few lambs and foals to the occasional wolf attack is a fair trade-off, since the wolves keep the rodent population to a minimum.  The Chinese government, however, wants to relocate farmers to the area, and the wolves have to go.  I get that this novel is a condemnation of the Cultural Revolution, but it falls short in so many ways.  First of all, Chen’s obsession with raising a wolf cub is totally inconsistent with his reverence for the wolves and the grassland.  More annoying, though, is the author’s use of dialog to get points across about the protection and history of the land and the wildlife.  Characters sound as though they are quoting passages from an encyclopedia.  Yes, this is a translation, but I don’t think the Chinese would converse in such a stilted manner.  The book proceeds at a snail’s pace, partly because of all these sermons, and then the high body count for the animals made the book even more difficult to me to wade through.  Plus, I forget sometimes how important good writing is to my enjoyment of a book until I read one like this, which is not well-written at all.  The Kindle version is full of mistakes, particularly random repeated phrases that dangle randomly throughout the text, divorced from the sentences in which they originally appeared.  Bottom line:  The message is worthwhile, but the storytelling is not.

THE SHADOW OF THE WIND by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Like A. S. Byatt’s Possession, this novel has two characters investigating the mystery of two parallel lives from a previous generation.  The similarities don’t end there, but that’s another subject for another day.  In this book, Daniel Sempere, who lives with his father in Barcelona, discovers a lost novel by Julián Carax entitled The Shadow of the Wind.  He soon gets caught up, not only in the novel, but in the mystery surrounding the author, who is presumed dead.  He soon finds himself being stalked by an evil police officer and by a sinister man intent on destroying all of Carax’s work.  Daniel enlists the help of Fermín, a former homeless man who now works in Daniel’s father’s bookstore, and Bea, the beautiful sister of Daniel’s best friend.  Daniel’s quest takes him to the home of Nuria, who knows more than she’s telling and tries to throw Daniel off the track, to a haunted mansion once occupied by the family of Penélope, who was Julián’s great love, and to a paupers’ hospice for the elderly.  I found the plot to be a little predictable, although one particular revelation caught me by surprise, despite all the clues.  More frustrating was that I occasionally had to remind myself that Julián was not Daniel and vice versa.  I’m no expert, but I would say that this is a very good translation, since there are a few clever plays on words that probably required some alteration from the Spanish but rendered the desired humorous effect.  For me, the pace was a little slow, and, although there was plenty of confusion to go around, the general gist of it was very clear.  At the end the author provides a walking tour of Barcelona that highlights some of the real landmarks that figure into the story.  I have never been to Barcelona, but I think following this itinerary in order to become familiar with the setting would be worthwhile, but then I would have to reread the book.  Unfortunately, I did not love it enough to traipse through it again.