Quote:
Originally Posted by desertgrandma
From someone completely unfamiliar with the author and novel, why do you want it so badly? Synopsis please?
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My mini-review on sffworld
"Composed by 5 interlinked parts revolving around a mysterious German writer which has achieved belated recognition late in life and is supposedly finally seen in the dark, grimy Mexican city of Santa Teresa and the string of murders/rapes of hundreds of women in the above city in a period of about 8 years from 1993 to 2001.
Filled with odd characters, dark humor, grim and raunchy, its 900 pages turn by themselves and it's a book you can read in one sitting if you have a day to spend on it, being so absorbing.
Part one details the rise in reputation of the German writer Benno von Archimboldi, born in 1920, but a mysterious figure never seen by anyone except its publisher and supposedly living throughout the world. This part has as main characters 4 University professors and major Archimboldian translators/critics, a Frenchman, a Spaniard, a somewhat crippled Italian and an English lady, their inter relationships and meetings with assorted odd characters. Finally in 2001 they get a tip that Archimboldi has been recently seen in Mexico and they follow there.
Part two is shorter and stranger, about a weird Chilean academic currently teaching in Santa Teresa and met by the critics in part one - his back story and the whys of his keeping an obscure math book by a Spanish poet hanged on his clothesline outside his house and quite a few other weird happenings
Part three is seen through the eyes of a Harlem reporter who by chance is sent to Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match - he reports on African American politics/social issues but the sports reporter just got murdered - and his involvement with the daughter of the academic above and the first glimpse of the issues involving the hundreds of murders/rapes in Santa Teresa
Part four is about the murders - it is a grim litany of the bodies, the following investigations, sometimes followed by arrests, sometimes not, interspersed with a lot of other related things, like the affair between a detective and the head of the mental hospital, the story of various weird characters, corruption and indifference and much more.
Part five returns to Benno von Archimbaldi and tells his story focusing of his war experiences and how he got to be a writer, and later why he goes to Santa Teresa at age 81 in 2001"