The Irish Times reviews the latest paperbacks to hit the shelves
Say Her Name
Francisco Goldman
Grove Press, £8.99
In 2007 Francisco Goldman’s wife, Aura, broke her neck while body-surfing and died. This book tells the story of Francisco and Aura’s courtship, marriage and complicated relationship with her family. So it’s a memoir, right? No, it’s being sold as a novel. Yet this one describes real events and people. It left me confused and uneasy. Which bits are made up? The details of why Aura’s mother’s two marriages failed? Francisco’s description of sex with a woman he dates after Aura’s death? I hope so; if not, these passages destroy the privacy of real people. Although the book is long-winded, it also has irresistible power, as the reader knows from page 1 that Aura will die. The description of Aura’s accident and brief medical care afterwards are heart-rending, as are the details of Francisco’s grief: he cherishes a tub of Aura’s face scrub, as it preserves the scrape marks of her fingers.
Mary Feely
The Prague Cemetery
Umberto Eco
Vintage Books, £8.99
Umberto Eco’s fifth novel since the phenomenally successful The Name of the Rose explores the power of false beliefs by tracking the genesis of the 19th-century Russian document known as The Protocol of the Elders of Zion. This blatant forgery, which claims to expose a Jewish plot to take over the world, has exacerbated generations of anti-Semitism, including the Holocaust. The central character is Simone Simonini, who zooms around Europe fiddling about in the shadows of historical events and conspiring with cranks and fanatics of every hue: seedy Jesuits, murky masons, socialist bombers and anarchist Satanists. It sounds like great fun, but it’s unengaging and turgid. Eco’s erudition is jaw-dropping, but erudition can’t make up for the stop-start narrative, with its puerile jokes (Freud turns up as “Dr Froide”), endless recipes and relentless vitriol. It’s like trying to read some kind of mad, racist computer game. For this reader, the game-over sign couldn’t have flashed up a moment too soon.
Arminta Wallace
The Shadow of What We Were
Luis Sepúlveda
Europa Editions, £9.99
Although set in Santiago, Luis Sepúlveda’s cast of burnt-out but still proud rebels could just as easily be chewing the fat in Belfast or Derry in this evocative and poignant novel. Shadows abound, that is for sure, shadows that cast doubt on what is right and wrong, what is just and unjust, who is innocent and who is guilty. Sepúlveda evokes great atmosphere in this tale, set in the present, of a little cell of anti-Pinochet fighters who have come together again for one last strike against the state. The story is full of bleak moments and black humour about tragic, violent events. An absurd death leads to a chain of events whereby the former militants achieve some measure of recompense for past injustices. Sepúlveda’s happyish ending hints at the country’s elite finally being held to account for its brutal campaign and other crimes. If only.
Pól Ó Muirí
