Indra

I love The Shadow of The Wind and the city of Barcelona, so this is a biased review. What I like: the evocative sentences that bring you the atmosphere, the smell, and the idea of Barcelona and its surrounding, the cast of characters first recounted in The Shadow of the Wind, and the bibliophilia that permeates this book.

However, I find that the new cast of characters is not as distinctive as those of The Shadow of The Wind. The officer Hendaya, for example, is might as well Fumero in a new uniform. Alicia Gris and Victoria Urbach seem to come from the same mold, the classic femme fatale stereotype. Even Victor Mataix and his books serve as mere ornaments and are not as central as Julian Carax and his writings in The Shadow of The Wind.

What makes me put four stars instead of three stars is that the book entered into my dream the night after I finished it. I only remember fragments of the dream: the nooks and alleys of Barcelona, the tram in Tibidabo, the brown effigy that is the Montjuic Castle, and the sense of nostalgia the moving images evoke. It speaks volumes to the power of Zafon's writing. It's as if he is a spatiotemporal magician that brings with him all the time the city of Barcelona that he can conjure any time by a flick of the pen. The world will miss Carlos Ruiz Zafon, but the city he loves, the characters he wrote will stay in our memory and imagination. They might materialize in our castles of dream tonight.

In the rainy season, there is a certain kind of wind bringing the promise of rain. It is often accompanied by a musty smell, wet and prickling; Hurricane Season ushers in the same sensation. The book, aptly named, unleashed the same heat, charge, and effluvia that one experiences the moment before the storm.

The novel begins with the discovery of a corpse. It was the body of The Witch, a central figure of this novel, who is also an enigmatic and ingenious creation. Readers know The Witch through tell-tales and the village gossip. Nearly everything about her is fabulous and inexplicable: her mysterious conception and childhood, how she wanders around always clad in black clothes and veil, her role as the village's witch doctor, her rumored hidden treasures, and ultimately the story of her death. The novel continues Rashomon-like from different perspectives, but the crux of the tale is The Witch. She is a symbol of a time and a place: the narco period in a small village of La Matosa in Mexico.

As a novel that begins with death, it is no surprise that violence takes center stage in this book. The village of La Matosa was always a backwater place where inequalities and patriarchy persist. However, development in the forms of the new highway and oil fields exacerbates the situation by bringing with it narcotics and prostitution, problems that money attracts. Violence explored in this book comes in many forms: femicide, homophobia, abuse, and casual violence engendered by machismo and toxic masculinity.

Despite the despair and the grisly details of violence that fill the book, it is still a beautiful work. Fernanda Melchor writes with bold virtuosity and with a peculiar musicality. Chapters in this book take the form of a single unbroken paragraph. Run-on sentences weaved together creates a striking soundscape that is sensuous and evocative. Each consecutive chapters give voice to local characters that make them corporeal and distinct. However, the most remarkable quality of this book is the visceral description of life in La Matosa. There, poverty and provincial backwardness are exposed in sensuous detail. Everything there smells: rotten fish, unwashed bodies, brackish water, and cigarette smokes. Profanities are as much an element in this book as are eggs in pancakes. Fernanda Melchor does not want to merely show La Matosa; she barrages our senses to present a small village in Mexico where violence is the daily menu.

In Hurricane Season, Fernanda Melchor writes a realist work that is so vivid and evocative that no other word could describe how she does it but magic.

Imagine the Earth suddenly having two moons, but with no immediate discernable impact upon gravity, sea waves, or animals. There would be speculations, conspiracy theories, panic buying, and governments trying to appease their citizens without having any idea what to do. Despite not knowing what to do or think, life would go on.

The kind of life that would go on in the above scenario is the center of Weather, a new book by Jenny Offill. Lizzie, the protagonist, is a librarian whose side job is answering emails for a doomsday podcast. The world she lives in is the world of climate calamity and Donald Trump. People are anxious yet don't know what to do about the former, and react strongly to the latter. Both are extraordinary events. Life could not be the same again afterward.

Weather does not speculate nor predicts how future society would be. The book, instead, provides a glimpse of the collective consciousness trying to process these extraordinary events. It circumnavigates the paralysis, confusion, and vehement desire for normalcy that people feel when facing something new and dreadful. The narrative thread of the book is simple. So does the short, fragmentary paragraphs that comprise the book. However, this simplicity is deceptive. It is a device that Jenny Offill cunningly uses to demonstrate time under suspension, to exhibit the feeling of dread and hopelessness despite the knowledge we amassed.

The book is a timely read during this pandemic. The similarity between how people react to it and how people behave and think in this book is uncanny. Consequently, one could argue that this novel is more about how humanity reacts towards adversity than it is about the disaster or circumstances that prompts the reaction. The term “weather” here relates more to the verb than to the noun. Reading this book, one could understand why March 2020 feels like a year, yet April 2020 passes by in an instant.

Weather is a smart book, full of tender humor that deftly displays humanity's strengths and failings.

A captivating debut that captures the voice of the young generation.

In the heart of Berlin, close to the glass dome of the Reichstag, lies memorabilia for human's capacity for evil. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe invites its visitor to walk around the seemingly unordered black concrete slabs. As one walks from one edge to another, the pieces increase in size, engulfing its visitors. The outside world gradually loses its hold. Everything is mute. One could not help but wonder at the cruelty that the monument commemorates; the scale, the scope, and the industrious quality of it. As one emerges, regaining sunlight and the outer world, one question usually bursts at that moment: are we a creature of light or darkness?

Voluminous tomes of literature try to answer that question. One most prominent example is The Lord of the Flies by William Golding. The classic inquiry of the nature of evil has entered the collective consciousness to such an extent that every subsequent quest examining power relations in closed society would garner comparison with it. Here comes A Luminous Republic, a story involving a group of children transgressing towards violence in an imaginary small city in South America. From the onset, the shadow of Lord of the Flies looms over this novel. However, putting this book so close to Golding's doesn't do Andres Barba justice.

For once, the striking originality. The plot of this novel is as unpredictable as the flow of the River Ere, the primordial river where the imaginary city of San Cristobal is set. It begins with the narrator in the present day recounting the day he moved to San Cristobal twenty years ago. Another aspect of Barba's deftness is the decision to frame the book in flashbacks and flash-forwards. The framework enables a pseudo-documentary style. The crux of the story, the fate of the thirty-two “feral children,” gains a layer of analysis. The reader can witness how time distance and survivorship reshape history and meaning. Despite the movement between different time frames, the chapters flow with an immediacy. One can read this slim book in one sitting, with bated breath at the end.

There is an element frequently occurred in Barba's works: the cruelty and mysteriousness of children. The book's central assertion falls along the line, that to expect children to be creatures of innocence is naïve and is a projection from adults trying to assert that their beginning is purity. Another theme in this book is the contrast between order and chaos, hierarchy and anarchy, and between society and individual freedom. A novel of ideas, disguised as a documentary, disguised as a conflict between an anarchic group of children and orderly society, this book will stay inside the readers' head long after they read it.

In A Luminous Republic, Andres Barba writes a slim, compulsively readable novel that would leave the reader thinking for twice as long as the time they took to read it.