★★★★☆ Deniably magic fun from Allende

Los amantes del Guggenheim

Isabel Allende

Isabel Allende is, I think, my favorite Spanish-language author, and one of my favorite authors full-stop. La casa de los espíritus is a great work of Magical Realism, better even than Cien Anos De Soledad in my personal opinion. Thus I was delighted to learn of the existence of this story. I was taken aback to find that it is not for sale in Spanish anywhere that I could find, although Amazon will sell you an English translation by Allende herself under the title Lovers at the Museum. However, it was easy to find free downloads of the Spanish booklet, e.g. here.

The Museum referred to in the title is the Guggenheim Bilbao. One morning when the museum opens two lovers are found inside, a naked young man, Pedro Berastegui, and a young woman, Elena Etxebarría, in a bridal gown. (The names in the English version are different.) She is questioned by Detective Larramendi

—¿ Por qué ibas vestida de novia? —la interrogó Aitor Larramendi.
—Porque no tuve tiempo de cambiarme.
—¿ Dónde se casaron?
—¿ Quiénes?

—Why are you wearing a wedding dress? Aitor Larramendi asked her.
—Because I didn't have time to change.
—Where was the wedding?
—Whose wedding?

It transpires that Elena and Pedro spent the night in the museum doing you-know-what, and that no one noticed. Even the security cameras have no record of them. It is just barely possible, if you really really want, to imagine that nothing magical happened -- that the guards were negligent and that there were unexplained electronic faults. But of course you're not going to believe that. This was a lot of fun.

The Spanish booklet but not the English translation follows the story with an essay called "El oficio de contar", which Google translate will tell you means "The job of counting". That is a mistranslation. The Spanish verb "contar" does mean "count", but it is also the verb used for telling a story. (The English verb "tell" also means "count" -- it is rarely used in that sense now, but that is why the person who counts out money at the bank is called a teller.) The essay tells how Allende became an author and what story-telling means to her.

Amazon review

Goodreads review

Comments

★★★★☆ What are these people?

Red Side Story Jasper Fforde When I reviewed Shades of Grey , the first novel in Jasper Fforde 's Shades of Grey series, I asked Although I referred to Eddie as a young man, it is not clear to me what the people of the Collective are. I think they are more-or-less human. ... However, in some ways they behave like automata. These are puzzles that I hope Jasper Fforde will clear up in subsequent novels in the Shades of Grey series. Now I'm patting myself on the back, because that is indeed what Red Side Story is about. Or so say I. You might think it is about other things -- a love story, a fight to survive, a battle for justice, a cycle race -- and you would not be wrong. Red Side Story contains multitudes. Shades of Grey ended in a flurry of revelations about the Collective. Eddie, Jane and Courtland Gamboge visited the abandoned town of High Saffron, where Jane revealed that all the people supposedly sent to Reboot were in fact sen...

★★★★☆ We return to the world of the Others

Lake Silence Anne Bishop Lake Silence continues Anne Bishop 's series The Others , except it doesn't quite. The Others consists of five novels about blood prophet Meg Corbyn and the city of Lakeside, which is located where, on Earth, Buffalo, New York is. Lakeside and Meg, however, are on Namid, a world that is geographically much like Earth, but ruled mostly by beings that call themselves terra indigene , who regard humans as prey. In The Others a group of profoundly stupid and badly informed humans take on the Others (as they call the terra indigene ) and are very nearly wiped out. A few humans survive by learning to live with the terra indigene . The story of Meg finished, we now move on to a different part of Namid and other humans. Three such novels constitute the successor series the World of the Others . We don't actually move very far. Lake Silence takes place on the shores of Lake Silence, one of the ...

★★★☆☆ A LOT of novel

Myriad Joshua David Bellin Once when I was a postdoc at MIT, I heard physicist Alan Guth speak in the Physics Colloquium. Guth was known for having invented the idea of Cosmic Inflation , that the universe exploded in size just BEFORE the Big Bang, setting the initial conditions for the Big Bang. (Versions of this idea are now mainstream physics.) In his Colloquium, he discussed the possibility that inflation could start anytime, anywhere, from quantum fluctuations. This, he showed us, would lead to the creation of a new universe. He then asked how we might see this. And he showed us that since the new universe would be entirely unattached to the one in which it began, there would be no observable consequence in the universe in which it originated. I was bemused. It felt to me as if he had walked down to the front of the room, pulled his hand out of his pocket and there unfolded an entire new universe. He then folded the new universe back up in his hand and...

★★★★☆ Enola is looking for a friend

The Case of the Peculiar Pink Fan Nancy Springer I just finished three weighty novels. If you care, and there is no reason I know that you should, they were City of Miracles , The Running Grave , and Starling House , good novels all, but no light fare. Therefore, I told myself wisely, "Self! What you want now is something light and sweet and crunchy! You want an Enola Holmes novel!" Thus I gobbled down Book 4, The Case of the Peculiar Pink Fan . It was just the thing! Pink Fan is the best Enola Holmes book so far, in my opinion. Enola is not OK. Despite her mother's frequently repeated mantra, "You will do very well on your own", Enola is not doing great on her own. Abandoned at the age of fourteen by her mother, hunted by her formidable brothers Sherlock and Mycroft, who want to take her freedom away, and without friends, Enola longs for affection. To be sure, plenty remains of the funds her mother embezzled from Mycroft and l...

★★★★☆ Madness and first-person pronouns

Live or Die: Poems Anne Sexton Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath are famous as founders of the Confessional Poetry movement of the mid-twentieth century. Plath began writing poetry in the 1950s and wrote until her suicide in 1963. That was not her first suicide attempt, only the first successful one. Sexton was admitted to a psychiatric hospital in 1955 to be treated for what we now call bipolar disorder. There one of her doctors encouraged her to write poetry to battle her melancholia. In 1974 she, too, committed suicide. Like Plath 's, her successful suicide was preceded by several unsuccessful attempts. One certainly gets the impression that "Confessional Poet" is a terribly hazardous career choice. (Yeah, yeah, correlation is not causation...) For a poetry writing class, I am required to read poems by Sexton and Plath . Live or Die is perhaps Sexton 's most celebrated book -- it won a Pulitzer...

★★★★★ A Cyberspace Cowboy

Count Zero William Gibson Count Zero was the first book in William Gibson 's Cyberspace trilogy I read. I picked it up in an airport bookstore, where it was on display, so it was probably pretty newly published -- let's say 1984. The Internet existed -- I had been using it to send email, although that was still pretty difficult and took some figgerin. It would be another ten years before Tim Berners-Lee 's World-Wide Web got off the ground as a thing that any academic could use, and thus a version of Gibson 's cyberspace became real. There were no eBooks back them (not really), which meant that a person like me, who must ALWAYS have a book to read, had to carry a backpack full of heavy paper books when I traveled. A quick glance in the bookstore made it clear that Count Zero was my kind of book. And it was. As it happens, the series works almost equally well in the order Count Zero , Neuromancer , Mona Lisa Overdrive ...

★★★☆☆ Wow! This felt familiar

Immortal Longings Chloe Gong Often I begin a review by looking at the publisher's blurb. I try to avoid spoilers, but my rule is that anything in the publisher's blurb has already been spoiled, and thus is free to mention in a review, without a spoiler tag. And this one! Well, they tell us right at the top that Immortal Longings (let me just get this out of the way -- I have no idea what the title " Immortal Longings " has to do with the contents of the book) was "inspired by Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra". In paragraphs three and four they introduce the two main characters, Princess Calla Tuoleimi and Anton Makusa. Calla and Anton, do those names sound familiar? Having given away who the main characters are and what their relationship is going to be like, the publishers proceed to reveal the plot. Every year, thousands in the kingdom of Talin will flock to its capital twin cities, San-Er, where the palace hosts a set of games. For those confident eno...

★★★★☆ Good example of Michener's work

Centennial James A Michener Centennial was the first book by James A. Michener I ever read. I believe I read it around when it came out, probably in 1976. Although published in 1974, Centennial was clearly written to come out at the time of the celebration of the bicentennial of the USA in 1976. Although Michener wrote some fairly conventional fiction early in his career -- his Tales of the South Pacific was the basis of the musical South Pacific, and The Drifters is an excellent novel -- he is most famous for his historical epics. Each of these is a long carefully researched novel about the history of one particular place. ( Edward Rutherfurd 's Sarum: The Novel of England is a very similar sort of work. It was, I believe, inspired by Michener 's works.) Centennial is about the fictional town Centennial, Colorado, and at the same time a history of the American West. I liked this quite a lot ...

★★★★☆ A Study in Scarlett

The Notorious Scarlett and Browne Jonathan Stroud A warning to begin -- this review will contain spoilers for book 1 of the series The Outlaws Scarlett and Browne . I will, however, try to avoid spoilers for this book itself, The Notorious Scarlett and Browne . In fact, this review is much easier to write than the one for Outlaws , because now I can be upfront about Albert's mental powers -- he reads minds, and he has poorly controlled telekinetic powers, which so far have mostly manifested in the form of huge explosions in his vicinity that somehow luckily spare Albert himself and his friends grievous bodily harm. In Outlaws we learned most of the story of Albert's life, at least to the extent he himself knows it, through flashback chapters. His earliest memories are of Stonemoor -- a prison/education facility for people like Albert who have mental powers -- and of Dr Calloway there, who tormented him, ostensibly to teach him to control his powers. I confe...

★★★★☆ Rincewind's other shoe drops

Eric Terry Pratchett As usual when I have just finished listening to one of Terry Pratchett 's Discworld books, I find myself trying to answer two questions: "Was there a plot? If so, what was it?" In the case of Eric , the original cover provides a clue: -- Eric is a Discworld version of Goethe 's Faust . And yeah, now that you point it out, I do kind of see the resemblance. But that's not what Eric is about really. To understand the purpose of Eric , you need to go back to Sourcery . In Sourcery the Discworld faced a grave danger from a Sourcerer, an immensely powerful Wizard. The Discworld was saved when Rincewind, the Discworld's most underperforming wizard, in an act of uncharacteristic self-sacrifice and courage, clobbered parts of the trouble with a sock full of sand. For his trouble he was banished to the Demon Dimension, which is the place (using the word loosely) in the...

Search This Blog