Frederico Andahazi - El secreto de los flamencos

Well, before going to the seaside I promised I would write a review for Frederico Andahazi’s El secreto de los flamencos. In Romanian it was translated as Secretul culorii pure and I don’t know if there’s any English translation for it, yet I guess that a less verbatim interpretation of the title would be The secret of pure colour -- sorry, but I’ve got no idea what “flamencos” might mean, save for inhabitant of Holland or a Northern European state (?). I didn’t find much on the net about Andahazi either, save for the fact that he’s a South American writer. Personally I dislike this trend for South American writers – really, has no one noticed how for a few years now everyone talks only about Marquez, Llosa, Borges and of course, the extremely trendy Coelho? I guess I wouldn’t have borrowed the book from the public library if I knew that Andahazi is South American, but ultimately I guess I did a good thing – the book was quite good. I might actually be driven to read more South American writers, despite the fact that I hated Marquez’s One Century of Loneliness.

The plot is fairly simple – Pierto della Chiessa, the disciple of Fernando Monterga is brutally assassinated in the outskirts of Florence. Nobody knows exactly why and by whom, and the story of his murder unfolds itself page by page. The narrator even drops a few hints, letting us know who is to die, and what things are the key to solving the plot. However this makes the book an even more interesting read, for the hints are insufficient to draw a conclusion before one reads the end. Basically the conflict is caused by the existence of a compound that can make every colour look divine. The Italians seek it desperately, and the only person in possession of it (a certain Northener) wishes no to use it at all.

The end is quite supernatural, a thing I had not expected at all. It endows the story with a certain lovable flavour, yet it also somewhat ruins the whole pace of the story. Undoubtedly the story has its flaws. For instance one of the characters solves the central puzzle due to the fact that he had myopia and he could distinguish a certain pattern in a drawing thus. Well, I don’t know whether it was a mistake of the author or a mistake of the translator, but myopia is near-sightedness, an affection (if it might be called thus) from which I suffer myself. However the symptoms of the character describe him as being far-sighted, affliction which is called Hyperopia. Either way, I tried looking in all the possible ways at the mysterious drawing and I could not distinguish the pattern of numbers from that of letters at all. Of course, there is a light possibility that the print was not that good.

Per total, it’s a pretty good book, not a mind bender, but definitely beats many of the books I wasted my time reading. Also reading it makes me want to try a more popular Andahazi book, namely The Anatomist.

I found out that it’s quite hard, almost impossible to read at the seaside. I carried a book with me there, William Gibson’s Neuromancer, but a mere 3 hours of sleep per night did not allow me to read more than 20 pages of it. When I returned home a fried lent me John Grisham’s Rainmaker (English version – YAY!!!) and Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting. So I left Neuromancer aside, and started reading the Grisham book for the moment. No biggie, since I read fully Neuromancer a couple of years ago. I just wanted to go again through all the adventures of Case. Maybe some other time. There are many books to be read and unfortunately there is so little time… Only a month ‘till college starts… Oh, hell, guess I’ll have to make the best of it :)