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In a blurb on the back cover, a reviewer compares this book to Pale Fire and The Name of the Rose. I would agree with that, but with the qualification that Somoza's book is a lot less demanding of the reader's work. Moreover, I'd add another couple of titles that came to mind while reading this: If on a Winter's Night a Traveller and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter: A Novel (perhaps also The Mezzanine and Mulligan Stew: A Novel?). Readers who liked these metafictional works will likely enjoy Somoza's novel as well.

Somoza's narrative is supposed to be a modern translation of an ancient Greek murder mystery (!--although some will argue that Oedipus Rex was the first detective story, but let's allow the author some latitude), and stylistically it is a fairly good pastiche of modern translations of classical Greek literature (even though at one point, one of the characters uses the word "umpteenth," which, for me, broke the illusion for a moment).

I thought the first half of the book was really entertaining; my attention began to wander in the second half of it. Perhaps because, as I mentioned, it does not require as much work from the reader as Pale Fire. The problem, I think, is that after a few chapters you get accustomed to the metafictional device Somoza deploys in this book; at that point, a lot of the tension goes out of the narrative. It is worth finishing, however, not only to learn "whodunit," but also to see how events play out on the metafictional level of the text.

Acquired Dec 31, 2008
City Lights Book Shop, London, Ontario