The Antiquarian
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
“Riddle by riddle, a murder confession unspools” in this “delightfully macabre” literary thriller of madness, mystery, and antique books (The New York Times).
Three years have passed since Gustavo, a renowned psycholinguist, last spoke to his closest friend, Daniel, who has been interned in a psychiatric ward after brutally murdering his fiancée and attempting suicide. When Daniel unexpectedly calls to confess the truth behind the crime, Gustavo’s long buried fraternal loyalty draws him into the center of a quixotic, mystifying investigation through an underground network of antiquarian dealers.
While Daniel reveals his unsettling story using fragments of fables, novels, and historical allusions, Gustavo begins to retrace the past for clues: from their early college days exploring dust-filled libraries and exotic brothels to Daniel’s intimate attachment to his sickly younger sister and his dealings as a book collector. Soon, Gustavo must deduce a complex series of events from allegories that are more real than police reports and metaphors more revealing than evidence. And when a woman in the ward is found murdered, Daniel is declared the prime suspect, and Gustavo plummets deeper into the mysterious case.
“An ambitious, complex novel…those who read by simultaneously working with the writer, fantasizing alongside him, capable of enjoying the subtleties and secrets of a text as rich and profound as the text of this novel, will never forget it.” —Mario Vargas Llosa
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The debut novel from Patriau, a Peruvian journalist, critic, and Roberto Bola o scholar, possesses much of the unease and horror characteristic of Bola o's work. Psycholinguist Gustavo is contacted by his old friend Daniel, whom he hasn't heard from in years. Daniel asks Gustavo to visit him in a nearby mental institution, where he's being held for murdering his fianc e. Daniel, a mild-mannered eccentric who loves antique books, promises to reveal why he did what he did, and thus draws Gustavo into a search through the underground and back alleys of his unnamed South American country. Along the way, Gustavo encounters a rare book dealer network that's actually a front for traffickers in illegally obtained human organs. One character, stricken with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which gives its victim an extremely elastic body, subjects another character to "the torture of her ecstatic expressions when one of her bones would break.... The sickness was her favorite toy." But despite the gripping plot, Patriau's beautiful and beguiling prose, full of dark fables (including the story of a 16-inch-tall boy) and bleak history lessons, is the real star: "As you know, mental illnesses make you speak, but they usually transform language into ritual"; "We're all monsters, in one way or another, it's just a matter of delving into one's own birth defects." This perfect blend of page-turning narrative and knockout prose is as good as it gets Patriau's book is pure pitch-black fun.
