Back Reviews Reel: January 2017

Regarding reviewed books, the first month of 2017 was extremely varied as prove my archives. Between the covers of two contemporary and two classical novels, I found people trying to understand their surroundings. There was the Austrian woman in Angel of Oblivion by Maja Haderlap who reconstructed her late parents’ lives before, during and after World War II to fathom their true characters. A young Spanish restorer of paintings discovered a century-old chess riddle in The Flanders Panel by Arturo Pérez-Reverte and found herself drawn into a murderous search of the truth. The Japanese boy in The River With No Bridge by Sumii Sué learnt in the years before World War I that his family origins alone sufficed to make others hate and discriminate him. And finally, a German architect looked back on his own, his family’s and his country’s past in Billiards at Half Past Nine by Heinrich Böll.

- - - - -

The narrator’s father is given to drink heavily in search of the Angel of Oblivion by Maja Haderlap because even after twenty-five years the horrors that he saw as a boy fighting on the side of the Yugoslav partisans in World War II keeps tormenting him, sometimes to the point of wishing to put an end to his life. Her grandmother, on the contrary, refuses to ever forget the suffering for her Slovene descent before, during and after the time in the concentration camp of Ravensbrück and all those who died for it. Only when the narrator leaves the Austrian mountain farm of her childhood and youth to go to boarding school in Klagenfurt, she begins to grasp how the historical burden marks their as well as her being Slovenian in a country with German-speaking majority…
read more »

- - - - - 

When a friend asks Julia to restore The Flanders Panel by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, she doesn’t know that it’ll turn her life upside down. It’s just an old Flemish painting of a chess game, but under layers of centuries-old varnish and oil paint she discovers a mysterious inscription entreating to find the assassin. At least that’s how Julia reads it. Encouraged by her fatherly friend, ex-lover and antiques dealer César she sets out to solve the riddle hidden in the composition of the picture as well as in the depicted chess game. With the help of the ingenious amateur chess player Muñoz she reveals the truth about the people in the picture and the murder. Then all of a sudden, she finds herself and Muñoz pieces in a murderous chess game against an anonymous opponent…
read more »

- - - - - 

In 1908, Koji is six years old and about to grasp The River With No Bridge by Sumii Sué. He has been looking forward to going to school with his brother because he loved books and studying, but he didn’t expect that the children from the other villages and even some teachers would give him a hard time during the six years of primary school. After all, his father died as a hero in the Sino-Japanese war. The trouble is that he comes from Komori, an ill-famed village because its inhabitants including Koji and his family are “burakumin” or “new commoners” tainted with the bad karma of their grave-digging, butchering and leather-working ancestors. As he grows older, he tries to understand where all the contempt and hatred come from and resolves to rise above his fate…
read more »

- - - - - 

On his father’s eightieth birthday of all days, the surprise visit of an old friend disturbs the daily routine of the architect from Cologne at the centre of Billiards at Half Past Nine by Heinrich Böll. It makes him look back on fifty years of family history starting with his father’s arrival in Cologne before World War I. Although he never took “the sacrament of the Buffalo”, he feels guilty. Only two days before the end of World War II, he followed the absurd order of his commander in the German army to blow up St. Anthony’s Abbey, his father’s first commission as an architect. He never dared to tell his father although he did it to punish the Church for its collaboration with the “Buffaloes” and to avenge the victims of the regime...
read more »