In a Mexican village, a young
girl is found murdered; a girl new to Loma Grande, unknown to most
of the locals, but admired from afar by sixteen-year-old Ramon
Castanos, who covers her body with his shirt. Which is all it takes
to establish the "fact", in the eyes of his neighbours,
that she was "Ramon Castanos' girl", and "the phrase
was repeated so often by so many mouths that he finally accepted it
as true." But with this new romantic reputation comes certain
responsibilities, chief among them the need to avenge the death.
Arriaga's novel, then, a translation from the Spanish, isn't a
mystery story, or at least, its central mysteries remain unsolved;
nor is it a thriller-in a sense, it's an anti-thriller, denoting as
it does the inevitability of certain actions. By becoming Adela's
lover, even if only in imagination, Ramon is left with no choice but
to seek revenge upon "The Gypsy", swiftly cast by rumour
as the villain: a man who has already survived five machete swipes
and three bullets in the chest in previous encounters with cuckolded
husbands. The ironies are written stark and clear: the reader is
never left in any doubt that The Gypsy is innocent, and it is
another love affair that brings him back to Loma Grande to seal his
own or Ramon's fate. It's a good book, this; written in an
uncluttered prose that matches up to its big subjects: love, death
and tragedy. Not what I'd call a genre novel, though; more of a
distant cousin to Marquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold.
|
|