The Disappearance of Irene Dos Santos by Margaret Mascarenhas
My rating: 3/5 cats
i would love for someone to invent “book-luminol” that would allow me to spray my entire collection from an over-the-shoulder-leafblower/ghostbusters type contraption thing and then all the good books would glow, using whatever algorithm netflix is using now that is supposedly the best thing math has ever done. that way, i wouldn’t have to read crap, even crap i mistakenly bought thinking it would be good.
this is why:
i could not decide what to read, so i decided to do the old “close my eyes and point” method. and the finger chose love in idleness and i was like “whaaaaa?? i own this??,” so i decided to go to goodreads.com and see why i might have bought it. and of all my seven kajillion friends, only one of them had rated it, and it was elizabeth, who gave it two stars. so i said “i’m not reading this garbage!” (not her review—the book—although i didn’t read the review either because it said it had spoilers, so i thought it best to leave it for now) but so then i decided to try again, even though the method was already compromised. but no one saw, so it didn’t count. this time the stupid finger chose cows, a book i know i do not want to read. i flipped through this one time after i had already paid for it, and once i came to the passage of the couple having sex in the split-open corpse of his mother i said, “yeah, not my thing.” and THEN the finger picked a book that is, like, number three in a series i have not yet started. so i gave up on my finger (twss) and chose this book with my eyes wide open.
this is a good book.
this book would glow if i had my book-luminol.
i was checking out other reviews of this, and someone complains about the similarity of voice in this book, even though it is told through many many characters’ perspective. and that’s totally valid, that is a weakness to this novel. however, i don’t really care about that if the story is good. and this one is. this isn’t a story about individual characters, it is just the opposite—it is about echoes and parallels and the plot is a densely woven mass of details and repetition and omission. and, eventually, irene dos santos.
the story itself is totally captivating, as it meanders through time and family tree and reality and unreality to a more or less satisfying conclusion (i say that, and it sounds bad, but it is an ambiguous ending and i am not totally sure how i feel about it—i think certain things, but they become impossibilities with the conclusion, but then again, in latin american magical realism, nothing is truly impossible, yes??)
anyway, i liked it. i did have to go back and reread parts of it to get all the reverberations, but i was happy to do so. i look forward to reading more by this author.
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