Electrico W
A Novel by the Bestselling Author of The Anomaly
-
- $15.99
-
- $15.99
Publisher Description
New York Times Bestselling and Goncourt Prize-Winning Author of The Anomaly
By the celebrated Oulipo writer, this brilliant and witty novel set in Lisbon explores love, relationships, and the strange balance between literature and life.
Journalist, writer, and translator Vincent Balmer moves to Lisbon to escape from a failing affair. During his first assignment there, he teams up with Antonio—a photographer who has just returned to the city after a ten-year absence—to report for a French newspaper on an infamous serial killer’s trial.
While walking around the city together to take notes and photos for the article, they visit the places of Antonio’s childhood, swap stories from their pasts, and confide in each other. But the more they learn about each other, the more their lives become inextricably intertwined.
With a structure that parallels Homer’s Odyssey, Eléctrico W recounts their nine days together and the adventures that proliferate to form a constellation of successive ephemeral connections and relationships.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Romantic and atmospheric, this novel also benefits from a particularly fine sense of place and time. It is 1985 in Lisbon. The narrator, Vincent Balmer, is a French journalist. He is trying to finish a novel when Antonio Flores, a photographer, asks him to help cover the trial of Pinheiro, a serial killer. The two men share a suite in a hotel and interact with a complex group of characters, such as "Duck," an important woman from Antonio's past; Irene, a woman known to both men, who once told Vincent that he had "a young man's body that hadn't aged well"; Aurora, a young woman who gives what is quite possibly the funniest violin recital ever rendered in literature; and Vincent's father, among others. Dealing with so many characters sometimes gives the book a cobbled-together feel, but also makes it lively and fleet. An epilogue describes the characters' futures so neatly and completely that the reader may want to skip it. But skipping anything else in this witty, sad, and interesting novel would be a shame.
