Recently Released
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
Recently Caught
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
Social Links
Bookish Quotes
"This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force."
Shadow without a Name
|
Shadow without a Name
Buy from one of these Booksellers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
9 journalers for this copy...
|
Man, this was a good book! Ignacio Padilla's Shadow Without a Name is equal parts murder mystery, riddle, espionage yarn and thoughtful meditation. The book wrestles with themes of identity, memory and the dissolution of the self -- and of individual responsibility -- during war, and does so in a subtle, non-dogmatic and utterly convincing way. It's a tough book to read, both due to the translation and the highly convoluted plotline (I had to read many parts of the book twice before I could be sure I was following the story accurately), but it's well worth the effort. Highly recommended to anyone with an interest or affinity for mysteries, chess, Nazi plots, and/or writing by contemporary Mexican authors.You can read the Houston Chronicle's review of Shadow Without a Name here, a 2002 article about Padilla in The Independent here, and an interview with him in the Paris Review here. See also Alberto Fuguet's article in Salon: I am not a magical realist!. Warning: the notes which follow are full of spoilers -- read on at your own discretion! The story told in Shadow Without a Name is so convoluted in places (it was quite accurately described as a "shell game" by one reviewer) that I found I needed to make notes to keep track of important details. I've reproduced my notes in the following journal entries as a kind of "Coles Notes" for anyone struggling to get through this book. Franz T. Kretzschmar Franz tells the story of his father, Viktor Kretzschmar, a young man from the state of Vorarlberg, Austria who in 1916 became a pointsman on the Munich-Salzburg railway line. "Viktor Kretzschmar", we soon learn, is an assumed identity -- Franz' father's real name was Thadeus Dreyer, but he won the Kretzschmar identity from the real Kretzschmar in a chess game, on board a train headed for World War I's eastern front. The prize included Kretzschmar's chessboard, and his safe, pre-arranged job as a pointsman near Salzburg. The "new" Thadeus Dreyer, it was understood, would surely perish in battle. But he doesn't. Thadeus Dreyer survives the war, and returns with an Iron Cross. He begins to attend special meetings of the National Socialist (Nazi) party, and gains recognition as an up-and-coming Nazi functionary. In 1933, an embittered Kretzschmar (the railway pointsman) feels Dreyer has gained the better life, and masterminds a train wreck to try to rob him of it. His plan backfires. Dreyer isn't on the train, and Kretzschmar is convicted of premeditated carelessness causing many deaths. At this point, the mysterious figure of Mr. Goliadkin enters the lives of son Franz and his mother. Goliadkin provides Franz with generous "compensation", and simultaneously brings him into contact with Thadeus Dreyer -- by 1937 a Nazi general and one of Marshal Goering's closest collaborators. |
|
|
|
|
Richard SchleyWriting in Geneva, Switzerland in 1948, Schley recalls how during the last weeks of WWI, as a young seminarian providing pastoral care on the Balkan front, he encountered a childhood friend, Jacob Efrussi, in Belgrade station. Efrussi, the son of a Jewish jeweller, was the owner of a well-worn chessboard (which he has brought with him to Belgrade), and an accomplished chess player. Schley makes several efforts to speak with the oddly reticent Efrussi, and when they do finally speak, Efrussi tells him his name is now Thadeus Dreyer. In October 1918, Efrussi/Dreyer's regiment is decimated by the French cavalry. Those that survive -- including Efrussi/Dreyer -- scatter in the Serbian mountains. In a scene straight from Heart of Darkness, Schley goes to find Efrussi/Dreyer, who he thinks may have gone mad. The character of Alikoshka Goliadkin -- a "Cossack who had recently joined the imperial troops" -- reappears in this segment as the boozy staff sergeant at Karanschebesch who gives Schley permission to go. Hiking through abandoned checkpoints and reeking fields, Schley finds Efrussi/Dreyer in an abandoned cabin. There he finally tells his story: "I have been everyone and no one ... I have stolen so many lives that even you couldn't count them" (p. 80). He also recounts -- obliquely -- how he got the name Thadeus Dreyer. Remembering their childhood, Schley challenges Efrussi/Dreyer to a high-stakes chess game on Efrussi's childhood chessboard. Efrussi loses, and is to accompany Schley back to Karanschebesch. Instead he attempts suicide and is mortally injured. At the end of this segment -- in October 1918 -- Schley assumes Dreyer's name and identity, bribing Goliadkin into complicity. In so doing, he accepts "not only [Efrussi/Dreyer's] death but the crushing weight of his race as well", and "responsibility in the endless battle that he had not wanted or been able to fight". (p. 86) |
|
|
|
|
Alikoshka GoliadkinWriting from Cruseilles, France in 1960, Goliadkin – a Cossack born in the Ukraine – has just been to see Thadeus Dreyer at his Geneva mansion. Goliadkin, we learn, went to Dreyer’s home with the intention of shooting him. Instead, on arrival at the house, he found the door open and the air tinged with gunpowder. He salvages certain papers from the mansion, including those describing the 1918 meeting of Schley, Goliadkin and Efrussi in Karanschebesch. The reader has already encountered Goliadkin earlier in the book – as the boozy staff sergeant at Karanschebesch in 1918, and as the mysterious benefactor who brings Franz Kretzschmar into contact with General Dreyer in the 1930s. Part 3 of Shadow Without a Name expands on his damaged, tormented and psychopathic nature. We learn about the violence Goliadkin suffered as a child, the fatal duel he fought in 1917 with his twin brother, a "stupidly faithful" officer in the Tsar’s palace guard, and we hear his contempt for his family's loyalty to Russia. All this provides the context for Goliadkin’s conviction that "[a]ll we have left to us now is to beat a path leading irrevocably to the destruction of the sacred". (p. 104) For this, Goliadkin has a plan. After the war, Goliadkin and Schley/Dreyer stick together, the former having sensed an opportunity to exploit the latter's weakness: "[t]his man, I thought, has lost his spirit, and I shall ensure he never gets it back". Sure enough, in due course Schley/Dreyer experiences a transformation, a kind of emptying out of his character, such that Goliadkin is quite able to control him. He falsifies Dreyer’s war records, and buys him an Iron Cross. Schley/Dreyer, for his part, "cleverly display[s] an exceptional thespian talent", and by 1932 he’s an influential young member of the emerging National Socialist Party of Austria. In 1933, as Hitler is established as Chancellor of the Third Reich, Schley/Dreyer suggests to his colleague Hermann Goering "a project that would become the symbol of his existence". He proposes the training of a small group of impostors who could replace senior Nazi officials in high-risk public appearances, and the plan is put into action. In 1942, General Schley/Dreyer agrees to a series of chess games with Adolf Eichmann (chief of operations in deporting Jews to Nazi extermination camps). During these games, Eichmann lectures Schley/Dreyer so relentlessly about "the Jewish problem" that Schley/Dreyer experiences remorse about what is happening to the Jews. Schley/Dreyer hatches a plan to substitute one of his best men, Franz Kretzschmar (son of the embittered railway pointsman and the original Thadeus Dreyer), for Eichmann. However before his plan can be put into place he is betrayed by Goliadkin, who sends an anonymous letter to Himmler accusing Schley/Dreyer's "doubles" of hatching a "Semitic conspiracy". The doubles, including Franz Kretzschmar, are promptly disappeared, and Schley/Dreyer and Goliadkin escape to Geneva. In Geneva, Schley/Dreyer grows senile, self-absorbed and pathetic. Goliadkin abandons him in disgust, and doesn't hear from him until 1960, when Eichmann is arrested in Argentina. Schley/Dreyer -- now living as Baron Blok-Cissewsky -- calls Goliadkin to tell him he has "something important to tell him about Eichmann". Goliadkin, intent on denying Schley/Dreyer the satisfaction of Eichmann's capture, resolves to kill him. There's only one problem: when he gets to Schley/Dreyer's home in Geneva, someone else has beaten him to it. |
|
|
|
|
Daniel SandersonWriting from London, England in 1989, Sanderson is an heir of Schley/Dreyer/Blok-Cissewsky. The latter, following his death in 1960, bequeathed a savings box of old coins to Goliadkin, the proceeds of his personal effects to a sanatorium in Frankfurt and 100,000 Swiss francs to each of three men: Remigio Cossini (a painter), Deman Fraester (an actor) and Sanderson (a writer). As this part of the book begins, Goliadkin has been found dying in a cheap hotel room in Cruseilles, from a gunshot wound he'd "inflicted to his own right temple". This allows the authorities to close the file on Schley/Dreyer/Blok-Cissewsky's murder. (Just one problem: Goliadkin had no right hand.) In the office of Schley/Dreyer/Blok-Cissewsky's executor, the three beneficiaries are introduced to a man who looks like Humphrey Bogart ("Bogart"). He tells them Schley/Dreyer/Blok-Cissewsky's will is illegitimate, since Schley/Dreyer/Blok-Cissewsky was an impostor "so skilled in his art ... it was virtually impossible to discover his real name". The beneficiaries are told they can pick up their 100,000 francs if they will relinquish the manuscript Schley/Dreyer/Blok-Cissewsky mailed to each of them before his death. According to Bogart, the manuscripts contain information necessary to convict Adolf Eichmann, who was apprehended in Buenos Aires several weeks before Schley/Dreyer/Blok-Cissewsky's death. (Photo: Adolf Eichmann on trial in Jerusalem, 1961) |
|
|
|
|
A Note on Author Ignacio PadillaIgnacio Padilla was born in Mexico City in 1968. His debut novel, La catedral de los ahogados, won Mexico's Juan Rulfo prize for Latin American and Caribbean fiction. It was followed by the short stories of Subterráneos and the novel Si volviesen sus majestades. In 1996, Padilla and a group of colleagues (Jorge Volpi, Eloy Urroz, Miguel Angel Palou and Ricardo Chávez) launched the manifesto of Mexico's Crack literary movement, with the aim of renewing Mexican fiction. Shadow Without a Name (called Amphitryon in Spanish) won the 2000 Premio Primavera in Spain. In 2000, Padilla was appointed as Mexico's cultural attaché in London, England. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
I have Shadow all packaged up, and will be popping it in the mail to HallieK in Austin, Texas some time next week. Happy reading from New Westminster, British Columbia (photo: the Fraser River - near my home - during a foggy October sunrise).
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
...mailed this afternoon, so Shadow Without a Name should start its journey tomorrow...
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Journal Entry 22 by
Book received today,what a great Surprise ! Thanks a lot for sharing Ftarazu :)I'd never heard of this book before but from what I read on the back cover, it sounds great, I can't wait to read it! |
|
|
|
|
Journal Entry 23 by 
Although the idea behind the book is very good and I liked the beginning very much, I found it a bit tedious to read and ended up skipping a few pages here and there. Then again, I've never liked Mexican & South-American litterature much so this is no surprise for me. I did find the historical facts really interesting, especially the Amphitryon Project (I'll probably do some research about it). Thanks goatgrrl for your brilliant journal entries, they're the most interesting I've come across at BookCrossing so far:) Thanks Ftarazu for sharing the book, I'll send it to Qantaqa this morning. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
I just finished reading this book - hmmm... having read all your reviews before reading it (not the spoilers, though :o) ), I find myself a little disappointed! Though it was quite a nice read (really a one of a kind book), my expectations weren't met.Plus, I didn't really like the author's writing style (or maybe it was the translation?). Will send this to areir in Greece in the next few days. The picture shows the book in Heidelberg, Germany. |
|
|
|
|
Released 6 yrs ago (9/28/2005 UTC) at by mail in To the next participant, A Bookring -- Controlled Releases WILD RELEASE NOTES:
|
|
|
|
|
24/12/05: Interesting book! Less than I expected but still a good one! |
|
|
|
|
Released 6 yrs ago (12/24/2005 UTC) at to a bookcrosser in sent by mail, A Bookring -- Controlled Releases WILD RELEASE NOTES:
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
