The Antiquarian

Starred review from February 3, 2014
The debut novel from Patriau, a Peruvian journalist, critic, and Roberto Bolaño scholar, possesses much of the unease and horror characteristic of Bolaño’s work. Psycholinguist Gustavo is contacted by his old friend Daniel, whom he hasn’t heard from in years. Daniel asks Gustavo to visit him in a nearby mental institution, where he’s being held for murdering his fiancée. Daniel, a mild-mannered eccentric who loves antique books, promises to reveal why he did what he did, and thus draws Gustavo into a search through the underground and back alleys of his unnamed South American country. Along the way, Gustavo encounters a rare book dealer network that’s actually a front for traffickers in illegally obtained human organs. One character, stricken with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which gives its victim an extremely elastic body, subjects another character to “the torture of her ecstatic expressions when one of her bones would break.... The sickness was her favorite toy.” But despite the gripping plot, Patriau’s beautiful and beguiling prose, full of dark fables (including the story of a 16-inch-tall boy) and bleak history lessons, is the real star: “As you know, mental illnesses make you speak, but they usually transform language into ritual”; “We’re all monsters, in one way or another, it’s just a matter of delving into one’s own birth defects.” This perfect blend of page-turning narrative and knockout prose is as good as it gets—Patriau’s book is pure pitch-black fun. Agent: Ryan Fischer-Harbage, the Fischer-Harbage Agency.

Starred review from May 15, 2014
A masterful debut in which a Peruvian literary critic and scholar crafts a metamystery that explores identity, deceit, guilt and narrative.The plot seems simple enough, until it doesn't. Narrator Gustavo (who has the same first name as the author) is a psycholinguist who receives an out-of-the-blue call from his closest friend, Daniel, with whom he's had no contact for three years. Daniel apparently wants to talk about what happened back then, when he was accused of killing his fiancee in a jealous rage and subsequently attempted suicide, and what has happened since, during his confinement in a mental hospital. From that setup, strands of narrative intertwine: stories of Gustavo and Daniel in the formative days of their friendship; stories of Daniel and his disturbed sister, who disappeared; stories about Daniel's obsession with older books, which somehow involves him in a "mafia that traffics in human body parts." Interspersed with these stories are fables and parables from the novel's title character, who merges with one of its main characters. Against a backdrop of clashing armies and acts of terrorism, Gustavo and Daniel resume their relationship, with the former starting to feel like a "fictional detective" who "felt more like I was being played with by an army of hooded puppeteers." Is Daniel the one pulling those strings? Did he commit the murder to which he confessed? Has he committed others? Daniel has plainly enlisted Gustavo to find out something, but what if Gustavo's discovery incriminates Daniel? As one character suggests, "[t]he moments from the past or from the future, the unreal scenes from tales, dreams, the projects we push aside each day that exist in the doubt we stop having in order to live-they're all worlds as true as this one." Within these worlds, the novel finds a provisional truth.Rarely does a literary mystery work on as many levels as this.

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June 1, 2014

In this exciting first novel by Peruvian literary and social critic Patriau, who teaches at Bowdoin College and writes a popular blog on Peruvian writers, a man is accused of stabbing his lover. Allegedly, in a fit of jealousy, Daniel stabbed Juliana 36 times. He has been confined to a psychiatric hospital after his family paid off the judge to rule him insane. An antiquarian bookseller with a photographic memory, Daniel calms his anxiety by telling his old friend Gustavo, a psycholinguist, gruesome stories gleaned from the books he sells. Similarly grim tales are regularly narrated by a central poetic persona called the Antiquarian, which, as clues, begin to seem more real than those investigated by the police. From these many macabre allusions, including one to Anne Askew, who was burned alive in Tudor England for preaching against transubstantiation, Gustavo brings to light Daniel's intimate relationship with his sickly and badly burned younger sister Sofia. Sofia is a victim of Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a connective tissue disorder that she shares with Nicolo Paganini, whose fingers lacked tendons and were able to coax from the violin ethereal notes and chords. VERDICT An innovative psychological thriller with deliberate echoes of Jorge Luis Borges that insists on the reader's participation.--Jack Shreve, Chicago

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from April 15, 2014
Shocked by the news that Daniel, his old college friend, has murdered his girlfriend, Juliana, Gustavo is surprised when, years later, Daniel calls from a mental hospital to invite him to lunch. At that lunch, Daniel announces, I am going to tell you a bunch of stories today, so launching into a bewildering tangle of tales, suggestive both of Daniel's fevered mental state and of Patriau's consummate literary artistry. Recounted week by week, Daniel's dark fables draw the protagonist (and reader) ever deeper into obscure symbols obliquely pointing to the truth about Juliana's death. To decipher the secrets embedded in Daniel's bizarre narratives, Gustavo draws on his skills as a psycholinguist, scrutinizing each torturous clue and connecting it with his own memories of college days spent with his friend in obscure librariesand brothels. Keys to interpreting Daniel's convoluted fictions come from Yanama, an elderly bookseller sharing Daniel's passion for old books of arcane lore; from Pastor, the exnaval officer who heard Daniel first confess to having killed Juliana; and from Mireaux, the hardened newspaper executive whose cryptic comments about Juliana veil hidden knowledge. At once heartbreaking and redemptive, the denouement illuminates a deep interconnection between horror and love. A powerful translation of the Spanish original.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

Starred review from October 1, 2014

A psycholinguist investigates a macabre murder in an asylum--a murder for which his antiquarian friend, with a criminal record for homicide, is the prime suspect.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.