Jose Carlos Somoza

This has been on my radar since 2011 and in my possession since 2015. Ancient Greece and stories involving translators tick two pretty good boxes for me, so I was prepared for a good story. However, I found it extremely irritating. Part of this was on me—I’d actually somehow forgotten about the translator storyline and thought it was just a mystery set in ancient Greece, so it took me a little bit of getting used to. But I absolutely could not get behind the translator storyline, with the translator trying to solve a mystery that he thought was embedded in the text.

The translator came across as a pretentious twit. He threw fancy words around like nobody’s business, and said the word “eidesis” so many times that I was going to either make a drinking game out of it or reach into the book and slap him. And for some reason the whole ending each footnote with “(Translator’s Note)” or “(T’s N.)” annoyed the **** out of me. WHO ELSE WOULD BE WRITING THESE FOOTNOTES?! Also, translators don’t generally write this sort of nonsense in their footnotes. It was just too implausible.

And then because of this dude taking up all the airtime, I did not feel invested in Heracles Pontor’s story either. This book went straight to the giveaway pile.… (more)

Zig-Zag is one of the best SiF book I read the last years. Based on the contemporary theories of Physics the author gives the opportunity of a beyond the imagination travel to the past in the day of Jesus Crucifixion in Jerusalem or in Jurassic period watching dinosaurs. Science is the safest way to approach the truth but how far can we go? How could we avoid the misuse of scientific discoveries and not to ask ourselves as the the pilot of the Enola Game: "my God what have I done?". Where are the limits of science and morality? Looking the past is a kind of trespassing and as in the ancient tragedy it is a hubris, which causes the anger of the Gods and catharsis comes with the terrible punishment.… (more)

I’ve enjoyed a number of Samoza’s works and threw myself enthusiastically into this one. In a short time I began to be quite horrified by the theme but a certain morbid curiosity kept me struggling onward and the more time I invested, the harder it was to pull away from what is finally, a sinister and ugly story. It describes a world where art has descended to a new low. The canvases are now people who, horror of horrors, wish to be enslaved in this exploitative profession for which they are highly paid. The unsuccessful become household furnishings, lamps, tables, ash-trays, worthless trinkets. You’ve seen elaborate tables with marble nudes supporting them. Somoza imagined them real and his terrific imagination was able to conceive that they’d covet and enjoy their work.

SusannaAs always, I admire the sheer scope of his imagination, but he’s begun to strike me, deep down, as a dirty old man. As in much art, his models pass much of their time naked and he revels in describing them and humiliating them. I’m appalled that I made it to the end. The plot involves the hunt for a vicious killer who is destroying valuable works (which happen to be human, but it is their value that provokes the hunt). Lucas Bosch (named perhaps for Hieronymus Bosch, a painter of grotesque works which look cheerful beside the depraved oeuvre described in this book) eventually saves model Clara who depicts a living version of Rembrandt’s Susanna (shown right).… (more)