Review of Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo's Where There's Love, There's Hate

Where There's Love, There's Hate by Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo

If travel is on your holiday agenda, the perfect take-along may be Where There's Love, There's Hate. Originally published in 1946, the novella was translated from Spanish into English by Suzanne Jill Levine and Jessica Ernst Powell and published in May, 2013 by Melville House.

The novella's married authors, Casares and Ocampo, were famous Argentine writers and friends of Jorge Luis Borges. They've combined a sophisticated spoof of a detective story with a romantic satire. It's very vivid writing, jam-packed with eccentric characters, sly literary references and nods to Golden Age mystery writers, such as Michael Innes, Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie.

The story is narrated by Argentine physician Humberto Huberman, an arrogant pseudo-intellectual who looks like a pocket-sized Goethe and has a "perfect" appetite. In addition to treating patients, Huberman writes screenplays. He's working on an adaptation of Petronius and seeks solitude at his cousin Esteban's seaside hotel in Bosque del Mar, "the literati's paradise."

To reach the Central Hotel, one makes a dangerous journey over planks set across crab bogs and sinkholes that claimed the physician's horse. The hotel is like a foundered submarine, sinking in swirling sandstorms, and opening windows is impossible. The air inside is foul and full of buzzing flies that drown out dinner conversation. An elderly typist ("Muscarius"), armed with a flyswatter, hunts them when she isn't gently swaying her head in time to the dinner bell or foretelling trouble in the hours ahead. Also living at the hotel are Esteban's sister, Andrea, who cooks, and her 11-year-old son, Miguel, who's into exploring a grounded ship and embalming. Miguel's facial expression, which combines innocence and maturity, makes Huberman uneasy.

Besides Huberman, guests include a young blonde woman named Emilia Gutiérrez, and her sister, Mary. Mary translates and edits detective novels and it's her habit to travel with everything she has ever translated. She works for a prestigious publishing house, but Huberman, who considers the detective novel unrealistic and childish, isn't impressed. Accompanying Emilia and Mary is Emilia's fiancé, Enrique Atuel, who reminds Huberman of a overly debonair tango crooner. Doctor Cornejo is middle-aged and knowledgeable about meteorology and the ocean. Pipe-smoking Doctor Manning plays game after game of solitaire.

From the guests' first day, when Mary comes close to drowning (although she denies it), scenes hint of the Grand Guignol. Emilia disappears before turning up at dinner with red and teary eyes. After dinner, she freezes when Mary asks her to play Liszt's Forgotten Waltz on the piano. The dogs howl and the wind, "as if grieving all the world's sorrow," whips the sand into a frenzy. By the next morning, someone is dead, a victim of suicide or murder.

The Central Hotel, in the middle of a sandstorm, was almost as closed to outsiders as Christie's island in And Then There Were None. Arriving to investigate are Commissioner Raimundo Aubry, who can't discuss crime without referencing Victor Hugo, and police physician Doctor Cecilio Montes, whose appearance is that of an escapee from a Russian novel. One might expect Huberman to be standoffish, since he says complicated crimes are the province of literature, while reality is more banal. But Huberman jumps to argue about the criminal using examples from literature. He becomes a detective, as does almost everyone––other than the corpse.

One after another, revelations are produced, accusations are made, suspects are cleared and Golden Age mystery conventions are skewered. After reality is confused with a book, it's a miracle that the case is solved.

Running on Dali Time

Yesterday began a week of Dali Time at my house. That's what my husband and I call our kids' obsession with time since Daylight Saving Time ended and we set the clocks back an hour on Sunday morning. I cannot say, "Lunch is at 1:00," without their response, "You mean Now Time or Real Time?" as if we're time traveling, or any moment the hands on the clock will spring forward again. They heatedly debate what time it really is until my head spins. This is when I'd take refuge in a book, but if the book is anything like some I've read recently, time doesn't stay put there either.

The past collides with the present through memories and visions in The Fire Witness, a riveting and spooky thriller by Lars Kepler (translated from Swedish by Laura A. Wideburg), published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in July 2013.

The crime scene at a home for troubled girls in Sundsvall, Sweden, is disturbing. A ward nurse and teenage resident were bludgeoned to death. The bloody weapon is found under Vicky Bennett's pillow, but Vicky has vanished into the forest, only to reappear and steal a car with a young child asleep in the backseat. The case is closed when the empty car turns up in the river. But Stockholm Detective Inspector Joona Linna doesn't believe Vicky and little Dante are dead and he isn't convinced of Vicky's guilt. No one trusts Linna's instincts, because he's still off-kilter from an internal affairs investigation and worries about his family's safety. Then he receives a call from medium Flora Hansen, who insists this time her visions are real.

Time, logic and and identity shift  in César Aira's The Hare (translated by Nick Caistor), published in July 2013 by New Directions.

Nineteenth-century British naturalist/explorer Tom Clarke is in the Argentine pampas, searching for the mythical leaping and flying Legibrerian hare. Accompanying him are a gaucho with plans of his own and a 15-year-old boy. Their mission is interrupted when Cafulcura, leader of the Mapuche tribe, disappears and Clarke assumes the role of detective responsible for finding him. An all-out tribal war ensues.

That makes too much sense to convey the tangle of subplots, the sense of improvisation and strange conversations in which the meaning of words changes as they are spoken. Despite the wild and woolly disorder, it ties together in a meaningful way. You'll want to read this if you have an appetite for imaginative and absurd Victorian adventure.

After a decade of quietly observing the ravages of time, a guard at London's National Gallery becomes restless with her stalled life.

In Chloe Aridjis's hypnotic modern Gothic, Asunder (September 2013, Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), Marie is the 33-year-old guard. Her great-grandfather was also a museum guard there and his inability to stop suffragette Mary Richardson's vandalism of Velàzquez’s Rokeby Venus haunted him and weighs on Marie. Almost as quiet as her work is her life outside the museum, hanging out with her roommate and creating tiny landscapes inside eggshells. A trip to Paris with her poet friend Daniel tears her life asunder.

The asides, such as the explanation of why varnish on painted canvas forms a network of cracks ("craquelure"), are fascinating. The beauty of the writing about the effects of time invites margin notes and underlining. This is a book I'll remember.

Let's leap four decades into the future with a U.S. President from our past, and then travel back in time to the '60s.

It's 2055 in Philip E. Baruth's satire/sci fi/thriller The X President. Several bills signed by then-President Bill Clinton in the 1990s have now resulted in decades of global Tobacco Wars. The war isn't going well for our country, and the National Security Council has the answer. Surprisingly, it isn't drones or spying on Americans, our enemies and our friends. They want to time travel to 1995 and undo those Clinton decisions. To this end, they kidnap Sal Hayden, the official biographer of now 109-year-old "BC" (it's due to bionics, not veganism) and send Sal back to 1963 to find the 16-year-old "yBC." Accompanying Sal are NSC operatives code-named "George" (Stephanopoulos), "James" (Carville) and "Virginia" (yes, she's beautiful). It's kinda silly but who doesn't like (a) time travel, (b) satire/thrillers and (c) BC? (Hey, if you can't say anything nice....)

I often correct my kids' manners with that reminder, and now that reminds me. It might be time for my kids to go to bed. That is, if it's really their bed time.