La tristesse du samouraï (edition 2011)

Del Árbol’s first novel to be translated into English, The Sadness of the Samurai, is a gripping thriller of a book. Set over three generations, the book keeps you guessing right up to the messy end. And the book is messy, in the grisly murder and innocent victim kind of way. Even though not really my usual genre these days, I found it hard to put down, powering through it on a couple of plane rides and when I probably should have been working.

The setting is Catalonia starting at the beginning of the Second World War and going up through the aborted coup of the early 1980’s. Del Árbol holds a degree in history from the University of Barcelona and worked in the police force for many years, so he definitely has the background to weave his fictional characters into the history of Spain and Europe in that period and to create some realistic (and scary) crime and prison scenes. And I learned a lot about events in Spain during the period of the novel that I’d like to understand more.

I was getting a little annoyed with the mistakes in the text before I remembered that I was reading an ARC, so I assume all those issues are cleaned up in the final product. Even so, if you like a good crime thriller, you should check out this book. You won’t be sorry.

On a side note, some of the torture scenes made me a bit queasy, not really because of the stark way they are portrayed but more from a general disgust and revulsion with torture and violence. It doesn’t help that as I read this book, we were weeks away from a presidential election here in the United States, and that both of the parties that are slowly strangling democracy here seem to have no problem with state-sanctioned torture.

This book was reviewed for LibraryThing’s Early Reviewer’s Program. Thanks to Henry Holt & Company for providing me with a review copy of the book. ( )

This story flashes back and forth between 1941, and the murder of a Spanish aristocrat named Isabel, and 1981, during an attempted fascist coup, and the story of Maria, accused of helping plan the escape of a prisoner she originally helped put behind bars. I enjoyed the alternating stories and the way del Arbol weaves the narratives together, and also appreciated getting a look inside a period of Spanish history and fascism about which I'd previously known very little. There's the definite feeling of stepping inside a different world.

As with any work in translation, it's difficult to know for sure what difficulties in flow come from the author and which from the translator. I had a little bit of difficultly getting into the story to begin with, but the compelling plot drew me in eventually. It was definitely worth putting in the initial effort to continue reading. ( )

It seems like there is probably in interesting plot in this book, but unfortunately I couldn't get past the style. I suspect this is the fault of the translator, but I can't know for sure. The wording is alternately clumsy or melodramatic, and there is a great deal of telling when showing would have served better. In the end I lost patience. This review is based on the first 100 pages. ( )

http://girlsjustreading.blogspot.com/2012/06/julies-review-sadness-of-samurai.ht... ( )

The Sadness of the Samurai is a thriller with a Shakespearean bent, a comedy of errors replete with mistaken identities and family feuds which leaves a lot of dead bodies on the page by the time the last page is turned. The catalyst is the murder of Isabel Mola some four odd decades before the novel begins in 1981. In the decades following her death the three families most affected by her murder live in their own dedicated purgatory in which they are forced again and again to face and betray each other across decades and generations.

The title comes from a passage in the book about the sword of a particularly cruel and bloodthirsty samurai in 17th century Japan, one who hated war and feared death and, defeated by the dichotomy of his own nature, committed ritual suicide. As he lay dying in agony a friend beheaded him (as was apparently the custom, but I know nothing of samurai culture) with his own sword. A copy of the sword is given to Andres, the mad son of Isabel Mola, who might have been spared the worst of his madness had she lived. In fact, this is a novel where most of the mothers have met violent ends, sometimes at their own hands, because of someone they loved. Even the one female protagonist, Maria Bengoechea, is herself the victim of domestic violence and is pulled into the whirlpool left in the wake of Isabel's death, by another victim domestic violence and when the novel opens she too is dying, having sacrificed her health, if only by neglect, to rectify her own contributions to the cycle of death and retribution. Love death are inseparable in this book.

The book goes back and forth in time from Maria's present (1981) to Isabel and slowly the flashbacks catch up to the present. I had known next to nothing of Franco when I started reading the book and had never even heard of the Falangists. The Spanish fascists were, like most fascists I suppose, a brutal lot and their main representative is a character named Publio, who is pulling the strings behind the scenes during the the entire book. His is a pragmatic brand of evil and his relentless pursuit of power is chilling.

Some readers might not enjoy the rather unlikely coincidences that keep the characters all tied to each other, but for me it felt almost like a play, with its circumscribed list of characters, and it kept the tension and emotional stakes built up in way that a larger cast might not have. Many more readers, especially fans of thrillers, historical fiction, and political fiction, will enjoy this novel.