Ignacio Padilla (1968–2016)

At least three different men. Two different names. Constantly shifting identities. Who is really Victor Kretzchmar and who is really Thadeus Dreyer? And who is Adolf Eichmann? Did the Israelis hang a double? Padilla has constructed an overly complex story revolving around the question of identity which plays out against a backdrop of literally life-changing games of chess. Some of the chess games take place on the chessboard and some play out in real life. I will readily admit that even show more after finishing the book I was still so confused that the ending only partly made sense to me. The shifting identities, the intrigue that spanned forty years, eventually so baffled me that what might be an excellent book isn’t because Padilla’s cleverness overwhelms his message. Perhaps I would have been able to follow it had I read much more slowly…but at a certain point, a reader depends on the author to provide sufficient guideposts that the work is clear enough to follow that he need not take notes. Others have quite quite impressed. I was just bewildered, the more so because of occasional glimpses of a strong work buried too deep under the gamesmanship. Disappointing. show less

Though they don't make appearances in Ignacio Padilla's collection of stories Antipodes, the reader would not be surprised to see Robert E. Peary, Henry Morton Stanley or Captain Richard Francis Burton pop up somewhere in these pages. Like those 19th- and early-20th-century adventurers, Padilla's tales feature men exploring the boundaries of known civilization, as well as the limits to which a person can be pushed.

These are short stories—twelve crowded into 132 pages—which are snapshots show more of a 19th-century world where a hallucinating Scottish engineer imagines rebuilding the city of Edinburgh in the middle of the Gobi Desert, a medical scientist finds a plague journal in the Amazon jungle (with deadly results), a cross-dresser dying of tuberculosis tries to scale Mount Everest ("a voluptuous high-heeled shoe" is later found a few paces from Sir Edmund Hillary's summit flag) and a British colonel in charge of the railway in Rhodesia is determined to get the trains running on schedule—if not, he'll shoot himself in the smoking room of the Hotel Prince Albert.

As the title indicates, these stories place men at the opposite poles of the earth in their quests. Padilla, a Mexican author whose previous work in English was the 2002 novel Shadow Without a Name, writes in a carefully-crafted style reminiscent of these travelers, isolated in the jungle or halfway up Everest, feverishly scribbling longhand in journals, all the time with an eye on prosperity and ego-driven immortality. They should have saved their ink. Padilla's main goal seems to be pointing out the folly and insignificance of mankind. The Anglo characters in these vignettes are nearly always defeated by disease, natives or the wrath of nature.

It's hard, really, to call these stories stories since most of them are filled with expository material. Dialogue, action and conflict are sacrificed in favor of long stretches of fable-like prose about colonialism, industrial progress and megalomania.

One of the book's several problems lies in the fact that these are not so much characters as they are blurred human shapes, as indistinct and superficial as names in a history textbook. In these truncated morality tales, people take a backseat to thought and philosophical debate.

In theory, there's nothing wrong with that—Diderot, Borges and Calvino all excelled at this in one way or another—but in practice, it's difficult to pull off successfully. How to keep the reader entertained while making him think? While he may be a competent (perhaps even brilliant) wordsmith, Padilla fails to engage the reader where it matters most—at the character level.

History, not people, is at the forefront of Antipodes. Because each story sends the reader to a new, far-flung locale, the collection also functions as a sort of travelogue. Unfortunately, the stories are like stickers on the side of a steamer trunk. We know where the traveler has been, but those stickers won't tell us the interesting stories of his journeys. show less

Life is an ongoing, premeditated chess game and those who live life move like pawns on the chessboard. The chess game that took place in a train at the dawn of World War I in Ignacio Padilla's book, Shadow Without A Name, irreparably changed the lives of at least four men whose identities became warped even after death. The novel cleverly evokes the question of identity and selfhood against the historical backdrop of the darkest period of the twentieth century, as men appropriated names of show more each other, shielded off past memories and adopted new identities in the hope of a changed, better destiny. It was a time in which the truth became shrouded by lies and the lies adopted as truth.
Four men contribute to the narrative, which, in an overlapping interval of time, recounted the sequence of events that spanned decades as well as continents following the chess game in 1916, between Viktor Kretzschmar and Thadeus Dreyer.

In 1957, in Buenos Aires, Franz Kretzschmar reminisced his father, Viktor Kretzschmar, who faced Thadeus Dreyer on a chessboard for a life-and-death game. The winner would take Kretzschmar's identity as a railway signalman in Salzburg and the loser would head to the Austro-Hungarian eastern front, which promised death. When Franz's father (the true and only Thadeus Dreyer whose name had been appropriated and incarnated throughout the book) won the game, little did he know the exchange of documents would lend him a warped identity though he saw the deadly wager as a promise of immortality. However he despised trains, Franz's father approached the job with unbounded enthusiasm and not the slightest of his despondency betrayed his imposture until he was found guilty of premeditating a train accident near Salzburg. He wasted away in a sanatorium upon release from jail, rendered unable to recognize his son, let alone Franz's revengeful efforts to restore his father's peace of mind.

Richard Schley was a seminarist falsely elevated to priesthood who attended to near-death soldiers and gave vespers in 1918. Schley met his childhood friend Jacob Efrussi who changed his name to Thadeus Dreyer, in the time of the pandemonium caused by the Balkans on the Austrian front in 1918. Efrussi (or Dreyer), who had stolen so many names and lived under so many identities, persisted in denying his real name. Another name swap occurred as Efussi agreed to stake his fate on a chess game with Richard Schley, who found Efrussi in the midst of ravages and brought him home from the front.

Alikoshka Goliadkin was an orderly of General Thadeus Dreyer during his rise in the Nazi reign. This man was the key to unveil the clandestine relationships between Franz Kretzschmar, Adolf Eichmann and Dreyer. At the time, Dreyer supervised the training of a small legion of impostors (doubles) who would occasionally replace senior party officials or served as decoys in public appearances considered high-risk. Goliadkin was the only man who knew the where about of Dreyer and his impostor team (which was reported to vanish without a trace) when the project fell out of favor with the Nazi.

Daniel Sanderson, one of the three heirs of Baron Woyzec Blok-Cissewsky who left an encrypted code in a chess manual that would resolve the whole mystery about the aforementioned men. The baron, took residence in Poland during his late years, turned out to be yet another incarnation of Thadeus Dreyer. The seemingly impregnable encrypted code embedded the secrets of the many failed attempts by Nazi officers opposed to Hitler's policies to destroy the regime from within. As Sanderson investigated the baron's connection with Eichmann, he became alert at the fact that a fourth heir who resided in a Frankfurt sanatorium existed!

This book presents a story within stories, twisted and shrouded. At each turn of a page, at each switch of narrator, the book challenges readers with the question: is the man who he says he is? I have to flip back and forth to make sure I do not have the slightest confusion of who is who, though it is sometimes inevitable to fall into the trap of which who I think the man is. Once I get used to all the name swap and appropriation, and the underlying connection or disconnection of all the Dreyer incarnations, the book is a tantalizing, suspenseful, mesmerizing read. The constant changes of identities do not lose the way. It is cleverly written, with finesse and attention to details. It holds your breath to the end. show less

This is the first I've read of Ignacio Padilla. This collection of short stories never really misses - because Padilla's writing talent is so great. However, the stories themselves do hit and miss. Still, well-worth the read as it's a quick couple of hours of reading. I believe it's probably worth a re-read as well...