Didier van Cauwelaert

In anticipation of next months vacation, I looked for fiction about Marrakesh. This one just had a little about Morocco. Aziz is a young Marseillais, orphaned at birth and brought up by gypsies. Having never gained French citizenship, he is caught up in a plan to repatriate him to Morocco due to the nationality on the fake passport he does have. Strange and sad relationships with the official who accompanies him, and the guide they hire are more what the story is about. Bizarre and a little boring, though my colloquial French wasn't totally up to the challenge. ( October 18, 2005)… (more)

A bit weird, this book. For once because it defied my expectations - which were something between Dan Brown and Umberto Eco, a light fast read for a free day. It was a light fast read in the end, but although I had plenty of the established Vatican conspiracy elements (ancient legends and shady clerics struggling for power under the disguise of searching for "the truth"), it was nothing like that.
Second, I didn't warm up to the main character. The celebrity ophthalmologist Nathalie Krentz starts out as a spoiled, shallow brat that cultivates a "lone wolf" image towards herself and her environment because of some more or less unspecified childhood trauma - as cliché as cliché can get. She is of mixed Jewish and Christian heritage, has decided for herself at some point that atheism is the easier way to get through life, and over the course of the novel, she is - at the behest of the pope's "advocatus diaboli" - to debunk the miracles a Mexican Indio has worked over the past 400 years. Over the course of this assignment, she and her worldview change significantly; unfortunately, too often I had the feeling that these changes were far too abrupt, that we don't get shown enough of her inner journey.
But even as I couldn't root for the main character, I did root for Juan Diego, the Indio in question and the second POV of the book. Due to him being dead for hundreds of years, his POV is written in a strange, very personal but somehow also omniscient 1st person that strung together various perspectives and events outside of Nathalie's POV, and I really liked it.
Another star is for atmosphere. The author doesn't tire his readers with tedious descriptions; instead, he conveys the strangeness, danger and beauty of a place like Mexicon City through little details. Especially the side characters had their part in this, and they were excellent; characters like the taxi driver Silvia or the insubordinate padre who becomes her protector were awesome.
Half a star is for the scene where Nathalie is mistaken for a prostitute. That was hilarious.… (more)