Severina

Our narrator is a bookseller and part-owner of a bookstore in Guatemala. One day he watches a young woman shoplift a book from his shelves. He carefully jots down the titles of what she is stealing and confronts her on her third attempt. The bookseller becomes obsessed with the woman, looking for hints in what she steals: I kept going over the books that she had taken from me and trying to imagine the complete list of every title she had ever stolen. It was as if I thought this would help solve the mystery of a life that seemed bizarre and fantastic to me." He connects with the woman and more he thinks he finds out, the more mysterious the woman gets, possibly slipping a bit into the fantastic.

The book comes across as light reading, and show more it would be easy to dismiss it as a story of one man's intellectual and sexual obsession with a woman, if it weren't for the terrific passages about books and bookselling. And, if it weren't for the enlightenment from the introduction (which I admit that I never read before I read the book lest it color my reading). I hadn't read any of the titles the woman stole, but had I, I might have recognized how, as noted in the intro, the drama of the story sometimes reflects the content of the books chosen (which, one has to admit, is terribly clever). show less

Good novella centering on a love of books. A small treat if you are interested in modern Guatemalan literature.

For some reason, part of the spirit or style of the book reminded me of Astragal.

Severina és l'obsessió del protagonista, i per ella ho fa i ho deixa de fer tot. Serverina és un misteri i continua sent un misteri al llarg de tot el llibre, i és la raó de ser d'aquest llibre que té, com a més interessant, al meu parer, un llenguatge deliciós, les descripcions de l'entorn i de l'estat d'ànim de l'autor del relat molt captivadores.

Una novelita de amor fantástico, referencial y críptica. Las obras a quienes los personajes, amantes de los libros, se refieren constantemente ponen el tono de su relación y de su propia historia, pero el efecto es más bien el de un snobismo y aislamiento literario.

Un delirio amoroso. Así define su autor a esta novela, en la que la monótona existencia de un librero se ve conmocionada por la irrupción de una consumada ladrona de libros.