A fun, fast, and crazy mystery, well worth reading
I used to be really good at languages. I took French, Spanish and Latin in junior high school and continued French and Spanish throughout all of high school. I got A’s. I mention this not because it’s relevant to this post but because I never have an opportunity to brag about it these days, and also because no one would ever know it to hear me try to speak any language other than English now. I’ve pretty much lost any facility I might ever have had with those other Romance languages.
So thank goodness for translations–I could never read anything in the original. After Kim first posted about reading books in translation, several publishers responded by sending us both a few books to read. Most of them were big ol’ things which made me want to run in the other direction. But one was nice and short and therefore immediately appealing to me. I picked it up because it was light, but I tore through it because it was good.
Eduardo Mendoza originally publishedThe Mystery of the Enchanted Crypt in Spain in 1979. Fortunately, the book is timeless–its very weirdness keeps it from feeling anachronistic. And it is weird, one of the strangest mysteries you’re likely to read. This ain’t your mother’s Agatha Christie.
It’s hard even to know how to describe The Mystery of the Enchanted Crypt. The narrator is occasionally unreliable and always smells bad (he starts off ripe from a prison asylum soccer game and, despite many efforts, never manages to get into a shower or bath for the rest of the book, which plays out over several days. If I remember correctly, other foul substances add to the original body odor problem over time). He eyes young girls with rapacious interest and doesn’t hesitate to steal, hit, lie, and do anything else necessary to avoid the punishment that is almost inevitably coming his way. Throughout it all–and as he solves the very strange missing-girl mystery that isn’t actually a missing-girl mystery at the heart of the book–he narrates events with a flamboyance and verbal exuberance befitting a true hero and not the homeless ruffian he is.
I loved the book. Truly. I raced through it, which for me is the highest sign of approval. It made me laugh out loud. And I rooted for the crazy hero, although I think I was mostly rooting for him to get a shower at some point.
To stay true to the mission of this blog, I asked the marketing editor who sent us the book if Mendoza would be willing to tell us what his favorite bookstore is, and Mendoza kindly wrote, “Yes, of course, La Central. It began in Barcelona and it was so successful that it has two branches in Barcelona and a wonderful one in Madrid, at the Reina Sofia Museum of Modern Art.”
So if you go to Spain, check out La Central. And if you like mysteries that are dark and funny and weird, check out The Mystery of the Enchanted Crypt.
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