La librairie du cinnamon roll

Laurie Gilmore

Description

--Nominated for an Anthony Award and a 2004 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

"Daniel Chavarría has long been recognized as one of Latin America's finest writers." --Edgar Award-winning author William Heffernan

"Celebrated in Latin America for his noir detective fiction, Uruguayan author Chavarría makes his English-language debut with this fast-paced novel . . . a zesty Cuban paella of a novel that's impossible to put down." --Library Journal, on Adios Muchachos

The Eye of the Cybele, Akashic's second release by celebrated Uruguayan mystery novelist Daniel Chavarría, is equal parts historical epic, whodunnit-style thriller, highbrow erotica and philosophical discourse. Set in late sixth-century BC--during the reign of Pericles--the novel fictionally recreates the behind-the-scenes scandals and political intrigues that occupied the Athenian home front at the height of the Peloponnesian War.

The novel's central character is Alcibiades, a stutteringly precocious Athenian general whose physical beauty, unparalleled Olympic achievements, and reckless courage on the battlefield earn the fanatical enthusiasm of the polis; the affection and desire of Lysis, a lusty and seductive temple prostitute; the admiration and patronage of Socrates; and the jealousy and suspicion of Nicias, one of the city's most powerful generals and a leading competitor for the favor of both Pericles and the masses. At the center of it all is the Eye of the Cybele, a sacred jewel whose mysterious disappearance sets in motion a sequence of deceptions, subterfuges and failed schemes that ultimately undermine the self-serving ambitions of both Alcibiades and Nicias.

Much of the novel's real action takes place behind the scenes, however, through the comically megalomanical preoccupations of the Keeper of the Sum, a mad but charismatic beggar-priest who founds--and personally administers the sensual sacraments of--a new Cybeline cult. While the core beliefs and aspirations of the Golden Age are beginning to crumble from within, Chavarría depicts--in the phallically obsessed reveries of the Keeper--the birth pangs of a new world religion.

Chavarría blends conventional third-person narrative, formal epistles, and deliriously sensual streams-of-consciousness to create a novel which progresses at a lively pace. Along the way there are savage scenes of torture and war, convoluted tales of political maneuvering, luridly sensual descriptions of cult sexual activity, and spirited philosophical debates. In a stunning denouement, Chavarría masterly employs the Socratic method to demonstrate the Socratic roots of the suspense genre, with the great skeptical philosopher himself unwittingly assuming the role of a Nick Charles-style detective who logically eliminates one hypothesis and suspect after another to identify the novel's real culprit for an equally uncomprehending audience.

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