NP En busca de Klingsor

[Doug Millison]

from Lingua Franca's Breakthrough Books, 
http://www.linguafranca.com/print/0103/brkthrubooks_mexico.html, this 
recommendation of a novel that some P-listers may want to read:

Ilan Stavans, professor of Spanish at Amherst College and author of
The Essential Ilan Stavans (Routledge, 2000).


"Among the most memorable books to come out of Mexico in the
twentieth century is Jorge Volpi's En busca de Klingsor (In search of
Klingsor), a detective novel that was published in Spain in 1999 and
received that country's Biblioteca Breve Prize. Its central theme is Adolf
Hitler's quest to develop the atomic bomb. The novel's climax features
the same historical event the Broadway play Copenhagen rotates
around: the meeting in Denmark of the physicists Niels Bohr and Werner
Heisenberg. En busca de Klingsor is far from a perfect book; it is more
enchanted with philosophy than with physics, and the result is at times
obtuse and infuriatingly ethereal. Still, there is much to prize in these
pages, in particular the fact that the book is as un-Mexican as one could
imagine-its characters are American and European, and its action takes
place in the United States as well as the Old World. Volpi proves that
south-of-the-border literature ought not to be taken hostage by a
rainstorm of butterflies and an army of clairvoyant prostitutes. Simon
and Schuster is scheduled to release an English translation of the book
early next year."