Bordeaux

Puertolas, Soledad. Bordeaux. Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1998.

Despite being under 200 pages this took me a long, long time to finish. Maybe it’s the fact it was originally written in Spanish (Soledad Puertolas is one of Spain’s most acclaimed writers).  I’m thinking maybe something got lost in the translation. That’s always possible. I found the whole storyline to be choppy, disjointed, even abrupt in some places. It was if Puertolas took three short stories and tied them together by location. On the surface all three chapters focus on a single character located in the same city. They all have Bordeaux, France in common. It’s the villa that apparently ties these stories together.

First, there is Pauline Duvivier, an lonely elderly woman asked to do a favor outside her comfort zone – something scandalous involving adultery and blackmail. As the reader you really don’t get the whole picture. Then, there is Rene Dufour. He is unlucky in love, worse in relationships of any kind. You can’t help but feel sorry for him and wondering what’s wrong with him. The last character, Lilly Skalnick, is a young American traveling through Europe. She’s just as lost as the rest of them. As each character is introduced and explored  it is hard to ignore the social portrait being drawn. Every character is lost, lonely, searching for something or someone to satisfy an unknown longing.

Favorite lines: “Her father’s death had left her alone with herself, and she lamented then not having known that that life was, perhaps the one she would have chosen” (p 7), and “His blueish-gray eyes didn’t seem to place much trust  in the wisdom contained in books” ( 84).

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust  in the chapter, “Latin American Fiction” (p 144).