And the Flame Devours Us

A man wakes up in an unknown place—possibly in a hospital room, but that's uncertain—and remembers nothing about himself at all. "Call me Ishmael," he suggests to the doctors, whom he, for lack of other versions, names Yuri Zhivago and Madame Bovary. The man painfully recalls what happened to him (some kind of accident? and it seems he had a love? and should he really be called Ishmael?). He describes the circles around the mystery, getting closer and closer to it, like a moth at night that flits in the dark and is doomed to perish in the flames. Meanwhile, just as cautiously and uncertainly around the man, narrowing the circle, walks his innocent victim and unwitting Nemesis, the future narrator of his story and just a bewildered orphaned teenager, just like the man once was. Jaume Cabré (b. 1947) is the leading star of Catalan literature; his books have been translated into dozens of languages, and their circulation exceeds one million copies. His new novel "And the Flame Devours Us" (the first in ten years after the epoch-making, award-winning "I Confess") is a subtle parable, a hymn to the glory of literature and a tense noir: there will be sudden revelations, unrelenting grief, true tenderness, murder, amnesia, chases, a mysterious fatal woman, and also a wild boar family, without which this story would not have happened at all. For the first time in Russian!