At 209 pages, this is the perfect length. Any longer and the reader risks descending permanently into the mad world created by the author. The narrator is a psycholinguist attempting to uncover the secret behind the murder of his old friend's fiancee. His friend, once a collector of rare books, has for some time been locked up in a psychiatric hospital, depicted in delightfully creepy prose. The collector tells his story (or conceals it) by spooling out weird fables which may or may not be embedded in the violent history of Spain, or Central America, or Peru. Add to that a sister who in childhood loved to start fires, some shrunken heads, death by paper, and you have a story you'll never understand but which you might enjoy anyway.
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