The Bookseller by C. Robert Cales
“It’s our story, Frank. I wanted to document everything, and with my ability to trace people back into their past, I put together a complete picture of all of us, of all the bad guys. It’s the whole story; our unvarnished truth.” “Presented as fiction?” “Sometimes the truth is so bizarre and mind-bending that it has to be presented as fiction to be accepted.” ………. excerpt from The Bookseller.
The name is bound to attract book lovers. As I started reading The Bookseller, I wondered who the bookseller was. The preface is set in Paris, in 1794, with a mass beheading of condemned men. As the anguished souls rise, the story jumps to 1864 London, where Queen Victoria has given birth to her heir.
Jumping into present time, the story unfolds with George and Elizabeth Saunders reminiscing about how they met. Their union gave birth to their bookstore, “The Bookseller“. Their love for each other and George’s passion for books- new and old, makes the store, their own little paradise, amidst the chaos of Boston.
Enter John Stoner! John goes all the way to Freetown, Massachusetts to clear away a deserted mansion. Local legend says that the mansion is haunted. Will the deep-rooted fear in the minds of the town folks affect the project? What will be the repercussions of disturbing the abandoned site?
And to these two stories, add the intriguing story of Carlos Ramirez, a drug lord and smuggler. He rules the world from his Peruvian stone chateau, which sits proudly atop a cliff overlooking the Pacific. The Chateau, built in the seventeenth century, with Aztec gold, hides many secrets. In 1937, it was reconstructed using Nazi gold and claimed by Carlos almost twenty-five years after the war.
With three parallel stories cramped together in one novel, the reader is definitely in for a rollercoaster ride. While I enjoyed George and Elizabeth’s story, Carlos Ramirez’s characterisation is very cliched. With strokes of magic, superstition and rebirth, the author paints a psychedelic picture which is sometimes lacklustre. The stories do connect, but the interminable descriptions and storylines made me lose interest. This novel was first published in 2010. The plot is promising, but failure to edit out the lengthy bits makes the reading experience torturous.
Read if you must!!!
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