The telegram, addressed to the man who had hired me to investigate the case, said briefly and somewhat obliquely that they were never coming back: “WHAT ARE WE LETTING IN WHEN WE SAY GOODBYE?”
A fascinating short novel, beginning as a weird detective story and ending in a descent into living folklore. There may be something about this first quarter of the 21st Century – I feel like I’ve read a lot of novels, particularly in the last ten years, that are about the emergence of myth, legend and folklore into the contemporary moment. Eruptions of old dreams into modern day.
The case of the woman who disappeared behind a whirlwind. The case of the castrated men. The case of the woman who gave her hand, literally. Without realizing it. The case of the man who lived inside a whale for years.
The detective is hired to find a missing couple – really, a missing wife and the person she vanished with – and finds herself in the Siberian taiga, tied to a translator and getting lost in a forest of stories. I’ve seen people tempted to see the book as Latin American magical realism, but that feels lazy. The fairy tale is a universal language. It creeps around our bones like Siberian frost or forest lichen, and it never lets us go. I really liked this mysterious little book.