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Cargando... Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire (1999)por Jose Manuel Prieto
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J. is a smuggler on the fringes between Eastern and Western Europe, making his living fencing the flotsam of communism's collapse. He has taken a commission to trap a rare Russian butterfly illegally, and decides to use it as opportunity to smuggle V., his Russian lover, back to her homeland. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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Google Books — Cargando... GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)863.64Literature Spanish and Portuguese Spanish fiction 20th Century 1945-2000Clasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio:
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Nocturnal Butterflies doesn't work as well as Rex, though. It's an epistolary novel, nominally consisting of the drafts of seven letters from J., a Cuban smuggling Russian goods to the West, to V., a woman he has met in Istanbul, where he was meeting a Swede to arrange an expedition to the Caucasus to find a rare butterfly. J. is in Livadia, on the Black Sea, and expected V. to join him there, but she only sends letters instead. We read only J.'s drafts (or maybe they're not his drafts—they're narratives, structured according to the intervals between incoming letters, but they're not really addressed to anyone). J. reads not only V.'s letters but piles and piles of books of great letters from history—Russian authors, Abelard and Héloïse, Paul's epistles, you name it. And that's where the book disappoints, because while J.'s character unpeels itself from a noble and scholarly butterfly-hunter to a wannabe lover/smuggler/adventurer—and that's reflected in the prose, which gets more entertaining as the book goes on—what I also wanted, after reading Rex, was for that prose to be so suffused in J.'s epistolary models that the reader couldn't be quite sure of even reading J.'s story any more, rather than some other letter-writer whose consciousness had leaked in.
It does that a bit, but not enough. Perhaps the translators aren't quite as skilled as Esther Allen? Nocturnal Butterflies starts off slowly and the pomo pyrotechnics don't really get going until halfway through. And even then they seem muted, subtle—and I don't think subtle is Prieto's thing.
If you liked Rex, you'll like this book—but don't expect to like it as much. ( )