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A review by veronicafrance
Todo esto te daré by Dolores Redondo
3.0
Oh Dolores. I enjoyed her three-volume series set in the Basque Country, in large part because it was set in places I know, but also because it was quite exciting, and her style and vocabulary were straightforward enough to make them relatively easy to read in Spanish.
Now she's obviously decided to become more literary, perhaps stung by criticism from more established writers. The Spanish dictionary on my phone got a lot of use from beginning to end, and I had to read many sentences twice to figure them out.
Being literary apparently also means being long. The book is 600 pages. As I mentioned earlier, Manuel is told on page 1 that his husband Alvaro has died in a car accident. This is Dolores Redondo, so we know it's not an accident, but it takes her till page 99 to tell us this. There is much internal monologue from Manuel and many long descriptions; the first half of the book moves really, really slowly. Manuel has gone to Galicia to identify Alvaro's body and finds a whole family he knew nothing about. In the middle of the book, there's a whole section which literally seems to have been sponsored by the Galician tourist board; it turns out Alvaro owned a vineyard, and Manuel gets a tour of the winery, plus a day grape harvesting, described in great detail and not advancing the plot in the slightest. Redondo really seems like a tourist in Galicia, throughout the book, whereas you got the sense in her Baztan books that the place was part of her.
There is then an implausibly large number of suspicious deaths/murders. You might think the Galician police would have grounds for suing Dolores, because they show little to no curiosity about the most unexplained of deaths. Later, she also casts aspersions on the church. As with her other novels, she doesn't really give you clues to the murderer; I did guess who it was, but only because they were the only remaining possibility after discounting the person/people she wanted you to think it was. And really, the motive didn't seem to justify the amount of slaughter involved.. There were many long, implausible expositions by characters solely to fill in bits of the mystery. Lucas and Herminia were particularly useful in this regard.
The whole thing was rather leaden and could have been much shorter and tighter -- by at least a hundred pages. I'm giving it three stars because it got better towards the end, and I did stick with it; not sure I would have done if it had been in English. I'm disappointed; Redondo doesn't seem to have grown as a writer, in fact she's gone backwards. And I was sure at the end of her Baztan trilogy that her next work would feature Amaia and Dupree encountering witches in the bayous of Louisiana!
Now she's obviously decided to become more literary, perhaps stung by criticism from more established writers. The Spanish dictionary on my phone got a lot of use from beginning to end, and I had to read many sentences twice to figure them out.
Being literary apparently also means being long. The book is 600 pages. As I mentioned earlier, Manuel is told on page 1 that his husband Alvaro has died in a car accident. This is Dolores Redondo, so we know it's not an accident, but it takes her till page 99 to tell us this. There is much internal monologue from Manuel and many long descriptions; the first half of the book moves really, really slowly. Manuel has gone to Galicia to identify Alvaro's body and finds a whole family he knew nothing about. In the middle of the book, there's a whole section which literally seems to have been sponsored by the Galician tourist board; it turns out Alvaro owned a vineyard, and Manuel gets a tour of the winery, plus a day grape harvesting, described in great detail and not advancing the plot in the slightest. Redondo really seems like a tourist in Galicia, throughout the book, whereas you got the sense in her Baztan books that the place was part of her.
There is then an implausibly large number of suspicious deaths/murders. You might think the Galician police would have grounds for suing Dolores, because they show little to no curiosity about the most unexplained of deaths. Later, she also casts aspersions on the church. As with her other novels, she doesn't really give you clues to the murderer; I did guess who it was, but only because they were the only remaining possibility after discounting the person/people she wanted you to think it was. And really, the motive didn't seem to justify the amount of slaughter involved.
Spoiler
I also never figured out how or why Alvaro could have told Samuel to put gardenias in Manuel's pockets "so that he would know the truth"; if he knew a specific person was going to bump him off, he could have taken steps to avoid it.The whole thing was rather leaden and could have been much shorter and tighter -- by at least a hundred pages. I'm giving it three stars because it got better towards the end, and I did stick with it; not sure I would have done if it had been in English. I'm disappointed; Redondo doesn't seem to have grown as a writer, in fact she's gone backwards. And I was sure at the end of her Baztan trilogy that her next work would feature Amaia and Dupree encountering witches in the bayous of Louisiana!