BOOK REVIEW MISS MARTE Author: Manuel Jabois From the reader report by: Carsten Regling In his novel Miss Marte, Galician author Manuel Jabois tells about the disappearance without a trace of a three-years-old girl and the subsequent suicide of her mother at a small fishing village and about the case being reconstructed by a journalist twenty five years later. This journalist is making a documentary film about the events in those days, and for this purpose she interviews several inhabitants of the village as well as friends of the disappeared child’s mother. This way, by and by light is shed on the enigmatic, gloomy story, until finally the case is solved by a surprising turn. […] Manuel Jabois’s book is a kind of literary report (covering an invented story), a mixture of literature and fictitious chronicle, which is also reflected by his style and language. Apart from factual descriptions, there are literary passages presented in an evocative and dense language. Doing so, frequently the author makes use of the stylistic means of the omission, which way the reader only by and by and in a thrilling way comes to understand the connections between what happened in the years 1993/94 and the present, which is the time of the narrator.
Miss Marte is a convincing, brightly written and exciting novel (sometimes the piecemeal solution of the ‘case’ and the almost investigative research, including the ‘questioning of witnesses’, resemble a crime novel) circling around the topics of memory and identity. Topically and stylistically, Jabois succeeds with creating quite a special atmosphere (to which there also contributes the setting, the rough Galician coast) which with every page makes the reader diving more deeply into the enigmatic story.
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