📚: Ilona llega con la lluvia, Álvaro Mutis

⚠️ Warning: Spoilers

Great novel —this is a book that’s hard to put down. With its great ending, it doesn’t disappoint.

Mutis’ command of the Spanish language is as admirable as I wrote in La nieve del almirante. However, unlike La nieve, a lot happens.

The desenlace —Larissa taking Ilona’s life with her— feels fairly obvious in retrospect, and yet it caught me off guard. It’s admirable how well Mutis managed to craft it —that, as it happens, it feels simultaneously surprising and obvious. You see all the signs just then, not an instant too soon. Mutis achieves this by always giving us the impression that Ilona is in control, despite the very explicit messages about how Larissa will ruin them etc..

At some parts I felt that depictions of sex —some of the the challenges of running a brothel, the descriptions of Larissa’s encounters— was a bit cheap. The book might have been better leaving out some of these details. Then again, these are relatively short passages, so it doesn’t detract much from an otherwise great story.

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