Iosi Havilio

A vet moves to the tiny pampas town of Open Door when her partner disappears. The town is near a lunatic asylum of the same name, and the vet becomes interested in its history. She becomes romantically entangled with Jaime, the asylum's nurseryman and also Eloisa, a local schoolgirl.

The book is a bit soulless, and the author makes little of his lunatic asylum motif. Scenes that should be erotic are instead clumsy and perfunctory. Some have hailed Open Door as a masterpiece; I don't get that at all.

… (lisätietoja)

An existential novel that has the air of a post-war nouveau roman. Many of the elements are here: an impersonal narrator, a focus on the surfaces of things, and dramatic events driven by oblique motivations while retaining plausibility. The combined influence of Camus and Dostoevsky is palpable.

The novel is not a "coming of age" story, but it is suffused with the audacity and insolence of youth. The narrator is a young woman who leaves Buenos Aires to live in country near a psychiatric hospital, the "Open Door" of the title. There is some obscurity about the connections of the various characters to the hospital and its noninterventionist approach means that such a connection would be tenuous. Even so, there is a disquieting feeling throughout that madness, like the asylum, is just around the corner.… (lisätietoja)

There are several unanswered questions in this puzzling and brief novel by a writer who has been hailed as a great young Argentine writer, among them what happened to a girl who was thought to be dead and why a rare old book turns up in the simple home of an aging ranch worker. But most of the novel is the story of a somewhat hapless young woman, originally an aspiring veterinarian living in a city, who ends up moving in with the aging ranch worker out in the country and doing relatively little other than having a hot romance with a neighboring girl who seems to be sexuality personified. Oh, they try various drugs too.

What gives the novel its title, and the country town its name, is the Open Door, a psychiatric hospital that operates on the principle that the mentally ill shouldn't be locked up but should be able to wander around on their own and find activities that they enjoy; there are no locked doors or gates, but apparently the inmates don't run away. And isn't that just a tidy metaphor for life! We all wander around trying to find ways to enjoy life and there isn't any way to escape.

Havilio writes well, and this was an easy and quick book to read, but I didn't really engage with the narrator or the other characters: the narrator herself seems so passive and the other characters more symbolic than real. There is another book by Havilio that continues the narrator's story, but I'm not very motivated to read it.… (lisätietoja)

This novel is set mainly in modern day Buenos Aires, narrated by a woman who has moved there from a small town after her husband has died and left her and her young son destitute. She finds lodging at a rooming house, where she is befriended by a Romanian immigrant who helps her land a job at a local zoo. She subsequently moves into a nearby abandoned building, which houses a community of squatters that is headed by a woman dying of cancer, who relies on the new resident to give her intravenous injections of morphine to relieve her pain. The narrator integrates herself into the settlement and its shady characters, while maintaining close relationships with her Romanian friend and a running buddy from her old neighborhood, who has moved in with a wealthy drug addict nearby.

All three women and those around them are lonely, desperate people, bored with life and in search of temporary pleasure, in order to mask their anxieties and fears. The narrator frequently abandons her rambunctious son, as danger exists within and outside of the squatter settlement and whenever she meets up with her old friend.

Paradises was a pleasant and well written but not particularly memorable read, with characters who live on the edge of society. I didn't find them or the story to be particularly unique or enlightening, as people like these can be found in any major city in the world, but I liked this book enough that I would be willing to try other books by this author.… (lisätietoja)