There are very few books I truly dislike. (I’ll avoid “hate.” My mother taught me better than that.) Every novel reflects, for the most part, the hard work and imagination of the author, and thus usually possesses many redeeming novels. But this is one of those few.
So first, how I came to it in the first place. I was coming off the high of The Shadow of the Wind. Having already read most of Arturo Perez-Reverte and Matthew Pearl, I was in dire need of some sort of dark and ominous mystery with some crazy book(s) at the center.
Enter bookstore coworkers who assure me that David Bajo’s 351 Books of Irma Arcuri is the perfect prescription. I in turn blindly recommend it because of their recommendation to fellow Shadow of the Wind-loving customers. Then I crack it open...
...and it is just awful. I make it a rule to always finish books (with the exception of Bolano's 2666) so I stuck it out. Bottom line? It reads like a grocery list of sex scenes. Now, I am no prude but if Bajo wanted to write a romance novel, he just should have called it what it was. There was almost no concentration on the actual books of Irma, except how they were made (which was the one redeeming aspect of this novel).
The basic premise is that this man’s on-again, off-again lover disappears and leaves her books to him. The story lineshould then follow him on some literary journey as he finds more clues in all of the books, following the penciled-in clues alluded to in the narrative. There is some of that, but not enough. Or there should be extensive, lit-based travels to find this elusive beauty. Again, some but not enough. There is just a lot of running, having sex, and filling space.
Like Umberto Eco’s The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, it is based on a novel concept (pun intended) but it falls short of its potential.
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