A postmodern murder mystery set in ancient Athens? Sounds too clever for its own good, and yet a reader gets convincingly pulled into this labyrinth based on an ancient text. A modern translation (forget that there's an additional layer of translation here, from Spanish to English) is being provided by a Greek scholar who feels himself being pulled into the story as well,. Literally, as we come to find out, Montalo, who collected the papyrus fragments on which the translator is basing his work, was locked up as insane, and the translator begins to doubt his own sanity. The story begins conventionally enough with a mystery to be solved. A young male Athenian's corpse has been found, head and arms unblemished, but the rest of the body mutilated as if wild animals had been been tearing at it. A conventional explanation is that he had been hunting and had indeed been attacked by wolves. But a fat and elderly investigator, Heracles Pontor, known as the Decipherer of Enigmas, has his doubts. Along with the mentor of the dead youth, Diagoras, his investigations takes him all over Athens, from Dionysian mystery cult worship to a symposium led by Plato. He deduces, finally, that the victim, a student in an academy, had a dark side which was being covered up. He is right, and in an ordinary mystery novel, the solution of the crime would have been wrapped up half way through the book.But this is no ordinary mystery; the translator begins to notice oddities in the text, something called "eidetic" effects in which strong metaphors and images are used but seem to have no direct bearing on what is being narrated. They may be a kind of code, though, that tells a different story, and the narrator makes his own deduction that they are referring to the twelve labors of Hercules, one for each chapter of his translation.What is Hercules "laboring" to accomplish? In the middle of the novel, the translator is kidnapped by Montalo and forced to finish his translation in a cell. Keep in mind, though, that Montalo was locked up himself as insane, so what is the reality here? It appears that these eidetic effects are supposed to move each reader to realize that he is forming his own interpretation of the text, and this means that ideas (including the text) have their own independent reality. A universe of independent ideas. Does this prove or disprove Plato's belief in universal forms? I'm not sure. As one character who is criticizing the rational methods of the Decipherer of Enigmas, says, "he who always seeks explanation runs the risk of inventing them." But you might ask, how did the original compiler of the text get out of the novel and into the narrator's cell? A bogus chapter? - this possibility is raised. And there's the issue of an insane character writing of himself - how far can he be trusted?"We live in a strange world, Heracles, a world where nothing can be entirely rationalized or understood. A world that doesn't always behave according to the laws of logic but to those of dreams or literature," says Diagoras, who is beginning to doubt his own commitment to rationality. He adds that Socrates was a great reasoner, but even he admitted that some of the most profound truths he arrived at came from a "daemon" spirit.What about the basic story before it broke up into abstractions about the nature of reading where each person creates his own reality? Heraclites is rescued from a cult rite where his body was going to be slit open and mutilated, taking us back where we were at the beginning of the novel. An epilogue reveals that the novel was inspired by evens that did take place in ancient Athens. The investigation of Heraclites and Diagoras seems real, but it is undercut by the translator who is trying to disprove the efficacy of reasoning itself through this story. He is a fiction, as is the entire book. Nothing real exists, and that presumably includes the reader as well. All of which is, I suppose, a very clever form of deconstruction, of breaking down the narrative conventions that we normally take for granted. The book will either intrigue you or give you a headache ( a "real" one).
Originally published on my blog here in June 2003.This novel seems to have been one of literature's recent success stories. It is basically a crime novel, an investigation into the death of a young student at Plato's Academy, initially thought to have been caused by a wolf attack but leaving grounds for suspicion of something more sinister. The Athenian Murders takes the form of a translation of an ancient manuscript telling the story, complete with copious footnotes by the translator, who is fascinated by the literary convention of eidesis of which it forms part (that is, the presence of meaningful images in the text not part of the story, such as repeated metaphors). He becomes convinced that some secret is hidden in the narrative's images (the word eidesis comes from the Greek for image), and is eventually rather neurotic about them.Reviewers have described The Athenian Murders as a hybrid of The Name of the Rose and Pale Fire. It is in reality not much like The Name of the Rose, which is a fairly lazy comparison made for any historical crime novel with literary pretensions. Pale Fire is far closer, but it is a comparison which really shows up the shortcomings of Somoza's novel. The enjoyable aspect of Nabokov's idea (which is to illuminate the obsessions of the annotator through his misunderstanding of the text, and thereby satirise at academic literary criticism) is completely missing in The Athenian Murders. The translator does become obsessed, but it is about something so pointless as to be almost unbelievable - the use of the repeated images is interesting, but hardly enough to convince a reader, as it does the translator, that they reveal a secret of vital importance. (I don't know that much about it, but the form of the word eidesis leads me to suspect that a secret does not have to be involved at all, and that it could be used in other ways - as part of an intellectual game, as we have here in the way that the images are used to link each chapter to one of the labours of Hercules, or as by many writers from Aeschylus on, to use the subconscious to heighten the mood of a passage.)There are other problems with The Athenian Murders, as far as I was concerned. A minor one is the occasional error in the background Some of these are quite obvious and jolted me out of Plato's Athens; an example is the use of the American rattlesnake as a simile in the supposedly ancient text. (Since the novel is full of ironies, this hint of modern authorship may be another, but it doesn't really bear that appearance besides being far more subtle than the rest of it.) The main problem that the novel has is its ending, and this affects the whole of the last quarter or so of the text as Somoza leads up to it. As always when criticising the ending of a novel, it is hard to talk about it without giving it away; the least I can say is that it is banal and dull, pretty much at the level of "and then I woke up, and it had all been just a dream".It's hard to tell how much of this is the fault of the translator rather than the original author, since my feeling is that anyone who dumbs down by changing the title to something as silly as The Athenian Murders rather than keeping the reference to Plato's famous metaphor from The Republic could easily have completely destroyed the intellectual content of the rest of the novel.
Do You like book The Athenian Murders (2002)?
This book was a surprise to me. I love ancient history/culture/mythology and I also love mysteries. This book was a wonderful blend of both. We start with a modern day translator of an ancient text laying out what happened. His "footnotes" are actually part of the story. As he goes along, he becomes convinced that the ancient writer has hidden secret messages in the text and as he continues to translate , he finds that these secret messages begin to refer to HIM and in a threatening way! The question is- how would an ancient writer send threats to someone translating a manuscript centuries later? The manuscript being translated is the exciting story of a young man named Tramachus, a student at Plato's Academy, who is suspiciously killed. His teacher,Diagoras, guilty for not protecting him, joins forces (out of guilt) with Heracles Pontor, the "Decipherer of Enigmas" to unravel just what really happened to his student. They believe that he was not killed by wolves and that his death was no accident. As they begin to dig, more corpses turn up in ancient Athens. What are they closing in on and will they survive if they find it? And just what will happen to the translator thousands of years later? I will leave it up to you to read and find out.
—Terri Lynn
This book is something special! There is a warning though, it’s not the easiest read with all the philosophical theories of Plato and others, and with how these theories are worked in to the book. Even I, with a degree in philosophy, had to stop and think about want was going on – so I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone without a certain level of schooling in the liberal arts. While the mystery itself is pretty straight forward with it twists and turns, the parallel contemporary story that works along with it –the foot noted part – gives more interesting twists that kept me intrigued and the pages turning. Though, the book within a book thing is nothing original (The Solitaire Mystery and Pale Fire being other examples of this sort of story), but the story is very well thought out and, I thought, executed well. And despite being a translated book, it does not seem to lose the essence of the story or feel over simplified. And the finish, well, I wasn’t expecting that, but it did complete the book nicely. The question of external ideas, morality and the nature of reality of those ‘ideas’ are really tuff topics to deal with, and now I feel I understand the issues a bit better than a did before I read the book. So five stars is what I believe this book deserves. It’s one of those memorable stories that will keep me thinking, rethinking, and even would be worth rereading. May be, then, I might be able to grasp the “true idea” of what the author is trying convey to us.
—Lance McMurchy
Aparentemente estamos perante uma intrigante história policial passada na Grécia antiga. Três jovens alunos da Academia de Platão, surgem assassinados nas ruas de Antenas, com os corpos mutilados, e pelas características pensa-se, inicialmente, que poderá ter sido um ataque de lobos. Diágoras, mestre dos três jovens e seguidor de Platão, solicita a Heracles Pontor, famoso Decifrador de Enigmas, que o ajude a perceber o que terá levado a estes crimes horrendos e que chocam quer a Academia, quer a vida de Atenas. Heracles vai decifrando cada pista, sendo que atrás de cada uma, vão surgindo novas questões por desvendar.No entanto, ao longo do livro, vamos percebendo que nada do que parece é. E que, conforme referido na sinopse, as aparências acabam por nos enganar ao longo de toda a obra.Só esta parte da história e toda a trama que se desenrola á sua volta, é suficiente para que leiamos o livro com bastante agrado. Mas José Carlos Somoza não se fica por aqui. As questões filosóficas sempre presentes, do início ao fim, nos diálogos de um mestre, Diágoras, que partilha da doutrina dos filósofos antigos, nomeadamente de Platão e da sua teoria das Ideias, com um homem, Heracles Pontor, que apenas acredita naquilo que vê e naquilo que se pode provar no dia-a-dia, bem como o Tradutor que vai traduzindo o texto e que nos vai dando conhecimento, nas N.T. da sua reflexão sobre o texto, fazem esta obra invulgar tornar-se sublime.O Tradutor há medida que traduz vai descobrindo várias pistas que fazem com que ele fique convencido que nos encontramos perante uma obra eidética. Para quem não saiba, a eidese, segundo o próprio Tradutor, é uma técnica literária inventada pelos escritores gregos antigos para transmitir nas suas obras pistas ou mensagens secretas, consistindo em repetir metáforas ou palavras que, isoladas, formam para um leitor perspicaz uma ideia ou uma imagem independente do texto original.Na procura das mensagens escondidas por detrás do texto ele, o Tradutor, acaba por perceber que algo está errado, que as personagens do texto falam com ele e que ele próprio faz parte da história. De que forma? Já não vos posso dizer.Um livro muito bom em que chegamos até à última página a ser constantemente surpreendidos.“Ah, a literatura!...- exclamou. – Meu amigo, ler não é pensar a sós: ler é dialogar! Porém o diálogo da leitura é um diálogo platónico: o teu interlocutor constituí uma ideia. Contudo não se trata de uma ideia imutável: ao dialogares com ela, modifica-la, torna-la tua, chegas a acreditar na sua existência autónoma…”
—São
