Severina
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
“Right from the start I picked her for a thief, although that day she didn’t take anything. . . . I knew she’d be back,” the narrator/bookseller of Severina recalls in this novel’s opening pages. Imagine a dark-haired book thief as alluring as she is dangerous. Imagine the mesmerized bookseller secretly tracking the volumes she steals, hoping for insight into her character, her motives, her love life. In Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s hands, this tale of obsessive love is told with almost breathless precision and economy. The bookstore owner is soon entangled in Severina’s mystery: seductive and peripatetic, of uncertain nationality, she steals books to actually read them and to share with her purported grandfather, Señor Blanco.
In this unsettling exploration of the alienating and simultaneously liberating power of love, the bookseller’s monotonous existence is rocked by the enigmatic Severina. As in a dream, the disoriented man finds that the thin border between rational and irrational is no longer reliable. Severina confirms Rey Rosa’s privileged place in contemporary world literature.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Books have always been my life," says one character in Rey Rosa's delightful novella, about an unnamed bookseller with literary aspirations, who falls in love with the title character, an irresistible book thief. Obsessed with this "severe" young woman, the narrator experiences an erotic frisson when they connect as when he frisks her in his shop or when inertia presses them together in an ambulance. When Severina disappears and later returns, the hero becomes more intrigued and infatuated with her and her older male companion. Rey Rosa's book is both precious and precise. Its intense dreams, aphorisms, and literary lists are best read in one sitting. The author keeps readers on tenterhooks as issues of identity and desire ebb and flow along with a suspenseful episode involving the burying of a body. The fable here is a tale of love and forgiveness, which also includes the thievery of a book from Jorge Luis Borges's library. And while it would be impertinent to steal a copy, it is hard not to be tempted to grab a copy of this slim, terrific book.
