Pandora in the Congo by Albert Sanchez Pinol.
Published by Penguin Books
ISBN: 978-0-14-3052838
The Recommend:
Let me pull on your coat a minute, about Albert Sanchez Pinol.
He is a writer from Catalonia in Spain – he writes in Catalan – and his latest book, just published in the U.S. and Canada this year, is Pandora In The Congo.
On one level, it’s an African adventure novel of the kind that Edgar Rice Burroughs used to pen. On another level, it’s a wry critique of those stories from a post-Colonial perspective. Tommy Thomson (not the painter) is a hack pulp writer at the turn of the last century, hired to retell the story of Marcus Garvey (not the one who inspired the Rastafarians), a servant who is accused of murdering two well-to-do explorers in the depths of the Congo.
The story that emerges runs deeper than that: into a hollow Earth populated by pale, war-like giants and deeper still into strange and monstrous eroticism that echoes the grim perversity of Pinol’s previous novel Cold Skin. There is also a turtle, who copes with the loss of her shell the way any of us would. In short: It’s a beautiful book, and its Amazon numbers are lower than it deserves.
About David Nickle:
David Nickle is a Bram-Stoker-award-winning author of more than 30 published short stories and the novel The Claus Effect, with Karl Schroeder.
His collection Monstrous Affections came out from ChiZine Publications in 2009.
His website is http://davidnickle.googlepages.com/.
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