Lies

I'm teetering on the brink of giving up on Enrique de Hériz's Lies (Mentira) I'm about 50 pages in and nobody is dead yet, which may be a large part of the problem after my month-long immersation in the rather more visceral prose of Cormac McCarthy.

At this stage however, everyone believes the first narrator, Isabel, is deceased. But for reasons best known to herself, and which are yet to be of the slightest concern to me, she has decided to hole up in an empty eco-shack on the shores of lake Petexbatún in Guatemala, leaving her family to think that a soggy cadaver dredged up out of the river was hers. The other narrator is her daughter Serena, a meteorologist who is extremely interested in finding our the full truth behind her grandfather's biography. Unfortunately I'm not.

I think I will switch to Ismail Kadare's Broken April, which was the source for the so-so Brazilian film Abril Despedaçado, directed by Walter Salles. Guaranteed a few stiffs in that.

Meanwhile, in Petexbatún, I have discovered a new spot in Guate that sounds worth visiting, though it is rather off the beaten track in the south western corner of the Petén.