The Lone Man (Panther S.)

Rating:
Summary: An Unusual, Introspective Thriller
Review: A taut thriller set during Spain's hosting of the 1982 World Cup. Former ETA Basque terrorists own a hotel outside Barcelona where the Polish team is staying. One of them, Carlos, has allowed two fugitive terrorists to hide out on the grounds without telling his compatriots. The tension gradually mounts as the police close in, others at the hotel find out, and relationships get tangled and tense until the stunning denouement. What raises the book above the level your average thriller is the author's brilliance at getting inside Carlos's head to illuminate his ambivalence about his former activities and current allegiances, as well as his relationships to his dead mentor and mad brother. Gripping book, would make a very interesting film in the right hands.

Rating:
Summary: a moral suicide?!
Review: For Carlos, as for Atxaga, history is a fiction that we must escape. Carlos refuses to find a conciliation between his personality and the world around him, and the result is loss of responsability and moral failure.

Atxaga makes a perverse cultural strategy out of non-description. Perhaps not surprisingly, his latest novel takes place in the nineteenth century.

This novel is inmoral because it encourages apathy, in a country whose democracy is just two decades old. With the suggestion that staying out is a lofty option, readers are comforted in their cowardly choice not to use their civic duties to think and act.

The encouragement of isolation and apathy has terrible consequences. It goes to strengthen the totalitarian traits which are developing in our democracies. The author's negative evaluation of everything is probably a reflection of his fear to be outspoken. We must be patient and try to make progress. Neutrality is not human.

Rating:
Summary: Intense, intriguing novel about terrorism and football !
Review: This book starts quite slowly and during the first half I wondered if it was going anywhere, but I stuck with it and was rewarded with an exciting second half. Most of the action takes place not on the football field but in Carlos's extraordinary head: it is inhabited by his paranoias, lusts, dreams and memories of his homeland ...and by a series of loud voices alternately mocking, warning and advising him. These battles in his head are intense, compelling and convincing - they are the book's greatest strength. The book's other arena, the one outside the protagonist's head is also small - a few acres in and around a hotel - everything is tight, tense and claustrophobic. Although football is only a backdrop, anybody who loves the game will enjoy the way the author integrates the Polish team and the 1982 World Cup into his narrative. One may stop to wonder about a sympathetic central character who is a vain, womanising terrorist, kidnapper and murderer, but Atxaga is - like Greene and Dostoevsky - clever enough to make us side with his villain in the psychological battle with the chief police officer. Because the author made me care about Carlos, I found the last 50 pages very tense and the book hard to put down.

Rating:
Summary: The lone man!
Review: This marvellous story about a former terrorist in ETA (The nationalist organistation, who are fighting for independence).

Carlos has bought a hotel with his friends from the organisation with the money from a robbery! They have been let out because of general amnesty! The place is Barcelona in a hot summer in 1982, where there's World championships in soccer. The Polish team is living in the hotel, where they are protected by policemen, and journalists who're undercover! He does a last thing for ETA by hiding Jone and Jone (Like Bonnie and Clyde) in the backery, where he works! He's disturbed by his consciences, which are his former mentor in ETA, his ill brother, Kropotky (nickname for a russian revolutionary) and the bad one "The Rat". This psychological, magic realism, exciting, thrilling, dramatic and not least exceptionel story about a man, who can't escape from his past! Really must do..

I'm currently writing a project of this book, so if there anyone, who like to ask or comment, they're more than likely to write to me!

E-mail: [e-mail]

Rating:
Summary: Surface level thriller: brilliant psychological portrait
Review: This novel takes the form of a thriller but it is really a psychological portrait of the main protagonist, "Carlos", who is alienated from his revolutionary past and also from those around him because of his revolutionary past. Set outside Barcelona during the 1982 World Cup, in the Polish team's hotel, the drama centres on Carlos's attempt to free two ETA fugitives who the organization has persuaded him to hide before the police (disguised as a TV crew) find their bolt-hole. But this is really just a backdrop for Carlos's interrogation of his revolutionary past via his memories of his long-dead ETA mentor, his mad brother and his own cynical bad conscience. This novel brims with ideas (there is an interesting sub-theme about vanity and the importance of ornamentation and decoration to people). A prolonged meditation on how experience and (lost) committment can isolate and distance a person from others.