:wizard:

Bluecat's reveal is: Empire of Dragons by Valerio Massimo Manfredi



Synopsis
The town of Edessa, a Roman outpost, is on its last legs, besieged by the Persian troops of Shapur I. Roman Emperor Licinius Valerianus agrees to meet his adversary to draw up a peace treaty, but it is only a trap and the Emperor and his twelve guards are chained and dragged away to work as prisoners in a solitary Persian turquoise mine. After months of forced labour the Emperor dies, but his guards make a daring escape lead by the heroic and enigmatic chief, Marcus Metellus Aquila. They meet a mysterious, exiled Chinese Prince, Dan Qing, and agree to safeguard his journey home to reconquest his throne from his mortal enemy, a eunuch named Wei. Thus begins the adventures of the Romans and the Prince as they journey to China. There they will discover that they aren't the first of their kind to arrive in China: they were preceded centuries before by the survivors of the 'lost legion'.

Empire of Dragons

msjoanna's reveal:

A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali by Gil Courtemanche (translated from French)



From Publishers Weekly
Bernard Valcourt is a Canadian journalist in Rwanda planning a film on the local AIDS epidemic when he falls in love with Gentille, a Tutsi who works at his hotel at the time of the Hutu-led genocides. Chronicling the days of the government-sponsored atrocities, Courtemanche's novel is powerful in its ability to remind us how much the myth of race has done to divide and destroy the human species in the past hundred years. At the same time, however, it strains to position itself as a sort of neo-existentialist tome, quoting Camus and echoing The Plague. Valcourt describes himself without irony as "sophisticated... an enlightened humanist," and yet his childish self-pity and bitter refusal to accept life's harsh realities are less the trappings of a great intellectual than the alcoholic he obviously is. From the swimming pool terrace of the Hotel des Mille-Collines in Kigali, he observes the rapidly deteriorating situation, "rather like a buzzard on a branch... waiting for a scrap of life to excite him." His supposedly spiritual love for Gentille is intended to redeem him, but it most often takes the form of a rhapsody over her "perfect" body. The Rwanda painted by Courtemanche (a Canadian journalist himself) is a country bloodied by ignorance, hatred, sexual obsession and lust for power, as terrifying and darkly obscene as anything imaginable. Tragic and deeply touching at turns (and illuminating from an historical perspective), the novel is nevertheless cheapened by Valcourt's muddled sentimentalizing and adolescent grandiloquence. As Einstein said, everything is either meaningless or miraculous. Most often it's romantics who, becoming cynics, embrace the former.
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I won this from rootmartin in the Best of 2007 swap. I'm really looking forward to reading it, but I'd like to note that it's still TBR. I estimate mailing at the beginning of July. Also, I'll note that the hotel described in the title of this book is the same hotel as that featured in An Ordinary Man and the movie Hotel Rwanda (though this book is fiction, whereas An Ordinary Man is a nonfiction autobiography).

Geisha's reveal:



Baudolino by Umberto Eco
(translated from the Italian by William Weaver)

It is April 1204, and Constantinople, the splendid capital of the Byzantine Empire, is being sacked and burned by the knights of the Fourth Crusade. Amid the carnage and confusion, one Baudolino saves a historian and high court official from certain death at the hands of the crusading warriors and proceeds to tell his own fantastical story.

Born a simple peasant in northern Italy, Baudolino has two major gifts--a talent for learning languages and a skill in telling lies. When still a boy he meets a foreign commander in the woods, charming him with his quick wit and lively mind. The commander--who proves to be Emperor Frederick Barbarossa--adopts Baudolino and sends him to the university in Paris, where he makes a number of fearless, adventurous friends.

Spurred on by myths and their own reveries, this merry band sets out in search of Prester John, a legendary priest-king said to rule over a vast kingdom in the East--a phantasmagorical land of strange creatures with eyes on their shoulders and mouths on their stomachs, of eunuchs, unicorns, and lovely maidens.

As always with Eco, this abundant novel includes dazzling digressions, outrageous tricks, extraordinary feeling, and vicarious reflections on our postmodern age. This is Eco the storyteller at his brilliant best.

My reveal is:



The Double by Jose Saramago (translated from Portuguese)

Tertuliano Maximo Afonso is a history teacher in a secondary school. He is divorced, involved in a rather one-sided relationship with a bank clerk, and he is depressed. To lift his depression, a colleague suggests he rent a certain video. Tertuliano watches the film and is unimpressed. During the night, noises in his apartment wake him. He goes into the living room to find that the VCR is replaying the video, and as he watches in astonishment he sees a man who looks exactly like him-or, more specifically, exactly like the man he was five years before, mustachioed and fuller in the face. He sleeps badly.

Against his own better judgment, Tertuliano decides to pursue his double. As he establishes the man’s identity, what begins as a whimsical story becomes a dark meditation on identity and, perhaps, on the crass assumption behind cloning-that we are merely our outward appearance rather than the sum of our experiences.

http://www.bookcrossing.com/journal/4305694

Stellarv's reveal is:

The Alchemist
Paulo Coelho



Santiago is a shepherd living in Andalusia. He has a dream telling him to go to the pyramids, and that he will find treasure there. When he consults a gypsy about it, she tells him to go to the pyramids in exchange for 1/10th of his treasure, discouraging him. All of a sudden, Melchizedek, the king of Salem, appears and helps motivate Santiago along to his "Personal Legend," which is apparently finding the treasure. He gives the boy Umim and Thummim, black and white stones used for divination, in case he has trouble interpreting omens. Santiago promptly sells everything he has and goes to Africa, where a thief quickly steals all his money. Santiago works in a crystal merchant's shop for a year or so, learns Arabic and about life in general, and moves on. He meets an Englishman who is searching for an Alchemist at the Al-Fayoum oasis. They join together on their journeys east and exchange ideas. Once at the oasis, Santiago meets the love of his life, Fatima, at a well while asking about the alchemist. After preventing an attack on the oasis by reading omens, he is sent to the alchemist and continues his journey. The alchemist teaches him how to transform himself into the wind when they are captured by a desert tribe, and the tribe is so impressed that they let the two go. The alchemist does alchemy with the philosopher's stone, and makes lead into gold. He leaves some at a monastery for a monk and the boy, takes some for himself, and gives some to the boy. When the boy finally reaches the pyramids, he is attacked by desert people, and has to admit that he is searching for a treasure in the desert. One of them laughs and tells him that he once had a dream about finding treasure in the church where Santiago first had the dream. Santiago goes back to it, gets the treasure, and decides to go back to Fatima.

morsecode's reveal:

Adam Haberberg by Yasmina Reza
(trans. from the French)

http://bookcrossing.com/journal/5952803/



With the same élan and wit that inform her internationally acclaimed and award-winning plays, Yasmina Reza’s second novel, Adam Haberberg, revels in the tragicomedy of one man’s midlife crisis.

While slumped on a park bench in Paris, a man is suddenly hailed by an old female classmate whom he has not seen since high school. The poor guy is, of course, a writer. Morose, panicked about his health, preoccupied with his marriage miseries and the fiasco of his recent book launch, he finds himself stranded in the desert of male middle age. And now there’s the strange business of this woman, who may or may not still be in love with him. Somehow he finds himself riding in her Jeep, riding to her place, not for any of the sensational reasons you might imagine, but because he sort of got stuck in a conversation without any chance of escape. Now he has to find his way out—and home.

A bitingly funny, lethally wise portrait of a hapless nonhero’s big adventure.

The Saturday Morning Murders by Batya Gur
Translated from Hebrew



From Publishers Weekly

With sly, affectionate humor and acute insight, this flawless mystery by an Israeli literature professor traces the parallel processes of police detection and psychoanalysis. Chief Inspector Michael Ohayon is called to the Jerusalem Psychoanalytic Institute on a quiet Sabbath morning when Dr. Eva Neidorf, a highly respected senior analyst, is found dead of a gunshot shortly before she was to have given a lecture on ethical and forensic problems in psychoanalysis. As the intelligent, somewhat sorrowful Ohayon interviews the institute staff, its training analysts and candidates, Gur deftly and subtly inserts red herrings in her plot, at the same time investing her characters with remarkable depth and individuality. Ohayon's instinctive perceptiveness surfaces as Institute head Dr. Ernst Hildesheimer explains the grief and horror the murder has awakened in the analytic community--patients as well as practitioners. Following his investigation through Jerusalem's commercial district and into the ranks of the military as well, Ohayon exhibits the patience and attention to detail unclear what this is of an experienced analyst. A complex, fully satisfying resolution wraps up this masterful American debut.


From Kirkus Reviews

Who shot eminent Jerusalem psychiatrist Eva Neidorf just before she was to deliver a Saturday morning lecture on "Some Aspects of the Ethical and Forensic Problems Involved in Analytic Treatment"? Chief Inspector Michael Ohayon (a Moroccan former history student forced from the doctoral program at Cambridge into a marriage now ended in divorce) finds suspicion divided equally between Dr. Neidorf's colleagues--revered Ernst Hildesheimer; embittered Joe Linder; haughtily beautiful Dina Silver; conscientious young Shlomo Gold--and the mysterious patient who purloined her lecture notes, weekly schedule, and income-tax returns in order to conceal his (or her) existence. Mildly interesting psychiatric characters and background wrapped up in a ceremonious manner. Two sequels, already published in Israel, are bound to follow.


BookCrossing Journal Entry

Ace's reveal:

Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata


(cover is not as shown)

From back:

"SNOW COUNTRY is the story of a geisha, Komako, who gives herself, without illusions and with undismayed directness, to a love affair foredoomed to transience. It describes the three visits of Shinamura, a rich Tokyo dilettante, to a hot spring in the west of Japan, the snowiest region in the world. Komako's sparkling freshness stirs him, and he is touched by the 'irresistible sadness' she makes him feel, a sense of beauty going to waste and of imminent decay. But he cannot return her love; and their strange relationship, to which she gives so much, is doomed from the start."

http://www.bookcrossing.com/journal/2214253