– e-book
Read from January 3rd to February 6th
2018
My rating:
When she was
14, says Wikipedia, Eleanor Catton
and her father went to Arthur’s Pass from Christchurch, their home city. She
was immediately fascinated by the stories about the Gold Rush in the 1860s, and
she will return later to the West Coast, this time going to Hokitika, the most
famous center of the West coast Gold Rush, to study the documents and to look
for names and personalities of those times. Thus was born The Luminaries.
Therefore, The Luminaries is a historical novel –
let’s say in Victorian style, about 19th-century New Zealand, spiced
with some elements of the gothic novel, that playfully show that there are more
things in heaven and earth than are dreamt in mankind’s philosophy. Or maybe
the label was put in a hurry and history is only the background for a wonderful
love story, literally (and literary J) proving that l’amor muove il sole e l’altre stele. Or
maybe the love story, wonderful as it is, takes only secondary place to the powerful thriller that reveals once
again that the sleep of reason produces monsters, with a touch of a mystery for
whoever wants to challenge his “little grey cells”. Indeed it is. That is, it
is all this and none of the above, a postmodern masterpiece that takes
ingredients from many genres (nothing new here, it is what postmodernists have
been doing for a long time now), to establish the compatibility chart between
the narrative and the reader, daring the latter to choose among the many
stories the one that speaks to him. For each one of the stories seems to have a
hidden meaning.
