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Books like The City of Marvels

The City of Marvels

1990Eduardo Mendoza

4.1/5

City of Marvels by Eduardo MendozaA historical novel that is a love story to the author’s hometown of Barcelona. The time frame is sandwiched between Barcelona’s two World’s Fairs – 1888 and 1929. The main character is a poor boy from a rural area who is trying to escape poverty by coming to the city as a young teenager. He stays at a boarding house with a lot of characters (a fortune teller, a cross-dressing manager, a retired priest, a dentist/abortionist) and he gets a job distributing anarchist flyers. (Boarding house stories are always fun because of the diverse weird characters you get into --- I think of two other boarding house books I've read: The Boarding-House by William Trevor and Hotel Brasil: The Mystery of the Severed Heads by Frei Betto.)He soon realizes there is no money in flyers so he starts selling hair tonic on the side. His entrepreneurial skills attract the attention of the ‘mob’ so to speak, a group of politically-connected corrupt men making money off of the city’s expenditures for the 1888 Fair and stealing expensive equipment from the exhibits. He becomes an amoral man. Even as a young boy he forces a hotel maid to have sex with him so he will help her father (the cross-dresser) get out of prison. The main character becomes not only corrupt but even hires a hit man to take people out. It’s like Chicago in the 1930’s. There are gang wars among rival groups and eventually the still-young man rises to the top. He comes to believe that “Society rests on these four pillars…ignorance, negligence, injustice, and folly.” We follow his life and loves as time goes on. The main character moves on from local corruption and at various times gets involved in land speculation, diamond and weapons smuggling. He becomes an entrepreneur in Barcelona’s start-up movie industry, picking out women and making them stars, although this is one endeavor on which he loses money. Still, he becomes the richest man in all of Spain but never really helps his poverty-stricken parents back on the farm. While the main character is fictional, real people and true events are mixed in with the story, such as Antoni Gaudi, architect of the Sagrada Familia and Rasputin, and factual incidents about the scope and development of the world’s fairs. To an extent, the book is a fairly factual history of the urban development of Barcelona. It’s a good story and it kept my attention but there are passages that should have been edited out. For example, there are long lists of the names of engineers who worked on the fair (whether real or fictional, what is the point of that in a novel?). There are overly-statistical passages on the capacity of water displays and electricity needs. Still, overall, a good read. The author (1943-) has written a dozen-or-so novels of which this one is probably his best, according to Wiki and Goodreads. Top two photos from atlasobscura.comPhoto of the author from Wikipedia

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