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How do you solve for passion? What are the givens? One may exist in the beguiling Lucia, a translator with a striking resemblance to Irma, who begins a torrid affair with Philip that replicates many of his emotional experiences with the missing woman. It's engrossing stuff, there's no question. Bajo uses words and equations to the point of poetry, particularly when he evokes the world created by Cervantes and the theories of pendulum mathematics as they relate to Philip's life. The
Los Angeles Times
There's a difference between the bibliophile who loves books as physical objects and the one enchanted by the way authors tell stories. David Bajo's characters have it both ways in his intricate first novel about a woman who restores volumes with particular attention to the contents. The
St. Petersburg Times
The book invokes the metaphysical spirit of authors Bajo clearly admires—Borges, Kundera, Cervantes, to name a few—and it's loaded with intertextual high jinks, doppelgangers, artistic and carnal seduction and elegant mathematical equations. Think of it as Eastern European beach reading: a sexy book that's about everything, yet above all about the act (Act? Art!) of reading itself. The
Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune
In fact, Bajo’s novel practically reads itself. The story is a convoluted tale of mathematician Philip who has lost his long-term lover, Irma. He knows she’s gone because she’s bequeathed him her collection—351 volumes—of books, all of which were lovingly bound by her own hand. What Philip doesn’t know is where Irma’s gone, only that she’s “left her life.” The
Book Report on Mountain Xpress
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