A few years (yes I said years) ago I decided that I needed to read more fun stuff in Spanish. This might seem weird for someone who at the time was finishing a PhD in Iberian and Latin American Cultures, but I was working on my dissertation at the time, and I just wasn't reading. So I jumped onto the Casa del Libro website, and took a look at what was selling well at the time.
The top seller was a book by Javier Sierra called El ángel perdido. I picked up the Kindle version so that I could read it on my devices, but I had a really hard time getting hooked.
Here is the basic plot:
Julia Álvarez is an expert on Gothic architecture, and she is working on a restoration in the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. Then her husband, to whom she is currently separated, is kidnapped in the mountains of Turkey. The reason Julia and Martin (her husband) are separated is because he is obsessed with these urim and thumim-like seer stones that have been in his family since the time of the Elizabethan mathematician and alchemist John Dee. Julia finds out that the kidnapping is related to the stones, which are actually the way that God or the Gods have given humans (or the fallen angels who intermarried with humans) to communicate with them. So she gets swept up in this adventure where she is finding out about the stones (particularly their relationship to Noah and the flood) and trying to find her husband.
Like I said, it took me years to get hooked on this book. A couple of weeks ago, I decided that I had to finish it, so I started plugging through it. Then I actually got hooked and finished it pretty quickly.
So what did I think in the end?
I have actually always been a sucker for Dan Brown-ish stories that take art, history, religion, alchemy, etc. and weave them together in interesting ways. The Noah's ark angle was interesting because when I was a kid I was taught that the ark had a glowing stone in it and that that was possibly where the Brother of Jared in The Book of Mormon had come up with the idea to put glowing stones in his own barges. As a matter of fact, there is a pretty lengthy (a couple of pages) discussion in this novel about how John Dee was not the last person to speak with God through a seer stone, but Joseph Smith was.
Oh, and when I was a kid I was captivated by a documentary about people who have searched for (and possibly found) Noah's ark on Mount Ararat. This novel made lots of references to the Ararat Anomaly and expeditions that have gone in search of the ark. It was all pretty interesting for me and reminded me of that feeling of wonder that I had as a kid watching that documentary.
I don't know what to say about the novel from a literary or even cultural standpoint except to say that there were nothing horribly wrong with it. It isn't Javier Marías or Rosa Montero, but it was readable. There is some interesting stuff about the Cathedral of Santiago and the church in Noia, but I honestly don't think that anyone is reading this book for its literary quality. I think people read this book because they want to suspend disbelief and have a good time. Perhaps it is just because of my interest in seer stones and Noah's ark, but in the end I actually enjoyed reading this book, and I would recommend it to students as summer reading if they are interested in something light.