Coming Apart at the Seams

I came home from work a couple of months ago to find a book waiting for me, a fairly common occurrence around my neck of the woods.  However, this particular incident was a little out of the ordinary as it was a book I'd never heard of and had not asked for (even my wife looked a little confused).  Could it be...  Yes, on this day, I had received one of those mythical items, an unrequested advance review copy, a sign that I too had ascended to the next circle of bloggerdom, become one of the chosen...

The book in question was María Dueñas' The Seamstress (also known as The Time In Between), a best-selling Spanish novel of a woman caught up in political intrigue during the Spanish Civil War and World War II.  I was a little hesitant to read it at first, despite its being a translated work, as I suspected that it might be chick-lit in disguise (the cover certainly didn't convince me that it would be one I'd enjoy...).  However, in the idea of trying new things, and with a month of reading books by female writers in full swing, I decided to give it a go :)

The Seamstress, translated by Daniel Hahn (although you have to look pretty hard to find his name...), is written around Sira Quiroga, a young dressmaker living in Madrid, who abandons her ordinary life (and her very ordinary fiancé) to run off with a smooth-talking salesman.  Having been abandoned by her lover in Tangiers, she moves on to Tetouan (in the Spanish Protectorate in Morocco), where she is forced to work hard to pay off debts incurred by her horrible ex.

There she makes the acquaintance of Rosalinda Fox, an English woman who wants help making a fabulous dress at very short notice.  She needs it to wear to a function, on the arm of her lover - a high-ranking Nationalist official.  This chance meeting is the start of Sira's life of political intrigue...

Let me make something clear right from the start - this is not one of my usual literary tomes.  Unfortunately, my first impressions were largely justified, and I spent most of the novel picking faults in Dueñas' style, thinking about how this could have been a better book.  The major issue is that the writer is too eager to tell the story to let the story actually be told.  A good story unfolds at its own pace, unhurried by the writer's intentions, but Dueñas seems to be pushing The Seamstress along as if she has somewhere to be, and that's quite a feat in a book that runs to more than 600 pages (of admittedly large type).  In better hands, this could have been a trilogy of literary tales rather than one plumped-up page turner.

Another worrying problem is the characterisation.  The Seamstress is full of two-dimensional, stereotyped supporting players: the educated, possibly gay neighbour; the suave, roguish, seductive lover who abandons Sira; the buxom, matronly housekeeper (and smuggler!) who takes Sira under her wing in Tetouan.  Every time the reader is introduced to someone new, Sira gives us just enough details to let us know what kind of person it is before the plot continues on its merry way.  Sadly, it's not enough to make us care about any of them a great deal.

I would also argue that the choice of a first-person narrator is a fairly limiting one, forcing the author to resort to a long sequence of monologues, interrupted by the occasional conversation.  In one instance, Dueñas obviously realises that this is insufficient, and the chapter moves away from Sira and describes life in Madrid for Rosalinda and her beau.  In the final paragraphs of the chapter, we find out how this is done; it's all information Sira has gathered from letters - how convenient...

There are several more issues I had with The Seamstress, but to simply list them here would be overkill, and slightly unfair.  You see, for all the problems I had with the book, I did actually read it through to the end, and I ended up enjoying it.  As mentioned above, it is a page-turner, in the good sense as well as the bad, and the further the story progressed, the more I wanted to know about Franco-era Spain and Morocco.  It's an interesting setting for a World War II thriller, playing out in a country which isn't actually taking part in the conflict (even if it is very clear whose side Spain is actually on).

So is it worth reading?  I would argue that this depends very much on the reader.  If you crave literary fiction, books which are written in elegant and mesmerising language, painstakingly constructed with vast repositories of hidden meaning, then The Seamstress is definitely not for you.  However, if you enjoy historical fiction and ripping yarns, especially those told in the first-person by a young female narrator, you may well get a lot out of this novel (I've had a quick look around the blogosphere, and it appears that I am pretty much alone in my opinion of the book!).

Still, one thing's for sure - I don't think I'll be getting any unrequested ARCs again in a hurry...