I Loved this Novel About Digging Up Frozen Soldiers in 19th-Century Prussia and You Might Too

Thoughts on the bad state of book reviews. Plus, a review of a great book: Centroeuropa by Vicente Luis Mora (translated by Rahul Bery)

German woodcut from the early 1500s

This post has two parts. First, me rambling about my conflicting thoughts on book reviews. Second, a recommendation of the best book I read recently: Centroeuropa by Vicente Luis Mora. Feel free to scroll past the rambling if you just want to read the review.

Also, a reminder that I’m running a subscription incentive where I’ll send you a signed book if you sign up for an annual subscription. Details near the top of my last post.

A Bit on the Bad State of Book Reviews

Although I try to maintain a somewhat positive, or at least not despairing, outlook on literature, I admit to feeling not great about the state of book reviews. Things are bad. Everything I hear and read—from conversations with fellow authors and publishing professionals to news stories like the Washington Post cutting its books coverage earlier this year—is about how it is harder and harder to get coverage at all.

I’m sure many will think, “So what? Book reviews are formulaic and boring anyway. Good riddance.” I enjoy a traditional book review, but even if you don’t, there are reasons to mourn their disappearance. Most books do not sell all that well, as everybody knows. As an author, receiving serious critical engagement of your work is one of the best parts of publishing a book. Book reviews are also vital for the sales of many types of books. Not all types. Certain works thrive in a world where sales are dominated by marketing dollars, trope lists, and social media algorithms. But for my tastes, those are rarely the most interesting books. What I love typically falls into some category (small press books, translated literature, books that defy easy genre pigeon-holing) that have a much harder time catching on without reviews. Though, to be sure, such books faced an uphill battle even when critical reviews determined sales more than viral TikToks.

I’ve written before about how Substack (and newsletters in general) are one of the few bright spots in books coverage. But I’ve been thinking recently about how I don’t review that often. I recommend books, implicitly through my Processing author interview series and explicitly in the survey articles I categorize under “Syllabi.” But why don’t I write more straightforward book reviews?

Despite feeling serious book reviews are important and the traditional book review a worthy form to master, I find them tricky and somewhat confused. The problem, for me, stems from the dual audiences of a book review: those who haven’t read the book (and who are deciding if they want to) and those who have read the book (and are reading to see what critics say about it). There are other audiences sometimes, such as those who are looking to hateread a pan of a famous author’s book that they have no intention of reading. (I have, at times, been a member of this group too.) But the first two audiences are something a professional reviewer has to balance despite their conflicting knowledge base and opposing interests in reading the review. How can you offer interesting commentary or interpretations to already-read-it-ers without “spoiling” the story for haven’t-read-it-yet-ers? How do you usefully summarize the book for the latter without boring the former? Etc.

The trickiness of the balancing act is compounded by the brevity. 500-800 words or so. That really isn’t much space to get across the author, the context, the story, and the style while also including a few quotations and some critical evaluation (often smushed into the end). Learning to impart all that efficiently is a real skill, and probably a good exercise for students to try and master. It’s worthy to learn. But, I digress.

All of this is a long prelude to saying that I’m going to try to be the change I want to see—in the small and limited way I can with this Substack—and offer some more reviews of books. Especially books that I think could use highlighting, such as those in translation or on small presses. At the same time, I’ll try to jettison the traditional format in favor of something a bit more conversational and loose that hopefully befits a newsletter. And I will inject some digressions on fiction craft that I could never fit into a traditional book review.

Okay, preamble aside, let me tell you about an amazing novel I just finished about someone digging up magical frozen corpses of soldiers in early 19th-century Prussia.

You Should Read this Book: Centroeuropa by Vicente Luis Mora (translated by Rahul Bery)

Mora is apparently a known name in Spain—and this book won something called the Málaga Novel Prize Winner—but I will confess I knew nothing about him or the novel other than the translation was published by Bellevue Literary Press. Centroeuropa was simply a book I picked up off my to-maybe-read pile of galleys, review copies, and purchases. Actually, this is not one pile. It is currently five piles—split between my wife and me—that are stacked from floor to windowsill along one wall. Really, six piles since there’s another stack on my entryway table…

(So if I haven’t read a book you sent me, sorry, I will try!)

Anyway, when I grab books from the pile(s), often I’ll read a couple pages to see if I’m hooked or not. Exceptions exist, but I almost always know if I’ll love a book from the first few pages. You can tell if an author has the juice or not from the first squeeze so to speak. Or at least if the juice is the juice you want to drink. Here is the opening of Centroeuropa (as translated by Rahul Bery):

Male, Prussian, hussar soldier, frozen.

That was the first body I found while digging in the frozen earth to bury my wife; I say my wife because I never knew her real name, although I will return to that later.

This opening sinks several hooks into me. I admire the style, the shock, the teased mysteries, and also the storyteller voice of a narrator reflecting on the past. “I will return to that later.” The craft jargon here is “the point of telling,” but this specific point of telling encourages interesting elisions and contradictions from the inherent unreliability of memory and self-mythologization. This becomes a major part of the novel, with “translator’s notes” appearing now and then to remind you the narrator, Redo, has contradicted or omitted something.

The next paragraphs:

When one finds a buried body under one’s own earth, in one’s own soil, one suspects it is not alone; in some way, anyone who finds a corpse fears or suspects that other corpses are out there, waiting their turn. The fields of a given place cannot be looked at in the same way once the first body has been found, for now they no longer resemble flower meadows but burial grounds.

The story began with this discovery of that first soldier, but what I wish to write cannot be properly understood unless I go back a few hours to my anguished interview with Mayor Altmayer. Or perhaps I should go further and recall those sad days in Mainz? I ask the potential reader to forgive me for faltering as I expound, for these memories constitute the first long text I have ever put to paper, and the past is so wide, long, and deep, that choosing any single part as a starting point constitutes, in some way, an imposture. Nothing starts at an exact point. Our lives do not start entirely with our births.

Probably this first page will let you know if you are onboard or not. I took my seat.

When I was younger, I took a (non-academic) class with the brilliant writer Diane Williams. Williams wrote a list of what mattered most in fiction, from her POV, on the whiteboard. #3, the least important, was “the news.” Or, basically, everything that happens in a story from plot to characters. #2 was “voice” or style, which is probably self-explanatory to anyone reading a craft newsletter. But #1 was “authority.” This is hard, impossible really, to define. It is the masterfulness with which a writer’s work demands your attention and makes you trust that you are listening to someone who you want to listen to.

Mora wields great authority from page one. At least for this reader’s tastes.

What is the story this perhaps untrustworthy narrator tells? Redo Hauptshammer has lucked his way into the deed to a parcel of land in Prussia and fled his mysterious past with his wife, who is killed by a stray bullet before they arrive. Redo arrives in Szonden with the coffin and, after navigating the local bureaucracy, tries to bury his wife. He finds not just one soldier but an ever-multiplying number of soldiers—one then a pair then four then eight—all buried under his plot of land and all from different wars and magically preserved.

Plotwise, the book centers on the foot-dragging government and ecclesiastical bureaucrats who cannot decide what to do with these impossible corpses, preventing him from fulfilling his plan to plant sugar beets and start a new life. It would really have been best if they’d just stayed underground and no one had to make any decisions. History, with its shifting empires and forgotten mounds of dead, is always ready to rupture through this novel both literally and thematically. “[I]n these history-scarred lands, no sooner do you open up the ground than you find deep rivers of blood.”

Don’t mistake this for a horror novel. It’s quite funny and often moving. Despite this surreal central premise, the rest of the book proceeds more like historical fiction than magical realism. There is a period-appropriate (and memorable) witch character, but otherwise the story isn’t about magic but about a man trying to mourn his lost love and rebuild a life from scratch.

Mora populates the novel with memorable side characters, which I know is a bit of a stock phrase, yet is here quite true. Some of these characters have only passing mentions, such as a giant named Udo whom bees refuse to sting, and others play more of a role, like the local historian Jakob Moltke who befriends Redo or the witch Ilse who warns him about more bodies hidden inside the dirt.

Those will be my plot summary paragraphs, because there are twists and reveals—especially one at the end—I would not want to spoil.

One thing I greatly admire in fiction, especially of a surreal bent, is tonal variety. Mora is adept at moving between surreal slapstick, melancholy rumination, Kafkaesque strangeness, and lyrical description. Mora also has a Nabokovian predilection for playful language games—Redo moves near the river Oder—but they are never distracting. It’s a novel you cannot predict. Meditative digressions, strange memories, comedic set-pieces, or bursts of beauty could appear at any moment. One lovely line I copied into a notebook while reading: “These past conversations come back to me all mixed up, like birdsong in a forest.”

The novel’s free movement through time, little mysteries, and well-rendered cast makes the novel feel expansive despite its <200 page length. The novel takes place on one tiny plot near one tiny town, but contains vastness.

Overall, Centroeuropa was a novel of buried secrets, elliptical storytelling, and lovely surprises. I never knew where it would go, but I was always happy to follow wherever it decided to land.

*

After I finished the novel, I read an article by the translator Rahul Bery at Lit Hub. I like to read books blindly, and then read up on them after. So if you are the same way, skip this section until you have read the book. Though the “spoilers” here aren’t about plot but structure and composition.

Bery talks about the process of translating the novel and especially about Mora’s blog post, “How I wrote Centroeuropa,” explaining his process in writing this “archaeological novel.” I was not surprised to find that Mora’s novel was designed with the kind of Oulipian constraints that I always love, such as how the novel chapters double in length. The first is three pages. The last nearly half of the novel.

Bery talks about other games and “‘Easter eggs’ (my words, not his)” seeded throughout the novel. I also read Mora’s blog—as translated by Google Translate, I fear—where he talks about the last chapter being “divided into 64 parts of 375 words each, semantically represents the checkmate move in a chess game.” I hope Mora won’t mind me screenshotting the accompanying chart of the novel’s six chapters:

I’m a sucker for this sort of thing. Indeed, one of the first articles I wrote for Counter Craft—in the month I launched in February of 2021—was “Invisible Architecture” about essentially Oulipian-type constraints that authors use to generate and structure their book that might not be visible to the reader.

If any of this sounds like your kind of thing, perhaps you’ll love Centroeuropa too?

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My new novel Metallic Realms is out in stores! Reviews have called the book “brilliant” (Esquire), “riveting” (Publishers Weekly), “hilariously clever” (Elle), “a total blast” (Chicago Tribune), “unrelentingly smart and inventive” (Locus), and “just plain wonderful” (Booklist). My previous books are the science fiction noir novel The Body Scout and the genre-bending story collection Upright Beasts. If you enjoy this newsletter, perhaps you’ll enjoy one or more of those books too.