Tiburón, a Spanish inspector of roads who writes in his spare time, sets out to tell the story of Kai and Lucia, a perfect couple who are forced to seek work as illusionists in the fictitious mountainous Southern Netherlands. This story turns out to be a version of the Snow Queen fairy tale with a difference. Not that its readers are allowed by Tiburón to immerse themselves in its fantasy world without interruption. Instead they are regularly treated to Tiburón’s reflections on writing, which he likens to road-building. Despite constantly announcing that he will not impose himself on the reader, he does just that, so that we start to mistrust our narrator’s humble stance.


In the end, we know Tiburón much better than Kai and Lucia, and are lulled into a false sense of security by the closing sentence of the novel: ‘And I sat there happily ever after’. But how come it is the storyteller and not the characters in the fairy tale who live happily ever after? Kai and Lucia’s adventure in the South turns out to be frightening and may have changed their perfect relationship for ever. The Snow Queen, a gangster woman, kidnaps Kai after their first performance and takes him to her castle where she turns him into a sex machine. Meanwhile Lucia searches for him, helped by the clown who emerges from his costume as a strong, serene and wise old woman. In a transformation of the traditional fairy tale, Lucia loses herself in an idyllic community where sex seems natural and carefree. Eventually the clown reminds her of the quest and their arrival at the Snow Queen’s castle coincides with a shoot-out in which queen and clown are killed.


And so the inseparable pair are reunited. But at the tale’s conclusion, the reader is left with the image of the dead, and must wait for Tiburón’s celebration of finishing his story for the traditional gratifying ending. Despite all his protestations of humility, Tiburón asserts himself and the author’s authority. Except that lurking somewhere behind Tiburón is Cees Nooteboom who is such a master of irony that Tiburon’s self-assertion is simultaneously undermined. This, together with its theme of north-south polarity is what gives this short novel its depth.

My books, if you wish to call them that, are put out by a small publishing house in Léon — the capital of Asturias — certainly not in my own province. My wife and sons never read them, and what little comment they have elicited has been printed in the smallest type in Spanish provincial papers. This suits me very well. Anything more would only create obligations which, in my description of Kai, to mention the first thing that occurs to me, I can well do without.

I often wonder how other writers — for I am undoubtedly a writer — can keep going after good or bad reviews. But let us go back to Kai. If a computer existed in the form of a scientist who was told to calculate and execute the perfect complement to the female body, the result would be Kai. Sometimes, when Kai and Lucia walked side by side or, less visibly to others, when they lay in bed beside, under or on top of one another, they resembled a living sculpture on which a scholar with Renaissance preferences could have demonstrated to a class of eager students, if such a thing exists, the lines of perfection running from one to another. (p. 13, tr. Adrienne Dixon)