Good novella centering on a love of books. A small treat if you are interested in modern Guatemalan literature.

For some reason, part of the spirit or style of the book reminded me of [b:Astragal|16241803|Astragal|Albertine Sarrazin|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1358757298s/16241803.jpg|2923555].

This short book with its frenzied pace suited me at a time when I had trouble concentrating. Translated from Spanish, my first time reading a Guatemalan author although I won't presume it's representative of the country's literature.

I felt uncomfortable with the protagonist's obsession with eponymous Severina and his immediate assumption that she was going to steal from him in his bookstore (she did). There may be some regional prejudice, the context of which we are not privy to when he is trying to place her accent. Severina is a disadvantaged young lady with an enigmatic background; there's undoubtedly a power imbalance and social financial strata difference between them. The way she is written makes her a manic pixie archetype which accounts for his fascination with her, in addition to good 'ol fashioned lust. If she had been an elderly obese shoplifter, no doubt the police would have been called. Instead, he hastens into the saviour role, smoothing out logistical housing and financial difficulties for our mysterious free-spirited kleptomaniac. And he's not the only one waiting to pounce on her vulnerable tenuous situation, there's another male bookseller also older who proposes marriage as a way to pay off her debt.

Since our understanding of her is through him, the first person narrator's prism, I never got a clear sense of her as a three-dimensional person; what her fears and motivations are. This is ironic given the book (and its title cover) is ostensibly all about Severina.

Any book with a bookstore as a setting and love of books as a topic gladdens a bibliophile's heart, mine included. I liked reading which esoteric prized books Severina stole/borrowed and those of the two booksellers'.

Guatemala. I can see why Bolano loved Rosa so much. A great, short, captivating read.

I broke the rule and judged the book by its cover. In this case, a simply beautiful, colorful cover of polish hardcover edition. Not knowing anything about the inside I decided to purchase this book (what’s more, via internet!). It’s a pleasure to read this rather short story of a pretty girl stealing books from bookshops in Guatemala. It has a flavor of South American magical realism, a little bit of Murakami meets Almodovar atmosphere. Anyone who’s into books and bookstores (so most of us, Goodreads users) will definitely appreciate “Severina”.

"Bookshops are infested with ideas. Books are quivering, murmuring creatures. That’s what one of my business partners used to say. He was a poet, quite a clever guy (though not as clever as he thought), and likeable enough. There’s something to it: the three little Russian books stood there on the shelf next to the cash register for several days, murmuring, quivering, preserving her memory, but she didn’t return. Those were eventful days, or rather I heard that they’d been eventful (there was a rash of lynchings in the inland villages and a coup in a neighboring country, cocaine became the world’s number one illicit substance, stagnant water was discovered on Mars, and Pluto definitively lost its status as a planet), my life having shrunk once more to the ambit of books; I had become another specimen of that sad type, the book seller with literary aspirations."

Severina is a beautiful, highly literary and very short (86 well-spaced pages) book about ... books, wonderfully brought into English by Chris Andrews, Roberto Bolano's translator.

The setting is Guatemala, but the wider troubles of society, more discussed in Rey Rosa's other novels, are kept deliberately in the background here:"(There are far more serious problems here, but I don't want to talk about them now.)"

The unnamed first-person narrator is a part-owner of a bookstore, albeit motivated by bibliophilia rather than business acumen ("we didn't have anything better to do and we were tired of paying through the nose for books chosen by and for others, as 'eccentrics' like us are forced to do in provincial cities").

The "she" mentioned is the eponymous Severina, Ana Severina Bruguera Blanco, to give her full name, or at least the name she gives to the narrator ("'He doesn't have proof of identity you know, nor do I'. 'You don't have passports?'. She smiled. 'Yes we have several passports, they are all fake.'"). And the Russian books are set as a trap to catch her:

"I noticed her the first time she came into the store, and right from the start I picked her for a thief, although that day she didn't take anything."

But the bookshop owner isn't interested in retrieving stolen novels, but rather as a way to gain access to the, then unknown, girl who he immediately is attracted to "(perfectly rounded knees they were, shaped with evident care)"

Severina is an artful thief ("the alarm didn't go off, I wondered how she'd done it") and the narrator learns "You're not the first bookseller to fall in love with her". And the rest of this brief novel is devoted to his pursuit of Severina, who remains an enigma, even as he gets close to her.

"Ahmed [a fellow bookseller and under Severina's spell] had spoken of an illness. But I felt there must have been another explanation, which I associated with an uncompromising approach to life: absolute freedom, a radical realisation of the ideal that I too had adopted one fine day - the ideal of living by and for books.

There were black days when those fantasies faded away, leaving me pray to despondancy and remorse for a life half-lived. I would think: "You're kidding yourself; she's just a common thief, or, at best, a sad case, a kleptomaniac"

With clear religious parallels, Ana Severina and her (ostensible) grandfather claim to be from a wandering, historical and entrepreneurial tribe of book lovers. They believe themselves descendants of Lydians, who Herodutus, in The Histories, records as having invented dice games, before moving to "the land of the Ombricans", the present day Umbria, where Ana claims to have spent her childhood.

As Ana Severina's Grandfather explains to the narrator:

"Books have always been my life. Both my father and grandfather lived exclusively from booms...and I'm not speaking metaphorically: books are our sole means of substinence.

We have been accused of all sorts of vices and misdemanours, even crimes.

But the only thing we do consistently is use books to make a living."

The religious parallels are clear, (in my words) a People of Books as opposed to the People of The Book. Severina even claims to have entered the Holy of Holies, Borges's library, and her most valued relic is a copy of the Koran, valued for the annotations in the margins:

"'I took this book, just the one, from Borges's library. The notes are his. There, in the margin, he started writing one of his stories.'

''The Mirror of...', is this possible?' said Ahmed, without taking his eyes off the book. 'Are you trying to trick me?'

'You decide', Severina said calmly."

For such a short novel, it is packed with literary games and allusions. The bookshop takes it's name from a Cervantes play (La Entretenida) and Severina's surname Bruguera refers to one of Borges publishers, to give just two) and the list of books that Severina steals from the narrator and many other shops is intriguing to both the reader and indeed the narrator:

"I kept going over the books that she had taken from me and trying to imagine the complete list of every title she had ever stolen. It was as if I thought this would help solve the mystery of a life that seemed bizarre and fantastic to me."

Overall, a beautiful and thought-provoking work, packing more into it's brief pages than most books do into 4 or 5 times that length. Rey Rosa is rapidly becoming one of my favourite authors, following the wonderful African Shore (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/941154764?). There is a beautiful review by Raphael Rerolle in Le Monde which expressed what he achieves better than I ever could "His work is extraordinarily precise, mythic, intriguing; it's literature without useless gestures, where beauty seems to be born of it's author's curious inclination toward silence."

Bolano was of course also a big fan of Rey Rosa saying he “is the most rigorous writer of my generation, the most transparent, the one who knows best how to weave his stories, and the most luminous of all.”, albeit Bolano does seem to have been an extraordinarily generous commentator on fellow authors who he valued.