Author: Carmen Posadas
- Fiction
- Booket Planeta
- ISBN: 9788408052593
- Release Date: 01-22-2013
-Reviewed by: Félix Lizárraga
Carmen Posadas is a prolific and well-known Uruguayan-Spanish writer who won the Planeta Prize in 1998 with her second novel Pequeñas infamias (Little Indiscretions).
El testigo invisible (The Invisible Witness), her latest effort, is a novel about Leonid Sednev, a kitchen boy who served the Romanovs, the former imperial family of Russia, during their Siberian exile, and the only survivor of their slaying by Soviet agents. It has an intriguing premise: the last days of the Romanovs, seen through the eyes of an invisible but ever-present witness, a servant.
Written as a memoir, it goes back and forth between 1994 Montevideo, where Sednev, a nonagenarian, is in a hospital and meets a nurse assistant who reminds him of the princess Maria, and his life as a servant of the imperial family.
I personally love historical fiction, so I was looking forward to this book. Alas, I was sorely disappointed. Posada introduces early on Sednev’s aunt Nina, her personalized expositive device in the guise of an insufferable know-it-all who delivers interminable monologues about practically everything, from the use of English at the imperial court to hemophilia or the hows and whys of Russian funerals. She prattles on and on and on, and the reader is glad when finally Sednev goes to Siberia and leaves her behind.
But Sednev himself dedicates overlong chapters to watered-down, Wikipedia-like history lessons. There is a considerable portion of the book dedicated to Rasputin and his assassination –a subject that has fascinated generations and made its way into literature, film, music, even graphic novels. Posadas, I regret to say, does not contribute an iota to the topic, but instead manages to achieve what seemed impossible: to make it dreary.
Posadas’ research for this book is regrettably superficial. She seems to have raided Wikipedia, since there is barely anything in the book that cannot be found there. Moreover, had she bothered to make even the most superficial acquaintance with the Russian language, she would not made such glaring blunders in transliterating the simplest words –like “please.” which she renders as pojaluista, a spelling that works phonetically in any language other than Spanish.
She would have also realized that Yusupov’s valet Grisha (Sednev’s uncle in the book, if not in real life) was Rasputin’s namesake, and that he should have been formally called Grigori Ivanovich or familiarly Grisha; “Grisha Ivanovich” is an extremely implausible combination. On the same vein, it is conceivable that the Romanov princesses could have called Sedvev “Leo,” since they mostly spoke English and French, but his family would have called him Lionia.
