AUTHOR: Javier Argüello
PUBLISHER: Random House Mondadori
GENRE: Novel
READER’S NAME: Félix Lizárraga
DATE: April 18, 2015

Ettore Majorana (1906-1938?) was an Italian theoretical physicist who managed to make massive contributions to physics in his twenties before his mysterious disappearance at sea, somewhere between Palermo and Napoli. Around this fascinating and elusive figure, Javier Argüello (Argentinean writer based in Barcelona) weaves his second novel A propósito de Majorana –which in English could be variously translated as “About Majorana,” “Concerning Majorana,” “With Reference to Majorana,” etc.

The novel starts in a half-noir, half-Kafkaesque tone, with Ernesto Aguiar, his protagonist, being fished out of the sea in Sorrento and held suspicious of a supposed crime that he cannot prove did not happen. Aguiar, an Argentinean living in Barcelona much like Argüello himself, is a reporter frustrated with the direction his life is taking, who is sent to Napoli to write an article about Majorana’s disappearance on occasion of an experiment on neutrinos. The more Aguiar finds out, the more his dissatisfaction with his own life begins to mirror Majorana’s own, and he begins to understand Majorana’s possible frame of mind at the time.

This sounds intellectual and somber, and it is, but A propósito… is also wildly entertaining and brims with humor. There is a vivid and assorted cast of characters –including a university professor with a love-hate relationship with Sicilians; a childhood friend turned adventurer who travels around the world in a sailboat in search of his lost love; a hotel owner who is stoically waiting for the authorities to demolish his building while making crèches to pass the time, and whose improbable name is Giacomo Puccini; and a police commissary who goes from foe to friend, ironically named after one of the foremost authorities on Majorana. Even Agüero himself makes a guest appearance by phone (one of Agüero’s sources in real life was his own grand-aunt Blanca Mora y Araujo, widow of Nobel Prize winner Miguel Angel Asturias, who once declared having met Majorana in Argentina years after his supposed suicide).

A quest that goes awry, and in the course of which the protagonists find themselves, is one of literature’s (and cinema’s) most universal plot devices, from the Odyssey and Oedipus Rex to Ulysses, Dark Passage, and Vertigo. A propósito… makes good use of it. While I cannot reveal anymore of the plot without risking spoilers, I can safely say that Aguiar finds much more than he bargained for, including himself.

Full of great characters, fascinating ideas, scintillating dialog, and a plot that keeps twisting and turning in startlingly unexpected directions, A propósito… manages to do all that in a language that is crystal clear. Jorge Luis Borges criticized Faulkner for writing his labyrinthine novels in an equally labyrinthine language, further alienating the reader; I am happy to report that Agüero conveys even the headiest intricacies of philosophy and quantum physics in a relaxed, conversational way that makes everything look easy.

A propósito de Majorana did to me what every good book should do: it made me want to read more. I readily recommend it for translation.