Season of Ash

By Jorge Volpi

Book Overview

"Jorge Volpi will be one of the stars of Spanish literature of this century."--Carlos Fuentes

The Soviet biologist Irina Granina has experienced the worst of Communism, struggling to free her husband from the gulag for years. Following the rise of Gorbachev, her husband finally emerges a changed man, but then Irina is forced to witness the worst of capitalism, as her daughter Oksana disappears into the newly rapacious consumer society and she loses her husband again, this time to greed and a lust for power.

In the West, Jennifer Moore, the scion of blue-blooded American wealth, takes a high-ranking job at the International Monetary Fund, where she hopes to bring the tough love of the free market economy to the unenlightened masses the world over. But she also has to deal with a philandering husband, Jack Wells, whose pharmaceutical company is a market wonder built on a house of cards, and her sister Allison, a free-spirited anti-globalization activist.

Jorge Volpi's Season of Ash puts a human face on earth-shaking events of the late twentieth century: the Chernobyl disaster, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of Soviet communism and the rise of the Russian oligarchs, the cascading collapsing of developing economies, and the near-miraculous scientific advances of the Human Genome Project. A scientific investigation, a journalistic expos , a detective novel, and a dark love story, Season of Ash is a thrilling exploration of greed and disillusionment, and a clear-eyed examination of the passions that rule our lives and make history.

Jorge Volpi is the author of nine novels, including In Search of Klingsor, for which he won the Spanish Premio Biblioteca Breve prize and the French Deux-Oc ans-Grizane-Cavour Prize. Volpi is one of the founders of the "Crack" group--a prestigious Mexican literary movement.

Alfred MacAdam is a professor of Latin American literature at Barnard College and the translator of novels by Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jos Donoso, Juan Carlos Onetii, and Julio Cort zar, among others.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1934824100
• ISBN13: 9781934824108
• Release Date: October 2009
• Publisher: Open Letter
• Length: 413 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.5" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

A complex and engaging story

Jorge Volpi's "Season of Ash" is a difficult book to review. While reading, I kept trying to push it into any of a number of simply shaped categories. For long stretches, the novel feels strongly like straight historical fiction. It follows the paths of three women, spread across the globe, through many of the major events of the 20th century. The book then flips into murder mystery; although "mystery" is too strong a word as from the earliest chapters we know both victim and culprit; perhaps murder procedural would be a more apt term. Finally, all these events are couched in a not too clear metafictional universe where the murderer, and sometimes narrator, authors a book titled "Season of Ash" that also recounts many of the events of the book. Which leaves the reader to ask: just how much of Jorge Volpi's "Season of Ash" is really the narrator-murderer's "Season of Ash." Although this book is composed of several styles it uses a well established story telling method as its core structural device. I am not sure if there is a name for the genre but one name for the tradition might be "Epic Historical Fiction." In this genre the writer places a small group of characters lives head long the paths of a number of either true historical events of near simulacra. Upton Sinclair's "Oil" is the more recent entry in this genre I recall reading. In the case of "Season of Ash" Volpi has chosen to place his characters in later two thirds of the 20th century. The story is contains three major plot lines, following the lives of Jennifer Moore financial wizard of the International Monetary Fund, Irina Nikolayevna Sudayeva Russian biologist, and Eva Halasz Hungarian child prodigy turned computer scientist. Each woman, or a close relation, plays a role or is directly impacted by many of the major events of the 20th century: from the market crash in October of 1929 to the fall of the berlin wall to the mapping of the human genome. I found when the novel focused on recounting these historical event the writing was at its clearest. The many varied events are recounted with extensive details that create a vivid easily accessible picture. Sometimes Volpi shares the events details through direct recounting of sequences of events and sometimes through fictionalized eyewitness encounters. As a historical primer the book is successful; it leaves the reader intrigued and wanting to learn more about the source material of these striking events. Where the book fails, for me, is as murder "mystery." I didn't find myself compelled by the murder story. The interlacing of the murder story with the historical story felt was more distracting then engaging. One interesting aspect of this secondary story was that while the narrator-murderer is physically responsible for the death of one woman he also had a strong connection with two other women who die and plays a role in the ruin of the only two men he is shown to meet. The reader can't help but wonder if Volpi wan

no to the earth

An amazing account spreading from afghanistan to the usa a marvelously told historial novel, a page turner!!