A Small Death in Lisbon by Robert Wilson won the 1999 Gold Dagger Award for Best Crime Novel. It is a complex parallel story set in WWII and in 1999, in Berlin and Lisbon. It begins with Nazis coercing Swabian businessman Klaus Felsen into leaving Berlin to procure wolfram for them (by any means) in Portugal.“At dawn the heavy black curtains were crushing the iron-grey light back outside. The white linen bedclothes were stiff with cold. Felsen's head came off the pillow at the second crash, which came with the noise of a length of wood splintering. Boots thundered over wooden floors, something fell and rolled. Felsen turned, his shoulders hardened by the frost, his brain grinding through the gears, drink and tiredness confusing the double declutch required. The room shattered. Two men in calf-length black leather coats stepped through the door frames. Felsen's single thought – why didn't they just open the doors?”Felsen at first seems like he might be a sympathetic protagonist, as he and his lover Eva are bullied by the Nazis, but as time passes he shows equal cruelty and brutality (likewise his partner and his son). It’s difficult to read the senseless violence, including torture of men and women. Felsen’s story spans the decades from WWII to 1999.An event that strains credulity is Felsen waiting in ambush to kill an accomplice in wolfram mining who has double-crossed him, but ending up partners with him. They are equally cruel, brutal men; both trick the other, even though they must wait decades for full revenge. As the war progresses into Russia, Felsen’s superior officer begins to plot an escape route with Felsen, in case the Nazis lose. Felsen takes his revenge a decade later for the early violence in Berlin.Felsen buys a fantastic house, and briefly enjoys it with a former girlfriend:“They spent the time driving out to his house, the westernmost house on mainland Europe-only heather, gorse, the cliffs and the lighthouse at Cabo da Roca between it and the ocean...they sat in the enclosed terrace on the roof and drank brandy and watched the storms out at sea, the deranged clouds and the blood-orange sunsets...they renamed the house Cas ao Fim do Mundo-House at the End of the World.”Inspector Zé Coelho is on the Lisbon police force in 1999, investigating the murder of a sixteen-year-old girl named Catarina Oliveira. We learn right away that he is a widower of one year, living with his sixteen-year-old daughter Olivia, but we don’t learn much more about Zé for a few hundred pages. His investigation proceeds slowly, with interviews of the victim’s parents and friends (rather dull). He and his partner Carlos have frequent dialogues about Portugal’s history and politics. [Rereading the first chapters, I see major players are introduced, but I sure didn’t recognize it the first time.]Readers familiar with Lisbon and surrounding areas will enjoy the author’s descriptive details and obvious affection for Portugal:“I walked down the harbor wall to the sea. It was barely 7.15 a.m. and the sun already had some needle in it. To my left, looking east, was the mouth of the Tagus and the massive pillars of the 25th April suspension bridge which floated footless in a heavy mist. With the sun higher the sea wasn't so much blue any more as a panel-beaten silver sheet. Small fishing boats, moored off the beach, rocked on the dazzling surface in the morning's breeze. A passenger jet came in low above the river and banked over the cement works and beaches of Caparica south of the Tagus to make its approach into the airport north of the city--tourists arriving for golf and days in the sun. Further west and out to sea, a tugboat pulled a dredger alongside the Búgio lighthouse, Lisbon's scaled-down, antique Alcatraz. At the end of the wall a fisherman reached back with his rod, took two steps and sent his hook out into the ocean with a violent whip of his shoulders and flick of his wrists.”Settings are painstakingly described with a touch of dry humor:“We were shown into the sitting room which, judging by the furnishings, was not Dr Oliveira's side of the house. There was natural light in the room, fancy ceramics and no dark corners of books. The art on the walls was the sort that demanded comment unless you happened to be a police inspector from Lisbon in which case your opinion didn't matter. I took a seat on one of the two caramel leather sofas. Above the fireplace was a portrait of a skeletal figure in an armchair as seen through lashes of paint. It was disturbing. You had to be disturbed to live with it....There were plants in the room and an arrangement of lilies but just as the eye relaxed it came across a dark metal figure scrabbling out of the primordial slime or a terracotta head, open-mouthed, screaming at the ceiling. The safest place to look was the floor which was parquet with Persian rugs.”Zé has distinct opinions about wealth and status:“Teresa Carvalho, the keyboards player, lived with her parents in an apartment building in Telheiras, which is not far from Odivelas on the map, but a steep climb on the money ladder. This is where you come when your first cream has risen to the top of your milk. Insulated buildings, pastel shades, security systems, garage parking, satellite dishes, tennis clubs, ten minutes from the airport, five minutes from either football stadium and Colombo. It's wired up but dead out here, like pacing through a cemetery of perfect mausoleums.”Zé defines the Portuguese soul:“You know why Lisbon's a sad place. It's never recovered from its history. Something terrible happened here which marked the place for ever. All those shaded, narrow alleyways, the dark gardens, the cypresses around the cemeteries, the steep cobbled streets, the black and white calçada in the squares, the views out over the red roofs to the slow river and the ocean...they're never shrugged off the fact that almost the entire population of the city was wiped out in an earthquake that happened nearly 250 years ago...The Igreja do Carmo. Can you think of anywhere else in the world where they've left the skeleton of a cathedral in the heart of the city as a monument to all those that died?”Felsen rapes, beats, tortures and kills his way along the years, becoming tremendously successful. He and his Portuguese partner establish a bank to hide Nazi gold. On page 281 is the very first connection between the parallel plots: the lawyer drawing up the bank documents has the surname Oliveira.¾ of the way through the book, Zé is suddenly forced to really communicate with his daughter. He shares how he feels about losing his wife/her mother:“Loss is like a shrapnel wound where the piece of metal's got stuck in a place where the surgeons daren't go, so they decide to leave it. It's painful at first, horribly painful, so that you wonder whether you can live with it. But then the body grows around it, until it doesn't hurt any more. Not like it used to. But every now and again there are these twinges when you're not ready for them, and you realize it's still there and it's always going to be there. It's a part of you. A still, hard point inside.”About page 330, Zé’s investigation begins to link to the Felsen plot. His breakthrough comes on page 377: “Then your daughter also made this man’s tie”. By page 404, the murder mystery seems to be solved, and the reader may wonder why there are 40 pages left (I did). But if nothing else, this lengthy saga is a lesson in violent treachery and betrayal, and the plot twists and turns to reveal more of the same right up to the end.
[my comments are taken from a mailing list discussion and may contain spoliers!]I'm not going to manage to finish the book before going off on my holidays on Friday so I'm going to wade in with what I think so far and catch up when I get back. (By which time I'll have to catch up on the No 1 Ladies Detective Agency discussion too)I started reading this book and after a couple of chapters had to check the cover to check that the title was indeed "Small Death in _Lisbon_" as I was in 1941 Berlin and not much enjoying it. For once the back cover blurb helped me and let me know that what was happening would link up with things in Lisbon. In the course of this I totally forgot about the prologue.I'm really not enjoying the Nazi side of the story which is a pity because I'm really liking the present day Lisbon side of the story. The fact that the present day story is first person helps too, I find it so much more readable than the older side of the story. I'd like to see something showing me that these two stories are connected to get me into the earlier story but on page 200 or so it feels like reading two completely separate books.I'm looking forward to finding the connections and am kind of trusting the book as a "Gold Dagger" winner to deliver on its promises, though I'm probably missing things due to reading the Nazi bits and falling asleep.The two stories in different times is reminding me of Peter Robinson's _In a Dry Season_ that we read a couple of years ago. I think Robinson did a far better job of connecting his stories in the course of the book though.So no, I'm not finding both storylines to be enthralling I'm afraid and the prologue obviously didn't make an impression upon me. I do really like the present day story though and I'll keep reading to find out what happens.You know how sometimes you can love one book by an author whilst finding another unreadable? It feels like Wilson has managed to do this in a single book to me!
What do You think about A Small Death In Lisbon (2002)?
Quando se começa a ler o Último Acto em Lisboa, a primeira impressão ás primeiras páginas é de fechar o livro… mas após a leitura de mais algumas linhas a opinião deixa de ser a mesma, mas reside a pergunta, o que é que 2 histórias tão diferentes passadas em épocas tão diferentes têm a ver uma com a outra?… Tudo. A acção começa com um assassinio no final dos anos 90. e regressa logo a seguir para trás até 1941, onde Klaus é enviado pelo Reich até ao nosso país. 6 decadas de história, desde o inicio da 2ª guerra na Alemanha, passando depois para Portugal, que era um verdadeiro covil de espiões ingleses e alemães, a neutralidade do nosso país durante a guerra, os anos de ditadura sob a mão de Salazar, a queda do regime na sequencia da revolução de Abril, até ao final do milénio. Paralelamente desenrola-se uma investigação por parte de um agente da Policia Judiciaria no assassinio de uma jovem… a história tem tudo a ver com a outra; de um rigor hitórico impressionante, este último acto em lisboa, é sem dúvida o melhor livro de Robert Wilson que com ele arrecadou o CWA Gold Dagger para o melhor romance policial de 1999. é um livro impressionante, e indespensavél em qualquer prateleira de livros.
—Nuno Chaves
Portugal, 1940s and 1990s. Wilson is a UK-born author of which I don't think I've seen many books here in US (in fact also the copy I read was bought in Ireland).Nice amount of details in the descriptions in the story, and it keeps you wondering what happened. The history parts of the story, from 1940s to 1990s, only bind to the story in the end, when it seems to be resolved. Enough action and enough interesting characters too. I'd say 8 to 8 1/2 stars out of 10, but the location being in Portugal and the story having enough details (not just words or descriptions of how things look, but how they smell and how the Portuguese general attitude to something is etc) will make it a nice solid 9. I was hoping it to be enough action of the other Robert (Ludlum that is.. as opposed to the ones where it's just talk), and with some regional variations and characters (like Salvo Montalbano would be for Sicily), and this had both.A few quick notes for future (as the book is probably in US still after us); the measurements in the book are metric.200 escudos, if I remember correctly, was about $ 1 (or 1000 esc = $ 5)/20 C degrees = about 70 F, 35 C = about 90 F.
—Anna
Well, this is one of the few I haven't finished. Goodness knows I tried. I just couldn't get through it. I was forcing myself to read it the way one forces one's self to eat a few bites of a food one doesn't like.The story wasn't bad. I didn't like any of the characters. I found them all crass and frankly I got tired of the sex. Tedious or disturbing is how it came off. I was uncomfortable with the amount of rape and treating women as objects in this book, not people. Come to think of it the men aren't regarded as much more than that either. And that may have been the author's point, but it doesn't mean I have to endure it when I have over a hundred books to read and many of them I am so looking forward to reading.Perhaps I'll come back to this some day. The thriller/mystery part of the plot wasn't bad. I liked the 2 detectives interacting together best in fact. But I'm tossing this one aside indefinitely, awards or no awards. I just don't like it enough to keep dragging myself through it.
—Joyce
