An elderly man in Pozan Poland is found murdered. The more closely the investigating officer, Mariej Bartol, examines the scene the odder it looks. The victim is posed, naked, and almost seems to be smiling despite the strangulation. Then there are the Latin mottoes found on the flower vase, inside the bow of a pair of glasses. Enough to set one to thinking.
Then a second man is found, also posed, also with a few Latin mottoes discretely tucked around the scene.
We get quite a bit of the personal life of our hero, and his mother is some character. But it is laid on with a sledge hammer.
Our hero seems to have been born dumb and misses the obvious a few times.
On the other hand the officers he works with are well drawn, and there is much to’ing and fro’ing in and around Poznan in a wet spring. It has some sense of place.
Then there is the Latin scholar he recruits through his mother’s contacts to make sense of the tags. She is a firecracker from go to whoa, and our hero suffers a rush to blood to his first friend, making him even more slow-witted than usual.
I read it on the Kindle and it was not easy. There were odd font characters, broken lines, run-on paragraphs, spelling errors, and more. The translator into English seems to be a Pole, and I guess that explains the syntax errors and the unfathomable idioms which may make sense in Polish but do not in English. Maybe the translator once worked for Jimmie Carter. (Either you get it, or you don’t.)
Joanna Jodelka
Before trying another one of these I would want some reassurance that editorial improvements had been made. On Amazon the paperback is $0.08 which is less than the Kindle version. Not sure what to make of that.
It is a double whammy, a lousy presentation and badly translated. It was too much like reading student essays. There were students of my acquaintance who thought that if the work they submitted was incomprehensible, then the instructor — moi — could not fail it. WRONG! They would then challenge me on the ground that their paper was…, yes, incomprehensible, and since I did not therefore comprehend it, I could not honestly fail it. Imagine the time I spend in such conversations. Now it is easy to see why retirement has its attractions.
For what is worth and to balance the books, I had more than one similar conversation with a Ph.D.-bearing lecturers who asserted, no evidence required, that their lousy teaching stimulated students to learn for themselves. This was no argument about the meaning of lousy teaching, they admitted it and celebrated it. Needless to say these individuals all prospered. What did I say about retirement?
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