Speculative Fiction Junkie

Eric Stener Carlson

I've become quite a fan of the output of Tartarus Press lately. In fact, during the past few months I've started buying considerably fewer books than I normally do and often use the savings to acquire a Tartarus Press title here and there. Just when I was starting to think I would never meet a book published by Tartarus Press that I didn't like, I encountered The Saint Perpetuus Club of Buenos Aires, the debut novel from Eric Stener Carlson.

Saint Perpetuus is the story of Miguel, who finds a portion of a handwritten diary written between the lines of a copy of Butler's Lives of the Saints he finds in a used bookstore. The author claims to have developed the ability to control time and makes all sorts of other egomaniacal and sociopathic claims. He recounts how he uses this power to overcome the problems he experiences as a bored civil servant. Miguel, himself a bored civil servant, gets drawn in by the story and starts to seek out other copies of Lives of the Saints in used bookstores across Buenos Aires in the hopes of finding other diary entires. His increasingly persistent pursuit leads him across the city and causes him to neglect his family and other duties.

The substance of the book, as well as its problems, are very similar to those found in Zoran Živković's The Last Book (review here). Both books prominently feature books and bookstores and somewhat superficially make use of secret societies.

The main problem with Saint Perpetuus is that it is a boring story. Huge portions of the book are devoted to explaining the tedium of the life of a civil servant. We get a double dose of this because both Miguel and the writer of the diary are dissatisfied civil servants. Whatever end this overly generous serving of tedium was supposed to serve, it was too much, as there is nothing in the rest of the story to make its sufferance justifiable.

What's more, there is very little setting or character development. This makes it difficult to care about the fact that Miguel's relationship with his family is deteriorating because we haven't been given much reason to care about them in the first place. Additionally, after having read this book, I have almost no greater sense of what Buenos Aires is like than I did beforehand. And Mr. Carlson's ultra straightforward writing style doesn't lend any sense of atmosphere to the story whatsoever.

The story thus feels disorientingly unmoored to begin with, but then Mr. Carlson adds elements like a secret society which don't really seem called for by the internal logic of the book and don't really serve any purpose. Mr. Carlson can almost get away with this, though, because the moral of the story doesn't really require that the rest of the book make sense. This too is something it shares with The Last Book.

To top it all off, the moral of the story will be more or less already familiar to anyone who has listened to common tenets of wisdom passed down from parent to child for generations, which makes reading this novel not unlike listening to your grandmother tell a four hour long story only for the punchline to be "be careful what you wish for, because you might get it." Now, without doubt, commonly known tenets of wisdom like this can successfully be woven into stories, but in this particular case the story doesn't really add anything to the reader's understanding of it, which renders the bulk of the reading experience more of a burden than a path to enlightenment.

Rating: 3/10

The True First

The Saint Perpetuus Club of Buenos Aires was first published by Tartarus Press in 2009 and is limited to 300 copies.

[This review is based on a review copy]