Remember the Scorpion

(Paperback)

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Description

Lima, 1970: a tremendous earthquake has just struck the Peruvian capital, and mayhem reigns. Tensions are high, with a population reeling from the disaster and mesmerized by the World Cup. Enter detective Simon Weiss, tasked with solving two seemingly unrelated murders: the crucifying and beheading of a Japanese man in a pool hall and an apparent murder-by-hanging of an elderly Jewish man. Joined by Lieutenant Kato Kanashiro, whose deep ties to Japanese-Peruvian culture inform the case in surprisingly personal ways, Weiss traces the histories of two very different criminals and their crimes.
Weiss is haunted by the trauma of a childhood partly spent in a German concentration camp. Weiss is troubled boozing, coke-snorting, and vengeful. He is unfaithful to his prostitute lover and takes up with a younger, married woman who is a fellow survivor of the Holocaust. Weiss and Kanashiro's banter is hilariously recorded with Goldembergs deadpan police procedural narration.
Beyond a simple pulp, Remember the Scorpion tracks the wreckage of the Second World War and reconstructs it in the conflicted psyche of a South American detective. Weiss must uncover the relation between the perpetrators and their crimes, while searching deep within himself to conquer his own demons.

Reviews

"I count Isaac Goldemberg's novels, The Fragmented Life of Don Jacobo Lerner and Play by Play as two of the most inventive and linguistically beautiful novels to have been written by any Latin American novelist in the last forty years or so. He and I were both published by Persea Books and their list was remarkable --Juan Benet, Nazim Hikmet, Osip Mandelstaum, and others of a first rank--, but Isaac's fiction was, in my opinion, the best that Persea offered." --Oscar Hijuelos (Pulitzer Prize) "The Fragmented Life of Don Jacobo Lerner marks Isaac Goldemberg as one of the highest exponents of the new Latin American narrative. The humor, keen perception of everyday life, fluid narrative and depth of character, all make the experience of reading this novel highly recommendable." -- Mario Vargas Llosa "Troubled adolescents have been a staple of fiction at least since Goethe's time - and because so much of their trouble has come from identity crises, some of the more interesting adolescents have been Jewish, their sorrows and apprenticeships complicated by uncertainty about national or cultural loyalties. One thinks of characters in the work of Proust, Philip Roth and Elias Canetti. Marcos Karushansky Avila, the protagonist of the Peruvian writer Isaac Goldemberg's brilliant second novel, Play by Play, is a fascinating addition to that group."--Ariel Dorfman (The New York Times Book Review) "[The Fragmented Life of Don Jacobo Lerner] is a moving exploration of the human condition." --The New York Times Book Review "[In The Fragmented Life of Don Jacobo Lerner] Goldemberg shows with great perception how history, belief, and myth can burden people with more contradictions than they can bear. This insight, joined to well-observed details, makes this novel a wonderfullu promising debut for a gifted writer." --Newsweek "The Fragmented Life of Don Jacobo Lerner is a sign that Latin America, too, may produce its Bellows, Roths, and Malamuds." --Boston Phoenix

Author Bio

Born in Peru, in 1945, Isaac Goldemberg is a renowned poet, playwright, and fiction writer. He has lived in New York since 1964 and is the Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Eugenio Maria de Hostos Community College of the City University of New York, where he is also the Director of the Latin American Writers Institute and the Editor of Hostos Review, an international journal of culture. He is the author of four novels, including the critically acclaimed Play by Play and The Fragmented Life of Don Jacobo Lerner. He lives in New York.