Author: José C. Vales
Title: El pensionado de Neuwelke
Year of publication: 2013
My rating: 2 out of 10
This is the book I thought was fantasy but it turned out not to be. This didn’t make the book a whole lot better, though. In this novel, a governess in a boarding school in Livonia (this is an area in the Baltic states) during the 1840s suffers from an affliction that makes some sort of a ghost-like substance come out of her every once in a while, freaking everybody out. So for 460 pages, the ghost-like substance comes out of the governess and everybody freaks. Then it comes out some more, and everybody freaks. And then the book mercifully ends. And that’s it. There is no explanation of the ghost-like substance and no real resolution to anything. The novel is some sort of a weird pseudo-Gothic thing that just goes on and on and on pointlessly.
After finishing this painfully long and wordy novel, I did some research to find out what the hell it was all supposed to mean and discovered that people who believe in all kind of paranormal crap do think there was a real governess in Livonia in 1840s who had this ghost-like substance come out of her. So El pensionado de Neuwelke was directed towards this weird audience.
I knew things were bad in Spain but I had no idea they were so bad that 460-page novels on ghost-like substances were sorely needed. I have no idea if the book will be translated into English and I don’t care to find out because I didn’t like it. The book gets 2 stars instead of zero because there was an endearing character called Augusta Dehmel who suffered from insane jealousy and that character was finely done. Spanish authors have not lost their skill of writing about jealousy in a convincing way. Other than that, the novel was a major disappointment.
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