Federico Andahazi: The Merciful Women

Random House $26.95

Review: Nick Smith

Argentine author Andahazi plainly likes to weave historical events into his fiction. He is also clearly predisposed towards writing about sex.

His first novel, The Anatomist, concerned the based-on-fact episode in which a 16th-century anatomist clinically discovers the clitoris, publishes his findings and is tried by the Church for heresy.

The Anatomist also features the separate but intertwined story - apparently a matter of historical record as well - of a sexually hysterical woman who circumcises her daughters and runs away to establish a bordello.

In that book, Andahazi succeeded in proving that truth is stranger than fiction, no matter how embellished.

With The Merciful Women, any attempt at lulling readers into believing that the author is merely manipulating historical events is abandoned.

Using the famous, laudanum-soaked Swiss meeting of Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and his wife Mary (that resulted in Mrs Shelley penning Frankenstein) as his starting point, Andahazi's new novel concerns the mysterious Legrand triplets.

Two of the sisters look like goddesses, the third is hideously deformed. Furthermore, the ugly sister needs to ingest male sperm or she shuffles off this mortal coil.

If she suffers, all three feel the pain; if she dies, so do her sisters, whose task it is to procure the seed upon which all their lives depend. This isn't magic realism, it's just plain ridiculous.

To make such a preposterous premise fly requires a clever mind, a delicate way with words and an engaging sense of humour.

Andahazi seems bereft of these qualities. His prose is leaden, matter-of-fact, frustrating the reader, who yearns for a spark of imagination and originality in the writing. His attempts at humour would still sound moronic even if uttered in a Catholic boys' school.

A particularly low point is reached when Andahazi jests that the sisters should learn to bleat like sheep in order to seduce lonely shepherds.

The sexual descriptions are dull, only a step away from something one could read in Penthouse Forum, while the plot lurches from preposterous to stupid.

The Merciful Women has no redeeming features; it is an insult to the intelligence and as sexy as a drunken fumble in the back seat of a Mini.

* Nick Smith is an Auckland journalist.