Customer Reviews

A Deal With The Devil (Eurocrime)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

Martin Suter is my favorite writer of thrillers in the German language. He is a Swiss living abroad (why is it that so many of my favorite writers are expatriates like myself? Nabokov, Sebald, Doeblin, O'Brian, and quite a few more... ). He has a sideline in his publishing career: he writes splendid little satires on business life and the subculture of the 'Schickeria', as we call the yuppies and nouveaux riches in German. His main location is Zurich, which has its fair share of bankers, art dealers, other dealers, confidence men, etc. Actually his best novel is his latest, set in the art market scene in Zurich, but that one is not out in English yet.
The Deal with the Devil is a little burdened by the fact that some of its narrative elements are a little unconventional. Actually I think these parts are very good, but they challenge belief and are not straightforward prose.
The story is about a Zurich divorcee, a young woman struggling to get a foothold. Her husband had tried to kill her and is now in an asylum. She is into the wild life and we get to know her on a bad drug ride. We learn that she has more than a drug problem: she suffers from a peculiar disorder of her senses which makes her confuse smells, sounds and colors. That is a rare problem to have and it takes her and us some getting used to. (It is called synesthesia. Nabokov had it on a smaller scale; you find his comments on it in his autobiography: Speak, Memory.)
She tries to get away from this life and takes a job in a mountain resort hotel in a village. Simple life, right. She finds herself in a difficult web of social relations at her workplace and in the village. Not exactly a haven for troubled souls. Don't think for a moment that you are being led into esoteric experiences, or that this is the umpteenth version of Dr.Faust. This is in the end just plain neurology and criminology.
If you want to keep your ideas of Switzerland intact, as a clean and safe place with nice mountains and clean, reliable people, don't read this.

Martin Suter is a Swiss author, and his works came highly recommended to me by a couple of friends from that country. Normally I'm politely reluctant to read books that have been translated from German to English, even one that came as a gift as did this one, as many of them have turned out to be dry and somewhat disappointing, but this author's A Deal with the Devil is a diabolical tale was skillfully translated by British journalist and author Peter Millar. My friends had said that I wouldn't be let down, and I wasn't.

Zurich divorcee Sonia Frey fears for both her sanity and her life. She's a young woman under pressure to get a grip since her husband tried to kill her. He had been placed in an asylum, and Sonia has taken a walk on the wild side, so to speak, with a disturbing LSD trip. The book begins with the following passage on its first page:

"The air no longer smelled grey like slate and she could no longer see the voices.

The room lay in semi-darkness. Just enough daylight filtered through the venetian blinds for Sonia to find her way past the furniture and scattered clothing and get to the door.

She opened it to find herself in a hallway. From the stairwell beyond through the frosted glass in the apartment door light came in, and then went out.

She felt her way along the wall to the first of the three doors she had made out in the light from the stairwell. One of them had to be a toilet.

The door handle felt cool. Nothing more than that. Not bittersweet or sweet-and-sour. Just cool."

That was enough to have intrigued me, and this reader is glad to say that from that point on the tale got better, and the book was hard to put down. We quickly find out that Sonia doesn't really have a drug problem: she suffers from what's known as synesthesia. In physiology, it's the feeling of sensation in one part of the body when another part is stimulated. In psychology, it's the evocation of one kind of sense impression when another sense is stimulated, such as the sensation of color when a sound is heard. Though both definitions would fit here, it's the latter that seems to manifest itself in Sonia's mind.

She takes a job as a physiotherapist, her chosen craft, in a mountain resort hotel in Val Grisch, a fictional village located in the real Engadine region of southeastern Switzerland, which is separated from the rest of the country by the Rhaetian Alps. The region is stunningly beautiful, with its picturesque villages, meadows full of wildflowers, valleys with gurgling brooks, and high rugged mountains beautiful enough to take your breath away. The author skillfully paints a verbal picture of the region, yet behind this beauty, danger of a diabolical kind lurks.

A series of unusual events throws Sonia into even further turmoil. The mystery grows deeper as she discovers a strong parallel to these occurrences in local folkloric tales of the supernatural. Then she reads a book of old local fables in her room, and begins to wonder if the legend of the Devil of Milan could really be true... or could reality be even more ominous?

Already under pressure from her unusual sensory awareness, Sonia's mind is pushed almost to the breaking point by the atmosphere of terror building around her.

Will offer no spoilers here, but will say that author Suter leads us through some interesting twists and turns to a few real surprises and a fantastic and unexpected climax. That being said, all that remains is to say that this is a very original 5-star read, and this reader will be looking for more of Martin Suter's translated works such as his Small World in the near future.

an ideal travel read, as is the dark thriller `Deal with the devil' written by Martin Suter, a swiss writer which has been translated into English. My first read of a translated thriller, the story works well, with its drawing on deep and dark elements in nature to reflect the dark aspect of the legend that surrounds the village where the female lead works. A romantic novel that starts at a slow pace and has a disturbing thread running throughout the story-that the main lead can smell emotions and see sounds, a leftover disorder from a drug trip. Good page turner while travelling.