Centroeuropa - Vicente Luis Mora

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Centroeuropa

by
Vicente Luis Mora

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

Title:	Centroeuropa
Author:	Vicente Luis Mora
Genre:	Novel
Written:	2020 (Eng. 2023)
Length:	185 pages
Original in:	Spanish
Availability:	Centroeuropa - US
	Centroeuropa - US (Spanish)
	Centroeuropa - UK
	Centroeuropa - Canada
	Centroeuropa - España

	from: Bookshop.org (US)

Spanish title: Centroeuropa
Translated by Rahul Bery

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Our Assessment:

B : quite well twisted and presented

See our review for fuller assessment.

Review Summaries
Source	Rating	Date	Reviewer
El País	A+	30/10/2020	Carlos Zanón

From the Reviews:

"Todo lo que acomete como escritor Vicente Luis Mora (Córdoba, 1970) en Centroeuropa es difícil y todo lo hace espectacularmente bien. (...) La única posibilidad de que Centroeuropa no esté entre lo mejor del año es que quien confecciona esas listas, lisa y llanamente, no se haya leído este libro fascinante y loco. (...) La narración es viva por la música literaria de su prosa nunca excesiva. (...) Esta novela (...) es un reloj que da todas las horas con el prodigio añadido de leernos aquí y ahora. Y consiguiéndolo con un texto fuera de modas, ansias, vanidades o complejos. De principio a fin: impecable." - Carlos Zanón, El País

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

Centroeuropa is largely set in nineteenth-century Prussia, in the small town of Szonden -- "such a small place that its name was and is only known in the immediate surroundings" -- on the Oder (in what is now Poland). The novel begins with the narrator, who calls himself Redo Hauptshammer, having recently arrived. He had planned to settle here with his wife, Odra, on a patch of land that, thanks to recent agrarian reforms, he could own and work outright (rather than as, say, a tenant-farmer) -- making him: "the first free cropper in Szonden and a full citizen of our little town".
Tragically, however, Odra was killed en route, and Redo arrives with her casket, wanting to bury her on his new land. There's a surprise in store for him, however, when he starts digging: he finds a frozen body. And then another, and another -- a veritable cemetery of dead soldiers. The small plot is literally littered with them -- thirty-one that he digs up, and another thirty-two left in the ground. For much of the novel Redo tries to figure out what to do with the damned and unnatural corpses -- stiffs that don't thaw, much less decompose (though at least they don't give off a bad smell either, so: "I could leave them there until I decided what to do")-- and even his most ambitious efforts don't work out. As to burying his wife, after a while:

I stopped looking for a definitive resting place for Odra in the exposed earth. One night I understood that to excavate was to attract more frozen soldiers, more horror.

       So he buries her ... closer to home, which takes care of that problem. The other corpses, however, remain something of an issue -- though eventually they're put to reasonably good use, and the whole matter is ultimately taken care of in a way by the highest of authorities -- one that understands that: "A nation cannot survive with the truth exposed".
       While the frozen bodies are one secret that the authorities want to keep, Redo came to Szonden with another. We know from early on that Redo is not his real name (just as Odra's isn't her, either), and that, born to a woman who ran a Viennese bordello, he and Odra fled to start a new life -- taking a longer, circuitous route to reach their destination not so much so as to better cover their tracks and past but rather to convince as the new selves they want to present themselves as, emerging as 'Redo' and 'Odra'. There are hints as to the secret along the way (such as the mention of that: "tiny and elusive person hidden deep inside me, who gives me sound advice whenever I have the time to go down to my catacombs"), including in how Redo behaves with and around others, and his caution in certain circumstances, but only near the end does is it fully revealed (and, yes, it's a fair doozy).
       Beyond the story, Mora plays some other games with his text, including giving it several mathematical twists. We know that Redo learns from experience: "Every time I dig into this earth, corpses appear. Double the number each time, to be precise. [...] On the first day I found one soldier; the second, two, the third, four, and the fourth, yesterday, I found these eight bodies", and he winds up with thirty-one exposed ones and thirty-two more still buried -- and; "The body of Odra, another victim of war, is body number sixty-four": like the number of spaces on a chess-board. The novel is also presented in six chapters, with each roughly twice the length of the preceding one: the first is only three pages long, the final one covering around ninety pages, filling half the book. The final chapter also concludes with a list where he records a number of things -- thirty-two of them, all numbered.
       Stylistically, too, Centroeuropa is a novel very much of the nineteenth century (and continental), with epigraphs by Stendhal, Fontane, and Goethe, as well as a cameo by Rahel Varnhagen (with Redo reporting that: "until Rahel's death I kept up a correspondence with her. What an extraordinary woman, enviable in so many ways").
       There's quite a mix of stories here, with the novel's elements of the fantastical -- most notably the corpses, but also, for example, the local gentle giant (of varying height) -- and romance (Redo's deep devotion to Odra -- even as he continues to have sexual desires after her death, release from which he makes sure to get far away from Szonden ...), and a dash of mystery as to the real identity of Redo (even as he seems quite forthcoming about his background from the first ("I, Redo Hauptshammer, born in a Viennese brothel at some point during the death throes of the eighteenth century") -- though a handful of translator's (foot)notes point out discrepancies in the account that suggest some narrative unreliability, and by the end Redo admits: "I know that some of the things I have related are not true. At least not completely"). (One might also read into the names: Redo certainly seems to be re-doing his life -- and while the German reading of his surname would be: Haupts-hammer, he is certainly the novel's haupt-shammer ('haupt' being the German for: main).)
       The novel also deals with the social and political changes of those times, as well as the legacy of war (and some foreshadowing of future ones). Incidentally, Redo winds up successful in his endeavors: as he sums up in his later years: "I changed my life, yes, and achieved much of what I set out to do" -- including in establishing the business he had planned from the first (so that: "I possess in practice a monopoly on all the sugar beet in the Oderbruch") -- though he did lose the love of his life, and with her also the life he wanted to lead, and share with her, which then must also remain suppressed until his death. (But, as he notes, boy, will they be surprised when they find his corpse .....)
       It's all quite neatly done, with Mora playing several games here, adding up to a decent and quite clever little entertainment.

- M.A.Orthofer, 19 September 2025

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Links:

Centroeuropa:

Peninsula Press publicity page
Bellevue Literary Press publicity page
Galaxia Gutenberg publicity page

Reviews:

Vicente Luis Mora:

Diario de lecturas - weblog
Faculty page

Other books of interest under review:

See Index of Spanish literature

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About the Author:

Spanish author Vicente Luis Mora was born in 1970.

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