A publisher’s instinct in recognising talent is the thread connecting Eugene Chirovici’s own story and his novel. E.O. Chirovici, a Romanian author who has tasted phenomenal success with his first book in English, The Book of Mirrors , was turned down by several literary agents before he found Peters Fraser and Dunlop. The agent at PFD who read the novel said in an interview that she fell in love with the work immediately.
So does New York-based literary agent Peter Kratz when he reads a partial manuscript submitted by a man called Richard Flynn. Attached to the manuscript is a gripping letter in which Flynn, who works at an advertising agency and has always dreamt of becoming a writer, says that a slice of his past had come back to haunt him “like a detonator”. Overwhelmed by the memories, he writes it all down and hopes it will get published. There are three protagonists in the story: Flynn; Joseph Weider, a celebrated psychology professor; and Laura Baines, the woman Flynn loves. Katz is intrigued by the seemingly honest and warm letter. He sits down to read the manuscript along with us.
Dramatic turn
Flynn’s story is set in Princeton in the late ’80s. An attractive, intelligent woman, Baines, who is studying psychology at the university, moves into Flynn’s apartment. She introduces him to her friend, one of the most important figures teaching at Princeton at that time, Professor Weider, and Flynn starts working at the professor’s library. Things take a dramatic turn when the professor is killed one night.
It is here that Flynn’s racy storytelling comes to an abrupt end, for his manuscript is incomplete. Katz is impatient to know the rest. So are we. Sniffing the potential for a bestseller here (and he isn’t wrong), Katz goes in search of Flynn, but finds that he is dead. Flynn’s partner says she knows nothing about a manuscript, and the case is still unsolved.
Who’s the killer?
Who killed Weider and why? Was Flynn’s manuscript fiction or the truth or a confession? As the original detective in the case, Roy Freeman, remembers Marcel Proust once saying: “Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.”
The Book of Mirrors is sophisticated and complex, but also a tad unnerving. “Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin,” said Barbara Kingsolver, the American novelist. Chirovici spins a story out of this, showing just how manipulative human memory can be.
What we choose to believe can often morph into the truth in our fuzzy heads and objectivity can become our own subjective realities, blurring the line between fiction and non-fiction. A journalist whom Katz hires to solve the case realises this when he is faced with contradictory, but convincing, versions of the story of the night of the murder.
Chirovici is a masterful storyteller. He makes every story ring like the truth to the reader. The three main characters are well etched, but the second half of the book falls rather short of the thrill of the first.
The book within the book is especially clever and elegant. A great whodunit (or a whydunit as he calls it), The Book of Mirrors is an ideal easy read. It can also serve as an antidote, I realised, as I lay sick in bed while being transported to the ’80s.
The Book of Mirrors ; E.O. Chirovici, Random House, ₹599.
