Hidden away in the pages of an old copy of Lives of the Saints is a diary brimming with heresy and claims of supernatural powers. When Miguel Ibaรฑez stumbles across it in the strange bookshop he first believes it to be the ravings of a lunatic. But what if it is true? What if the anonymous author has really learned the secrets of controlling time? Could Miguel learn to do the same and therefore correct all the mistakes in his life?
Trapped in a mediocre job at a forgotten Ministry, his marriage falling apart, Miguel desperately searches for more hidden entries. This leads him on a chase through the forbidden bookstores, abandoned buildings and dark subways of Buenos Aires.
Miguelโs obsession soon brings him to the doors of the Saint Perpetuus Club, a secret society that holds the key to the salamanca, the cave where the Devil grants all wishes . . . for a price.
The deeper Miguel goes, the more he wonders whom he can trust. His wife, his friends, his old philosophy professor? Perhaps they are all members of the Club? Miguel is willing to risk his life, and his immortal soul, to uncover the secrets of The Saint Perpetuus Club of Buenos Aires.
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From Publishers Weekly
A chance discovery in the margin notes of an old book opens a young man up to fantastic possibilities in his everyday world in Carlson's first novel, a freewheeling bibliophilic adventure. Miguel Ibanez is taking a break from his thankless civil service job in a used bookstore in Buenos Aires when he stumbles upon a misshelved translation of Samuel Butler's Lives of the Saints. Scrawled between the printed lines of the chapter on Saint Perpetuus is an account written in the hand of a modern man, who purports to be the real saint and who claims to have learned how to manipulate time. Miguel's discovery that Perpetuus wrote the full account of his life and learning across numerous copies of the Butler volume sends him hither and yon throughout the city, seeking copies held by a small cult of collectors dedicated to Perpetuus. Though his obsessive pursuit strains relations with his family and his superiors at work, it introduces him to a lively cast of eccentrics straight out of a Borges story and indoctrinates him into a new awareness of secrets and intrigues about the city hidden to ordinary eyes. Unpredictable and steeped in allusions to classic and contemporary works, this spry exercise in magic realism can be enjoyed as a parable on how our reading transforms our perception of the world. Carlson is also the author of I Remember Julia: Voices of the Disappeared and The Pear Tree: Is Torture Ever Justified?
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