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El Hombre Que Quiso Matarme (2012)

by Shūichi Yoshida(Favorite Author)

3.56 of 5 Votes: 3

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Destino

review 1: Villain is a thoughtful and thought-provoking read that could have easily been titled ‘Victim’, since the two roles are thoroughly entwined in Yoshida’s absorbing tale of the murder of a young insurance sales agent. The great strength of the story is its telling, characterisation, contextualisation, atmosphere and plotting. While keeping the temporal structure linear, Yoshida tells the tale from multiple perspectives using both third and first person voices to detail the relationships between characters and their interactions. It’s a technique that works surprisingly well, I suspect because Yoshida’s narrative has an understated style, avoiding any melodrama, and yet captures the subtleties of emotion and human relations. He does a particularly nice job of de... moretailing the relationships between friends and family members and their petty jealousies, awkward moments, lonely reflections, secret fantasies and encounters. These are nicely contextualised with respect to the social relations of Japanese society. The result is a layered, nuanced and interesting tapestry of views that thorough unsettles and blurs any notion of villain and victim, and a compelling plot that charts the aftermath of the murder and how the case unfolds to a resolution, but never from the perspective of the police. In this sense it’s a kind of police-less procedural. I especially like the denouement that threw up as many questions as it answered, creating closure but leaving the reader pondering the tale. In my view an excellent piece of literary crime fiction.
review 2: This is one of those books that tells you the ending in the first few pages and you think, "Okay, now that you've told me the ending, what is the rest of the book about? What's left for me to discover?" But this book, I feel, is more about the individual characters than about discovering who the true murderer is or if it really is who we were told it was. This book had so many point of views from a variety of different people, each with their own personality, history, and emotions. Villain often left me feeling a variety of emotions after one scene, sometimes contradictory to how I'd felt a few pages prior to that moment. Definitely a good read! less

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