Book Thoughts: The Capital of Latecomers by Nina Nenova

The Capital of Latecomers by Nina Nenova
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I got this book as part of a Kindle First promotion (so it was free) several months ago, and finally got around to reading it. The premise of the book, at least as it was presented, possibly dealing with quantum mechanics and the mysteries of time and free will, made it interesting. Ultimately though, the book fell short for me (and some of that could have to do with it being translated from Bulgarian, I believe).

The exploration of these ideas just never took off in an in depth way because the plot just didn't connect in any real way. It begins with a famous artist moving to some kind of mysterious isolated community in a desert (called The Oasis), at an exorbitant price. He, Rhein, goes to try to recover his vision for painting. He appears to be going mad at the isolation, with some sort of split personality or schizophrenia attached to amnesia (taking the concept of an unreliable narrator to an extreme). As such, throughout the book, you never know what to think of anything Rhein relates. It's one thing to keep mystery in a book; its another not to give readers anything firm to grasp while reading.

The plot takes us from a girl (Vanda) from Rhein's agent's office showing up to help him. Her behavior, as seen through Rhein's eyes (who seemingly loves and hates her), is erratic and unexplainable until (maybe) at the very end. Then, for no reason that's clear until later, Rhein, after having not met anyone else for the first year spent at The Oasis, starts to meet his fellow millionaire hermits and they, along with some staff, end up being murdered. Then, randomly, there's stuff thrown in about an ancient tribal legend about the location of The Oasis, the possibility of ghosts, a legend of things called Remorites that might have some connection to the theory of quantum mechanics as proposed by one of the millionaire hermits, and everything just begins to get muddled with no real sense of direction or connection. Perhaps, if the book had been longer, these things could have been explained and explored in more detail. But they weren't and so, in the end, you feel like you read a book where some stuff happened for no apparent reason, and you have no understanding of any of the "reality" the author was attempting to create for the book's world.

In addition, the characters show no real depth - to the extent you can trust anything you learn about them from the extremely unreliable narrator. Thus, as you get to the end, you're left with no understanding of what occurred in a string of events that are tangentially connected but for no overarching purpose. In a book that was supposed to have some commentary on the concept of choices changing the realities within a quantum world, having a reader leave with a sense of meaningless seems a mistake. Perhaps there's a message in that meaningless, but ultimately, I think it fell flat.

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