Year of publication: 2015
Valuation: Highly recommended
The ultra-brief summary of the novel would be a re-reading of Virgil’s Aeneid. There are five voices in charge of narrating the story of Aeneas, who arrives in Carthage after the defeat of Troy, and Elisa, queen of Tyre and now of Carthage, where she also arrived in exile: those of Aeneas and Elisa themselves, that of Anna (Elisa’s half-witch sister), that of the god Eros and that of the poet Virgil.
The three human voices take the lead in narrating the events, while the voice of Eros functions as a kind of string-puller who occasionally digresses into the human and the divine. For his part, the voice of a Virgil who has peered into the story of Elisa and Aeneas from later centuries serves, at the same time, to introduce an element of “modernity” by placing the author within the work and the author in front of his work.
All of this in a beautiful text that mixes myth and poetry and that, despite being set in the distant past and seeming like a “simple adventure novel”, brings to the table timeless themes, situations and dilemmas such as love, power, the weight of guilt and remorse or violence. Along with the above, the author’s rhythm and the construction of the two main characters, deeply human in their doubts and contradictions, are remarkable.
On the less positive side, I have a strange feeling about Anna’s voice. Granted, she is the daughter of a king, half-sister of a queen and half-sorceress, but I think there is a lack of some differentiation between her voice and that of the now adult Elisa and Aeneas.
In any case, the general assessment after reading The goalkeeper’s whistle It is more than positive. Good story, good main characters and good handling of rhythm, as well as a poetic and elegant style without being cloying.
Source: https://unlibroaldia.blogspot.com/2024/08/irene-vallejo-el-silbido-del-arquero.html
