Travel and Live in Ecuador

El Viajero de Praga

I´ve been reading a book called El Viajero de Praga and I finally finished it today. It was pretty dense and hard work, especially the first 100 pages when I kept getting distracted and going back to books in English.

It´s hard to know how much of that was down to the quality of writing and how much to my Spanish. I still don´t understand every word so when nothing much was going on I guess I missed some of the detail - probably the rich language. The bits I enjoyed were the faster-paced sections where the main character Kronz got exasperated by the chaos of Ecuador´s government offices and public hospitals. It all sounded too familiar, but it was funnier to read about it than experience it.

I picked up the book in the shop because it was prominently displayed and sounded interesting. Afterwards I found out that the author, Javier Vasconez, is quite quite highly rated in and outside of Ecuador-lots of critics in Spain seem to be falling over themselves to to praise him. Personally I though the style and plot was a bit similar to The Plague by Albert Camus but maybe I just need to read it all again and learn a bit more vocabulary.

Here is a link to other opinions about Vasconez from the magazine Otro Lunes.