The Content Reader

One of our book club members recommended this book for discussion in our April meeting. To be ready in time I started early just in case. No problem there, it was finished in now time at all. It is a wonderful, steamy, violent, horrifying and interesting book. Allende, an excellent storyteller, tells a family saga from colonial Saint-Domingue, present day Haiti, in the end of the 18 th century. We meet a gallery of different people; white colonialists, military people, slaves, mulattos, young and old. Slave trade is the backbone of the colonialism. Without it they would not survive and prosper. It is the time when the slaves started to fight for an independent state, the foreigners fight for their plantations and life style, the military is doing their job and

This is quite a different book. I bought it because the title fascinated me, and the short summary of the story on the back cover. The story takes place during 1943-44. It starts in Trieste where a man is found beaten half to death in the street. He is taken to a German war ship where a doctor takes care of him. To everybody’s surprise the man survives. But he has no memory and he has no language. The doctor, who is Finnish, tries to find out who the man is. The only clue is the name ‘Sampo Karjalainen’ sown into the inside collar of his jacket and a handkerchief with the initials S.K. Presuming that the patient is Finnish he starts teaching him Finnish. However, the memory is not coming back so the good doctor thinks that the best idea would be to go to Finland. Once there, well-known places, peoples or incidents might trigger the memory to come back.  He manages to put the patient on a train and ship to Helsinki with a recommendation letter to a fellow doctor in the pocket....