First in Russian: the novel by the outstanding Catalan writer Jaume Cabré, “I Confess.” The book has been translated into twelve languages, and its total circulation is approaching half a million copies.
The novel’s hero, Adrià Ardevall, a musician and connoisseur of art, a polyglot, reviews his life before the invisible broom sweeps away from his memory all events one after another. He remembers his childhood and the loving care of his nanny Lola, a cold and pragmatic mother, and an erudite father with a mysterious fate. The most valuable treasure in his father’s antique shop was an old violin, the Stradivari “Storione,” on which the shadow of a long-ago crime lay. But it turns out Adrià’s life story cannot be reduced to a few decades—everything began many centuries earlier, in the Catalan monastery of Sant Pere de Burgal, and the sounds of the fantastically perfect violin, created by a Cremonese master, magically transform people’s destinies. In the end, the hero’s world is flooded with dark secrets and mystical riddles—solving them will take years.