Infanta: A Novel

By Bodo Kirchhoff

Haunted by their obsessive and unspoken love for their beautiful maidservant, a native girl they raised from infancy, three Jesuit missionaries in a Philippine village find relief from their guilt by... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0670842613
• ISBN13: 9780670842612
• Release Date: September 1992
• Publisher: Viking
• Length: 432 Pages
• Weight: 1.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 1.3" x 6.5"

Customer Reviews

Touching and highly erotic

Modern German literature tends to be very arty and extremely boring. If it were not for Bodo Kirchhoff. He is a novelist, essayist and playwright, focussing mostly on obscure erotic possessions. His protagonists are mostly male, in their fourties, good-looking and without any influence on what is happening to them. Usually, his characters rather react to all the catastrophies, murder and death they are faced with than act. The main character of this novel, a German fashion model named Kurt Lucas, experiences exactly this: It is not he himself who is in charge of things, but everything just happens to him. Kirchhoff never tells his readers about Lucas's thoughts; Lucas remains a completely blank and empty character. Still, "Infanta" is a really beautiful novel, set in the exotic Phillippines. This setting stresses even more how helpless Lucas is, although we get the impression that even in a familiar environment he must always be a stranger even to himself. Kirchhoff's prose is beautiful in style, at least in the German original (I have not read the translation) and the main characters of the story (except for Lucas) are described very plastically. Furthermore, the novel is highly erotic from the first to the last page.