Beautiful freak

And the award for the longest (and possibly best) title of anything I've read this year goes to... a Swede. A native of the Scandinavian realm, that is, not a vegetable similar to Graham Taylor. Fiction in translation is not something I generally read a lot of, but so far this year there have been a couple and this next one, passed on to me by a willing dupe, was Carl-Johan Vallgren's nineteenth-century tale, The Horrific Sufferings of the Mind-Reading Monster Hercules Barefoot: His Wonderful Love and His Terrible Hatred. Even the acronym for that would be a mouthful. Ok, it's neither as witty or as pithy or as plain bonkers as the average Half Man Half Biscuit song title, but then not much is.

The story of the life of, well, a freak, Hercules Barefoot is a deformed deaf-mute dwarf born to a prostitute. Or at least part of his life, anyway – a lot more was hinted at in the prologue than actually happened in the novel, which did disappoint me slightly, but I do always like the creation of a larger world, dropping in details to give it hidden depths and history. Anyway, our hero, in my head at least resembles something out of Day of the Tentacle, but then my head can be a very odd place at times. Oh, and like the title says, he can actually read minds.

It's a colourful tale, taking in large areas of Europe and how Hercule is treated, or rather mistreated, by various parties. Although it is billed as a love story, with the protagonist being separated from his love and trying to track her down, to me it is more of a revenge story, with him wreaking his bloody venegance on the numerous people who wronged him. He also comes across a variety of other outcasts and freaks during his journeys, as well as regularly clashing with the church. A modern fairy tale then and a enjoyable one at that. It was a good read, with a bit of everything thrown in, though my only slight disappointment with it was that it perhaps wasn't as good as I thought it might be.

Book number: 53
Title: The Horrific Sufferings of the Mind-Reading Monster Hercules Barefoot: His Wonderful Love and His Terrible Hatred
Author: Carl-Johan Vallgren
Category: Books by authors I've never heard of