Where There's Love, There's Hate (Neversink)

In her fine Introduction, co-translator Suzanne Jill Levine calls this "a tongue-in-cheek mystery somewhere between detective spoof and romantic satire." That it is, although I find it closer to the pole of detective spoof.The narrator, Doctor Humberto Huberman, goes to a remote resort hotel on the coast of Argentina to work on a literary project. Once there, he encounters a group of four other guests, one of whom is a young woman who had been a patient of his. The next morning she is dead, from strychnine poisoning. The questions are: Was it suicide or murder? If the latter, who was the murderer? It is the framework for a classic mid-twentieth century detective story. Hypotheses and suspicions keep shifting as new clues are uncovered and variously interpreted. Complicating matters is the fact that the victim was a translator of popular novels, and among the drafts of her translation efforts is found a page that can be interpreted as a suicide note.WHERE THERE'S LOVE, THERE'S HATE just manages to avoid becoming a farce. It is very much a light-hearted, whimsical send-up of the sort of detective story popularized by Agatha Christie. It can be read in a couple of hours. In all probability it will be forgotten in a couple of days. It is diverting, but it is a piece of fluff.Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo were married, and they were close friends and collaborators with Jorge Luis Borges. Bioy Casares is the better-known in the English-speaking world, especially for "The Invention of Morel". I understand that WHERE THERE'S LOVE, THERE'S HATE (which originally was published in 1946) is representative of their literary aesthetic. It is one that I don't share.