Shadow Without a Name : A Novel

In 1943, General Thadeus Dreyer, a WWI hero who trains doubles for Nazi leaders, disappears. In 1960, Adolf Eichmann, a master chess player, is arrested in Buenos Aires, extradited to Israel, and hanged. Years later, a dying Polish count casts doubt on Eichmann's identity, leaving behind a manuscript with clues that tie the three men together. A gripping novel of imposture and identity,Shadow Without a Nameis a harrowing parable of our century of chaos, where individual will is swamped by the cult of personality and destinies hang on a game of chess. Ignacio Padillawas born in Mexico City, and is the author of several award-winning novels and short-story collections, includingAntipodes. Formerly the cultural attacheacute; at the Mexican Embassy in London, he now writes full-time in Queretaro, Mexcio. The winner of Spain's prestigious Premio Primavera Award,Shadow Without a Nameis the English-language debut of one of Mexico's dazzling new young writers. In 1916, on a train heading to the Austro-Hungarian Empire's disastrous Eastern Front, Viktor Kretzschmar and Thadeus Dreyer face each other over a chessboard. It is a game to the death: the winner will take Kretzschmar's identity as a railway signalman and live out the war in safety. The loser will go to the Front. When the game ends, a sequence of events that will span decades as well as continents has been set in motion. In 1943, the decorated World War I hero and influential Nazi General Thadeus Dreyer is in charge of training doubles to stand in for leading Nazis at dangerous public events. But when the Amphitryon Project falls out of favor with Goering, Dreyer and his team of doubles vanish, and their disappearance remains unsolved. In 1960, an escaped Nazi is uncovered in Buenos Aires, where he has been living under an assumed name. One of the few Nazis to be recaptured, he is extradited to Israel and executed. Only an old Polish count claims to know his true identity, but he dies before it can be revealed. The clues that connect these men are concealed in an old encrypted manuscript that the count has left to his heirsan unlikely trio of misfits who suddenly find themselves at the center of a dangerous game as they are compelled to decipher the deceits of decades past. Mesmerizing and suspenseful,Shadow Without a Nameexplores questions of identity and history against the backdrop of the darkest periods of twentieth-century Europe, and stands as an impressive introduction to one of Mexico's most gifted contemporary writers. "Gracefully and economically written, it is a meditation on the nature of identity and, not incidentally, on the myriad unsuspected tragedies inflicted on people by the chaos of war."Michael Kernan,The Washington Post "Ignacio Padilla . . . represents the continuation and reinvigoration of literature in our country."Carlos Fuentes "Gracefully and economically written, it is a meditation on the nature of identity and, not incidentally, on the myriad unsuspected tragedies inflicted on people by the chaos of war."Michael Kernan,The Washington Post "There is a power of invention and an imaginative force here that mark Padilla as a writer of outstanding gifts. He is a novelist who can disarm our sense of likelihood, of the norms of behavior, and so extend our sense of human possibility . . . Events are unfolded through the medium of four first-person narrators, voices of loss and fractured personality. They are not distinguished by variety of style or mode of utterance, and so they seem almost like a chorus, a collective expression of the quest for meaning and identity in a bleak and chaotic, morally trackless world. The way this collective voice is managed is one of the several triumphs ofShadow Without a Name, the first of Igna