A man dons a pair of heavy, blue-tinged sunglasses in Egypt but decides not to take them off when he gets back to London, setting off a chain of disasters including a secret marriage, a murder, and an execution, in Vita Sackville-West's Seducers in Ecuador.
Sackville-West's slender novella from the 20s is heavy on plot, dark humor, and irony and is a brisk, prickly read. The "seducers" of the title are men a lovelorn young woman is (supposedly) writing to when she agrees to the secret marriage. Why she agrees to it is confounding right up to the end, and even then you aren't sure what is true or not.
I first learned of the author through a film about her romantic relationship with Virginia Woolf. Over the years, Sackville-West's star has dimmed while Woolf's has only grown, though during their time together (and the time of the writing of the novella) Sackville-West was more popular as an author.
Her work is worth a look, if you are unfamiliar with her. I will definitely seek out more.
I bought a lot of Vita Sackville-West novels from eBay for my wife, a Humanities professor, and picked this one up out of curiosity.
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