LE JAGUAR (THE JAGUAR)
Loup Durand
Paris: Olivier Orban
1989, 416 pp. $19.95 (Canadian)
In Le Jaguar, popular French author Loup Durand has crafted an international thriller based on the premise that sustained global terrorism can be engineered from a distant capital and blamed on an unwitting innocent. Durand is hinting clearly that the so-called free-lancing terrorists such as the famed Venezuelan-born Carlos Ramirez Sanchez are sometimes Soviet pawns, if not complete innocents, in a larger ideological game.
Le Jaguar - chosen by Lire Magazine as one of the twenty best books of 1989 and recently purchased by Random House for North American publication - could well duplicate the great success of Durand's previous international best-selling suspense thriller Daddy (1987), the story of the Gestapo's pursuit of a little boy during the Second World War for a secret told to him by his mother. An author of rising importance in France, Durand is a linguist and World traveler. His first novel, The Golden Door, received the coveted French literary prize the Quai des Orfevres in 1967.
Birth of the Jaguar
Le Jaguar is, by and large, a well-paced thriller in which suspense, subterfuge, intrigue, and surprise play leading roles. Descriptive passages display a strong element of realism derived in all likelihood from the personal recollections of a well-raveled author. And with a few deft strokes, Durand brilliantly changes the locale across oceans and continents without leaving readers in a dust of confusion.
The nineteen-year-old Candido, both reluctant as a terrorist and unwilling as a revolutionary, leads the reader into an unusual labyrinth of manipulation and flight on the global stage of post evolutionary Russia. A bon vivant and heir to an immense South American fortune, Candido, himself, could not be less concerned with politics. He is a trained athlete whose manicured appearance masks animal-like instincts and the heart of a survivor.
Of Candido, Durand writes, "Taken very young, one can raise a Jaguar in a house without too many difficulties. He recognizes very quickly his keeper, likes to be in his company and even expresses pleasure at his presence." The title of Jaguar applies to Candido on two levels. First, Candido inherits an unearned reputation as the infamous international terrorist known as "the Jaguar." On a deeper level, however, he proves himself worthy of the name.
As the book begins, Candido is an army deserter in fear for his life. He has come to Berlin to be reunited with his lifelong tutor, Herr Doktor. There he meets and romances an American beauty, Samantha, an ardent disciple of the feminist and radical revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg. The tough-minded and opinionated Samantha is an anarchist by rearing and determined to act on her beliefs. Wishing to impress Samantha with his anarchist connections, Candido introduces her to a bomb-making friend, who in turn connects the young couple to Aliotchka, a Soviet secret agent.
The by-now intimate couple places a bomb in
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