Seth Oreamundo lives in exile in Washington D.C. He’s a vengeful character out to get his younger brother who betrayed him. As the story opens, Seth enters the Costa Rican ambassador’s office boldly demanding a visa. He wants to return to his native country to enact his revenge. Seth knows dirty secrets about the ambassador and easily gets what he wants.
Crocodilopolis tells an intricate story about sibling rivalry, political power, and family secrets. Its nonlinear timeline threads a complex tapestry of dark intentions. Answers about Seth’s exile begin to arrive with a back dive into the Oreamundo legacy. Otilio, the brothers’ grandfather, a coffee baron with presidential ancestry, seeds the destiny of his grandsons with an indiscretion that takes place long before they are born. When the indiscretion is revealed, Otilio’s son, their father, angrily sells the family’s coffee plantation to corporations, guts the family mansion, and recasts himself as an evangelical preacher. Further fracturing the family, Seth has always been favored by the grandfather, but his brother Osario is favored by their parents. The reasons are rooted in mystical incidents experienced by their mother.
When Seth turns eighteen, he estranges himself from the family in a fit of rage over the continued favoritism. It’s a shocking scene of rejection carried out by his mother that drives him away. As an adult, he comes into a life of luxury and corruption as director of Costa Rica’s national oil industry. Osario becomes Costa Rica’s Minister of the Environment. Unlike his brother, Osario has a moral compass. On the political stage, for the two of them, this is dynamite waiting for the lit match.
From the very beginning of this thrilling novel, occasional references to the American crocodile create a sinister foreshadowing of Seth’s plans. Fierce jaws and an enormous body that crushes with a death roll leave a frightening image of powerful devouring. Before he leaves Washington, Seth takes his son Andrés to the National Zoo where he studies the dangerous beast.
The story leaps back and forth in time drawing down the dramatic window to the moment of Seth’s return to Costa Rica. He meets with Osario in a secluded bar, where Osario surprisingly doesn’t suspect his brother’s seething hatred, even when they drive to the river where an ecological disaster happened — that which caused a scandal, which led to the betrayal and exile. At the river’s edge, Osario’s base instinct of rivalry drives him to accept a fatal bet.
The narrative rhythm becomes addictively alluring by its poetic prose, which is a major part of the novel’s success. The book’s chapter titles also appear to have poetic meaning, but it’s too elusive. I searched online for a reason connecting them to the dramatic plot, a subtle enhancement or allusion. According to Wikipedia, some of titles are names of cities, gods, and pharaohs of Ancient Egypt. Meanwhile, I learned there’s a story in Egyptian mythology where a god called Set murders his brother Osiris. This could be it, what the chapter titles are all about, but chapter titles shouldn’t be cryptic, if they’re to be effective.
The lives of cousins Andrés (Seth’s son) and Horatio (Osario’s son) become the focus in the final 100 pages. They’re living together in Washington D.C., both soon to attend New York University in Manhattan. Horatio impulsively travels to Costa Rica to visit a lover. He attends a gay pride parade. Here Horatio confronts a radical, anti-gay man without realizing the man is his Uncle Seth. Their brutal entanglement hints at an inevitable continuation of family hostility and revenge, beyond the book’s momentous conclusion. Early in the story, the author forewarns: “Destiny is dramatic and arrogant. But most important, it’s cyclical. A play performed again and again for millennia.”
Crocodilopolis is published by Bloomsbury. A version of this review aired on NPR member station WOSU 89.7 FM that broadcasts throughout Central Ohio. Minor edits were made in adapting a radio script to print.
The Longest Chapter 