Filip Florian's LITTLE FINGERS (Tr Alistair Ian Blyth)

An archaeological site near a small town in Romania proves to contain not only the expected Roman artifacts and building foundations, but also a mass grave of more recent provenance.  How recent is the main concern of Filip Florian's depressing yet charming -- and very, very ambiguous -- Little Fingers.

One possibility, the one immediately favored by locals, is that the grave is a 14th century plague pit, its contents all victims of a wave of the good old Black Death - historically as interesting as the Roman stuff that was originally the point of the site but not terribly controversial. The local police are directed immediately to treat it as the other possibility, though: that the human remains discovered as the book opens are from the terrible 1960s, when the forces of Romania's Communist dictatorship committed mass political murder to maintain its grip on power. 

Our narrator is part of the archaeological team, a man originally from the local area and staying with a relative in the town and already suffering from ulcers and other ailments before the shocking discovery, but he's really the least interesting of a parade of personalities that could grace, say, a cozy English mystery or a new season of something like Doc Martin. Aunt Eugenia, for instance, turns out to be a member of the British aristocracy by marriage but is locally known for an incident when she was moving to a new house and a member of the moving crew accidentally let her 50+ cats free en route, few of which were ever recovered, most of whom were never seen again - but this just gave her an excuse to start a new colony of cats in her otherwise tidy little house, where she gladly receives our narrator in for tea and gossip about the to-do in the village.

A local photographer, Mr. Sasha, who takes portraits of visitors who come to tour the Roman site does so with the aid of a camel named Aladdin that he has raised from a calf. The camel is perhaps the most charismatic figure in the village, munching away on whatever food Mr. Sasha gives him, including meat; Aladdin is even something of a nicotine fiend as he loves to eat the cigarettes that villagers and Mr. Sasha's clients like to feed it. The one rule is to keep him away from alcohol, which makes him amorous to the considerable distress of local cattle and their owners. 

Then there's local hermit-priest, a man of many names but now mostly called Onufrie, who was born on a riverbank and left behind by his unfortunate mother, taken in as a youth by a local monastery and became a devout and faithful brother there -- until the Communists came and arrested all of the monks. He becomes an important figure in all that follows. Once freed from prison, he becomes a mountain hermit for years and years, is visited by the Virgin Mary several times, and becomes a kind of confessor-by-mail of an unknown person sharing the forest with him, all while pulling a Pierre Menard with the Bible, which he writes on pieces of spruce bark, using berry juice for ink. 

It is he above all who changes the town's fate after he is moved to go perform (Catholic) funeral rites for the bodies in the grave and is observed doing so by a journalist hurting for a story. By novel's end Onufrie's act and his claims about the Virgin put the town on the map way more than the Roman ruins or the mass grave so, as the area becomes a destination for pilgrims.

As for the often mentioned Argentine forensic specialists, they never even get names and are at best figurants. Florian isn't here to tell a detective story, seems barely interested at all in giving us a solution as to the identities of those in the pit -- though he is happy to take a good chunk of the last fourth or so of the book to present their bona fides via a history of late 20th century Argentina through the lens of its national football/soccer team, with proper homage given to both Maradona and Batistuta, which I did appreciate, but having already read How Soccer Explains the World, I didn't feel like I'd learned much that is new. I reckon not a lot of Florian's original readership have read that bit of pop history, though, and as a way of understanding this group of figurants might go, it wasn't a bad choice. 

I still found the experience of reading Little Fingers, the very title of which makes no sense until the last 20 pages or so, a baffling, yet still enjoyable one. If you have a decent tolerance for ambiguity, you might, too.