About the book (from the publisher’s website and the book cover):
Welcome to Vivo, where the only cemetery is run by old Mateus and his dog, God. Mateus’s eyes aren’t so good these days, which is why he has been burying bodies in the wrong graves, and also why, while out walking with God, he trips over a young homeless girl. On a whim, Mateus decides to appoint the girl as his apprentice. Novo, who has been sleeping on the street with a dog-eared copy of The Savage Detectives as her pillow, is determined to reorganise the cemetery, but she will have to hurry: buried awry, divorced from their names, the ghosts of Vivo are accumulating, unable to proceed to the afterlife without knowing who they are. Also, someone, or some thing, is on the loose, killing people and closing in on the one person who can make things right.
Vivo is a town with a pigeon-messaging service, a phone booth used for romantic encounters, and a number of residents who are not quite what they seem, including a prostitute, a professor and a prophetic flower-seller. Oh, and the coffee is hellishly strong.
Erudite and wise, magical and quirky, Sven Axelrad’s debut novel is an enchanting adventure that explores what our names mean to us and who we are without them.
It’s so hard to believe that this wonderful, quirky, magical book is Axelrad’s debut novel! What has he been doing with his life up until now? Well, actually, he’s an accountant! I know! It’s almost impossible to believe. But they do say that fact is stranger than fiction. And in ‘Buried Treasure’ Axelrad blurs the lines between the living and the dead just enough to make us wonder if basing our lives on facts alone might be a pointless pursuit.
“We are a collection of everything that has happened to us, which is to say we are stories.”
The fictitious town of Vivo is a mystical and mysterious place; a place where the very fabric of its existence seems woven out of superstition, suspicion, word-of-mouth, folklore and I’m guessing if you look closely, maybe even a touch of pixie dust (although the pixie is probably wearing Docs)!
Axelrad has created vivid characters who, while they might seem quite unclear as to what they’re meant to be doing at any particular given time, all do actually have a very acute sense of their overriding place and purpose in the world, and in Vivo in particular – even the ghosts! The problem is that the ghosts know they’re supposed to be somewhere and they know without a shadow of a doubt that they’ve all been buried incorrectly. And this is where the crux of the story comes to rest: on the importance of names. Our names represent who we are, where we’re from and what we aspire to. Being buried under the wrong name causes confusion.
The cause of the confusion is old Mateus, who runs the cemetery. His eyesight has been deteriorating for some time, hence all the mistakes. His right-hand-man is actually a dog, called … ahem … Dog. And if we’re being really honest here, Dog’s name is really ‘God’ because Mateus is also dyslexic and that’s what he wrote down when he had the collar made! If we’re going for a full-on disclaimer: God is female! There, I think we’ve covered all the bases.
Unsurprisingly it is through the wisdom of the young Novo and Augustine that the future of Vivo and its residents (both the living and the dead) can be redeemed.
“Augustine is so unloved that instead of giving up on love, he places all his hope in it.”
Axelrad’s writing reads like lyrical verse. I felt like I wanted to drink it in. He has a way with words that leads you gently down rhythmic pathways, only to plunge you into deep, turbulent swells, before spitting you out onto an inhospitable wasteland, where he returns to scoop you up and safeguard you from anyone or anything who would dare to torment you. I couldn’t get enough!
I give this a full 5 stars, although I’d give it so many more, because it deserves them! Just buy it and read it, and then join the rest of us in waiting to see what Sven Axelrad has in store for us next!
jansbookbuzz.com 
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