When I began "Carnality," I thought I know what I was in for. Its language is spare and direct. Its plot involves a Swedish academic who travels to Madrid and has the sort of chance meetings with strangers that only seem to happen in novels. I figured that "Carnality" was going to be one of those abstract, unadorned, cerebral pan-European novels that read pretty easily but don't leave much of an impression when you're through with them.

But this is something different. While the novel's language doesn't really get any fancier, the book slowly opens up and becomes more involving. After a character -- a dwarfish Spanish nun with a missing digit -- who seems, at first, to have been introduced solely to lend the book an element of horror tells her story, the novel deepens into something genuinely moving. It isn't that "Carnality" isn't a philosophical novel -- we meet evil here in several guises, ranging from real-deal fascism to misplaced lust to greed to a simple lack of care. The way the author frames these characters' stories make their stories seem genuinely vital, more than just pieces being moved around some sort of moral game board.

I also rather enjoyed the way the author speculated about the evolution of evil in this novel. It isn't necessarily surprising to come across the echoes of a fascist past when reading a novel set in Spain, particularly when one of the characters involved runs a butcher shop. But it was interesting to see that this was contrasted with a sort of online event that aspires to pass judgment on weighty moral matters. Wolff seems to want to capture the widest possible spectrum of human moral action, and there were times when I was reading this one where I thought that she did this quite well. The overall message that this novel is meant to impart is, perhaps unsurprisingly, more difficult to discern. Some questions about what's real and what can be chalked up to a paranoid delusion induced by guilt are left unresolved. The aforementioned nun of short stature is undoubtedly a morally serious character, but her methods are, as they say, shockingly unorthodox, and readers are more or less left on their own to decide if her actions can be considered defensible or a moral perversion in themselves. The book's truly impactful last scene, which neatly pulls together our narrator's experience with that of the twisted little sister, leaves readers without a clear moral resolution. Those hoping that the plot, the book's primary motor, will be tied up neatly will also likely be disappointed. But this novel is still recommendable, and still much more than it seemed to be in its first few pages. Its readership on LibraryThing is limited, at the time of this writing, to the mid-two digits. I think that "Carnality" deserves a wider audience. ( )