Country Name: Andorra
Andorra’s small size and relatively remote mountain location have meant that it has had to struggle to develop national literature. However, there are now several well-known writers who hail from the country and, as Vincent Wood explains, it is its unique characteristics, mixed with its seclusion from the rest of the world, that makes it the perfect literary symbol for escape and exoticism.
Finding a good novel in translation from the tiny state of Andorra was very difficult. I searched for translated works because the fewer books written by the authors of Andorra were in the Catalan language. After a good amount of checking, a book by Albert Salvadó named The Teacher of Cheops, originally written in Spanish/Catalan was translated by Marc Brian Duckett into English in the Kindle format was available on Amazon.
This is a highly readable light novel with, now and then, some powerful flashes of insight into human greed, pride and ambition. There is also, according to the Author’s Endnote, a ‘door to the universe of Absolute Knowledge’ in the form of the Ancient Egyptian Eighth Principle of the Emerald Tablet and two conditions needed to attain it, which are hidden somewhere in the text. By and large, the level of detail and historical knowledge is well-handled, with only the odd section feeling like an extract from an anthropological tome on the customs of Ancient Egypt.
