The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty

 

I was not familiar with author Vendela Vida's work. This 2015 novel had been sitting in my Kindle queue for so long I had forgotten why I'd bought it and decided the time had come to read it. The nameless narrator arrives in Casablanca from Miami and her knapsack is stolen while she is checking into her hotel. She makes a police report and is soon notified that her bag has been recovered — but it is not hers. It contains another woman's passport and credit card which, for some reason, she decides to keep. She bears a physical resemblance the American owner of the bag and uses the other woman's name and her credit cards to check into a different hotel. At this point I figured that she is in Casablanca to escape from a difficult situation at home. Then the story spirals out of control. She suspects that the woman whose passport and identity she has adopted may have come to a nefarious end and that she should probably invent yet another identity for herself. When she is offered a job as a stand-in for a famous actress on a movie that is being filmed at her hotel she jumps at the opportunity and adopts another fake name, that of her infant niece. Why didn't she simply press her case with the American Embassy instead of engaging in serial fraud? The plot is flimsy but I was engaged enough to read the novel in two sittings. It would be a great airplane read, as long as your destination wasn't Casablanca.