tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-266237997215229572024-03-18T23:22:09.276-04:00Uncommon ReadingConfessions of a Common ReaderAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07126482436426213023noreply@blogger.comBlogger103125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26623799721522957.post-14450738292863475082015-01-08T02:37:00.001-05:002015-01-08T14:10:20.030-05:00Reading to Make Sense of Tragedy: "Nous Sommes Tous Charlie"In the wake of the slaughter of a dozen people in Paris, ten of whom worked for the satirical magazine <i>Charlie Hebdo</i>, by Islamic terrorists yelling "God is great!", I have been relieved to see how peaceful -- <a href="http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/01/paris-mourns-slain-charlie-hebdo-cartoonists.html">and moving</a> -- reactions have been. But while this horrific attack is clearly the action of a lunatic fringe, it is one of a string of similar assaults, and has provoked <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/blame-for-charlie-hebdo-murders">a debate</a> over whether this is simply extremist violence that has nothing whatsoever to do with what is happening within France (or the Netherlands, or other Western European nations). On the other hand, some commenters have also taken note of the fact that the terrorists spoke fluent French, and that France has a large and too often marginalized population, some second and third generation French citizens, who are descendants of immigrants from former French colonies in Muslim nations in North Africa and parts of sub-Saharan Africa. <a href="http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2013/01/31/muslims-france-north-africa-senegal-discrimination/">Study</a> after <a href="http://news.stanford.edu/news/2010/november/muslim-france-study-112210.html">study</a> has shown they face discrimination in the job market and in housing -- they can even find it hard to open a bank account.<br />
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But let's <i>not </i>venture down this rabbit hole. Instead, I think it's time to take a step back. Because there is one bright spot here, other than the tremendous reaffirmation for free speech and other Enlightenment values on the part of all French people and an absence of any backlash against Paris's immigrant community, outside the city's péripherique highway. That is that the fact that the decades-long tensions between these communities have produced some great novels, many of which Europa Editions has translated and brought to the attention of English language readers. Here are a handful of the highlights.<br />
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The first of these is geographically on target -- <i>The Sexual Life of an Islamist in Paris. </i>To say that Mohamed, author Leila Marouane's protagonist, is conflicted, would be putting it mildly. On the one hand, at the age of 40, he lives with his mother and younger brother in the Algerian neighborhood of Saint Ouen in Paris (better known to tourists as home to a great flea market). On the other hand, he also has "Gallicized" his name; he ensures his skin is pale and that his hair is straight enough that he isn't mistaken for an Arab in real life, so unlike a lot of the guys he knew growing up, he's got a great job. But what Marouane is doing is painting a picture of what it's like for a man in today's France when identities collide in immigrant communities. Which is the real Mohamed? Is he the "Momo" that his community knows, or "Basile Tocquard", the new Gallic identity he has adopted and that allows him to "pass" and be accepted by broader French society in a way that Mohamed never would?<br />
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Momo's identity crisis comes to a head when he discovers his dream apartment and sets out to build a dream life in it, complete with (at last!) losing his virginity to what he hopes will be an endless stream of non-Algerian women. "All that remained for me to do was to go over the wall, with the firm intention of becoming an individual who decides and charts his life as a Westerner, on a full-time basis, with every right thereto pertaining." But while he fantasizes about the real estate agent who sells him the apartment, many of the other women he encounters actually turn out to be Algerian, and he is haunted by another the reader never quite encounters, an Algerian novelist named Loubna Minbar. Like life itself, maybe Momo's emancipation isn't going to be quite as straightforward as he had hoped?<br />
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The novel starts out as a straightforward chronicle of the adventures of Momo/Basile, only to take on an almost hallucinatory tone, leaving the reading questioning the narrator's reliability and pondering the havoc that discrimination can play on a psyche. A bonus? It's translated by Alison Anderson, who does an amazing job capturing not just the literal translation but providing an individual 'feel' for each novel she translates.<br />
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<i>The German Mujahid </i>by Boualem Sansal is another dark novel set partly in the banlieues/suburbs of Paris. Sansal, an Algerian-born writer, has had his works banned in his native country since 2006, and, like Charlie Hebdo's cartoonists, is an equal opportunity critic, although he doesn't work in satire, but uses much darker material altogether.<br />
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This novel is so far Sansal's only title to be available here, although as of next week (!), Bloomsbury USA will be releasing <i>Harraga</i>, set in Algeria itself. (I've got it ordered already.) The focus of this book is the diaries of two brothers, Rachel (Raschid Helmut) and his much younger brother, Malrich. On Rachel's death, Malrich discovers that his German father and Algerian mother also are dead -- victims of a massacre in Algeria's bloody civil war between the military and fundamentalist Islamists. Reading Rachel's diary, he unearths uncomfortable truths about his father's youth in the SS -- truths that Rachel found unbearable. But while Rachel found history trapped him, Malrich's own efforts to understand and make sense of his past focus on his present life in one of the Parisian housing projects that are "home" to large numbers of Tunisians, Moroccans and Algerians and others trying to carve out lives for themselves in a largely unwelcoming country.<br />
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Malrich already is aghast at the success that radical Islamists are having in radicalizing his community and sees uncanny parallels between the Nazis of his father's generation and the fundamentalists. Sansal's strength lies in his ability to deliver two parallel tales in utterly different and convincing voices: that of a mature man whose world collapses, and that of an adolescent who must find a path for himself that escapes the paradigm of victim and oppressor. Malrich's tone is that of a young guy chatting to his friends; Rachel's is more sober and analytical; bother are utterly convincing. Who is guilty? What does it mean to resist? These are weighty topics and Sansal does an excellent job of engaging with them.<br />
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If you need or want a lighter approach to these very weighty and important topics, you'll want to turn to the works of another Algerian-born author, Amara Lakhous. Lakhous, who until very recently has lived and worked in Italy, has written a series of three elegant and often hilarious novels set in Italian cities and focusing on the motley groups of migrants who end up sharing neighborhoods and apartment buildings. <i>Divorce Islamic Style </i>is a slyly funny look at a particular corner of Rome, Viale Marconi, known as "Little Cairo". One of its main characters, Christian, is from Sicily -- but he speaks perfect Arabic and can pass for an Arab. So when the government officials and cops get antsy about the possibility of some kind of terrorist plot brewing, it makes sense that they dispatch Christian (as Issa) to figure out what is going on. There, his path crosses that of Sofia, or Saffia, wife of an immigrant from Egypt. She's delighted with life in Rome -- and young and beautiful. Her husband? Not so much. Trained as an architect, he's stuck working as a pizza chef, and keeps getting so frustrated and fed up that he'll come home and argue with her, to the point that he'll yell "I divorce you!" in the heat of the moment. Whoops... if this happens a third time, she'll be free -- and remarriage won't be very easy at all...<br />
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Lakhous's other novels also tackle what happens when people from disparate culture backgrounds try to coexist, with <i>Clash of Civilizations over an Elevator in Piazzo Vittoria </i>making the point that for someone in Rome, a guy who shows up from Sicily or Calabria can be just as much (or more) of an outsider as someone who is a migrant from North Africa. <i>Dispute Over a Very Italian Piglet </i>even had a reviewer at the Philadelphia Inquirer questioning whether Lakhous was an Italian Camus, writing novels trying to address the 'new Italy'.<br />
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The sudden rise of multiculturalism in Europe in the second half of the 20th century -- and the fact that in many countries, in practice, multiculturalism has taken the form of immigration from Muslim nations (in Britain, from Pakistan and Bangladesh; in Belgium and France, from Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Senegal and Mali, among other countries; in Germany, 'guest workers' from Turkey) -- has created all kinds of new tensions. Whether those tensions are connected to these horrific acts of terrorism, there's a risk that members of these communities will have to deal with an upsurge in exclusionary nationalism.<br />
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Which makes it worthwhile to listen to these voices, as we mourn the <i>Charlie Hebdo </i>tragedy.<br />
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07126482436426213023noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26623799721522957.post-5793391807743986712014-11-24T07:41:00.002-05:002014-11-24T07:48:55.096-05:00Mystery Monday: "There are people who should die...."<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I don't know why there aren't more mysteries set in Southeast Asia. That said, most of the ones I've sampled, I haven't been able to really get excited about. Which is why I've decided to devote an entire blog post to two mystery series that I think should be on every fan's shelf and that I strongly suspect still remain too obscure. My reasons for these suspicions? Well, one series is an old favorite, discovered several years ago -- the witty, delightful, suspenseful and utterly charming mysteries set in Laos of the mid to late 1970s and featuring the country's reluctant coroner, the septugenerian Dr. Siri Paiboun. Whenever I shove these books into the hands of a friend, there is a better than 75% chance that he or she has never heard of them or their creator, Colin Cotterill, and a 90% chance that the friend in question has never tried reading them. (I don't allow that state of affairs to last for long, and my success rate in getting people to share my fan-dom is fairly high.) Alas, I'm less enamored of Cotterill's newer series, set in Thailand, where he makes his home. But now -- cue drum roll and, yes, why not, some trumpets, too -- I can get very, very excited about another series of mysteries set in Thailand. This one is published by Soho Press (a fave publisher of mine) and is written by Timothy Hallinan, who not only spends a chunk of his time in Bangkok, but clearly been using that time very, very well.<br />
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Part of what appealed to me most about <i>A Nail Through the Heart </i>is that Hallinan doesn't even try to make his chief character Thai. Poke Rafferty, in many ways, is a quintessential North American, one of the many male expatriates who wash up in Bangkok and simply never leave, floating around the fringes of its bar culture. But Poke is different in many ways. First of all, he's half Filipino; as one of the Thai characters notes consolingly in the book, this makes him look almost normal, and not like one of those ugly <i>farang </i>with their big noses. And while he ended up in Thailand in order to write a guide book to the city for restless young guys looking for the hottest bars and clubs -- along with tips for how to identify a ladyboy -- his own life has long since moved on. He has fallen in love with Rose, a tall, thoughtful and drop-dead gorgeous former bar dancer trying to build a cleaning business that will help get some of her former co-workers out of the bar trade before they end up in the blowjob bars -- the lowest ranks of the sex trade. He has taken in an 8-year-old street girl named Miaow, whom he met while she was peddling pencils, and who now is at school herself. He wants to adopt Miaow, and to marry Rose: the former may, just, be feasible, but Rose isn't sure he understands Thai culture or what it means to earn merit or be reborn. She wants him to understand what it would mean to mesh not only their lives but their souls.<br />
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But before any of that can happen, Poke succumbs to Miaow's pleas to give her friend, a street urchin named "Superman", a place to stay. He agrees to do a favor for his closest Thai friend, a policeman named Arthit (and just as compelling a character as Poke, Rose and Miaow, the main players in the drama.) And that lands him in a whole mess of trouble, looking for a vanished Australian who, he rapidly discovers, was involved in a particularly nasty child pornography ring, even as he ends up entangled with Madame Wing, a reclusive, wheelchair bound woman who has one of the most evil auras that Poke has ever encountered -- but who will pay him enough to find someone who stole from her to finance Miaow's adoption. There are some truly nasty folks out there, and as Rose tries to make him understand, maybe some victims aren't innocent simply because they are victims, and perhaps not all killers, just because they commit murder, are guilty. Watching Poke wrestle with the competing claims on his conscience, as he discovers stuff about his clients -- who have one claim on his loyalty -- and as he understands the motivations of the perpetrators, is fascinating, especially as it's all interwoven with his ongoing struggle to understand Rose and Thai culture.<br />
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From corrupt cops to the legacy of the Khmer Rouge killing fields, this novel covers a tremendous amount of ground, but Hallinan has a command of his material and, more importantly, does an amazing job of capturing the ambiance of Bangkok, from the flower warehouses to the crowded <i>sois</i>, or alleyways off the main roads. At one point, Poke is on the back of one of Bangkok's motorbike taxis, dodging through the inevitable traffic jams, at risk to life and limb, and I was literally <i>there</i>. (Well, I've done that -- though not, thank heavens, at high speeds!) Hallinan doesn't exaggerate to give us a picture of Bangkok, but instead relies on a host of small details, from the humidity to the body language of people on the streets.<br />
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I think after one encounter with Poke Rafferty and his motley assortment of fellow characters, and my introduction to his attempts to build a family of some kind in unpromising circumstances, I'm hooked. I'm moving straight on to the second book in the series, and the third, and the fourth... Thankfully, I think there are enough to keep me going until at least Christmas...<br />
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For audiobook fans: I can wholeheartedly recommend the audio version of these novels, as narrated by Victor Bevine.<br />
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Now, if only the same were true of Colin Cotterill's Dr. Siri mysteries, and I had another unread book sitting here demanding my attention immediately!! The next in this much-loved series, <i>Six and a Half Deadly Sins </i>(is it a coincidence that both authors are published by Soho? It can't be...) won't be out until May. Grrrrr. By which point my nerves will be shredded. So I'll just have to spend time forcing the series onto more people. Including anyone reading this blog post.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJu7thlKxS-EHSl2r7avHYInYLBEa6EDqOLh3lpDs38jCebAuxKNNybd6syLg1z9qfg7resyfKcPakvN9Q-b4ddz3AozVJpiHrajc7oSb0StPSNOtVY13AfYtOru8U_3zsZrKJwSOm68I/s1600/imgres-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJu7thlKxS-EHSl2r7avHYInYLBEa6EDqOLh3lpDs38jCebAuxKNNybd6syLg1z9qfg7resyfKcPakvN9Q-b4ddz3AozVJpiHrajc7oSb0StPSNOtVY13AfYtOru8U_3zsZrKJwSOm68I/s1600/imgres-1.jpg" /></a>Why? Because Dr. Siri is simply one of the most intriguing and unique sleuths ever to stalk the pages of a mystery novel -- and yes, I include Sherlock Holmes in that category. The Pathet Lao have taken over power in Laos -- it's 1976 -- and Dr. Siri, a French-educated doctor who spent many of the best years of his life in the struggle for some kind of just, humane regime, just wants some peace and quiet. (He's also coming to realize that the new regime is just as foolish as the old one, albeit in entirely different ways.) He's a classic humanist; a believer in people. But dead people? Siri isn't keen on serving as Laos's only official coroner but when the last doctor with any experience zooms across the Mekong to Thailand in an inner tube, he's lumbered with the job: there is no way to say "no" to the Politburo. Worse still, his first jobs have unpleasantly political aspects: why on earth do the bodies of dead Vietnamese soldiers keep popping to the surface of a Laotian lake? and what happened to the wife of a powerful Laotian leader?<br />
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Siri's morgue may be short of anything that a typical coroner might want or need. But it turns out that Siri isn't a typical coroner. As well as being a reluctant coroner, he's a reluctant link to spirits and ghosts. He also has unusual resources, in the shape of Dtui, the nurse who hopes to be sent to Russia for medical training, and Geung, who, in spite of his Down's Syndrome, is loyal and eerily wise. They do amazing things with very little, even when they have to take samples off to local school teacher on the back of a motorbike to be tested. And even when the Laotian version of justice may be just as eccentric as some of Siri's methods.<br />
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As the series progresses, the stories simply get richer and more intriguing, taking Siri to the ancient royal capital of Luang Prabang (one of my own favorite places in Laos) and even to Phnom Penh in the final days of Khmer Rouge rule. His sidekicks include a Politburo member, a transvestite fortuneteller, Vientiane's best noodle chef, and Yeh Ming, the shaman who inhabits him. And while the tone is far lighter and more whimsical, Cotterill, like Hallinan, knows the region, its people and its culture. That becomes part of the story, neither window dressing nor exaggerated for effect.<br />
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And I may just have talked myself into re-reading the entire series before the release of the newest book in May. But not until I have finished reading all of the Poke Rafferty novels. Now, when will I find time to read anything else??Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07126482436426213023noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26623799721522957.post-57325090679474714032014-11-24T07:20:00.001-05:002014-11-24T07:20:06.733-05:00Tudormania Lives -- Part DeuxPicking up -- briefly -- on an earlier post about the latest influx of Tudor-focused historical novels: it's not over yet!<br />
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The latest news is that historian and novelist Alison Weir has signed a contract to produce <a href="http://www.thebookseller.com/news/alison-weir-signs-six-novel-deal-headline">a series of six novels</a> featuring, yes, you guessed it, each of the six wives of Henry VIII, for British publisher Headline, the first of which will see the light of day in 2016.<br />
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The news sparked quite a kerfuffle over on the Historical Novel Society's Facebook page, of which I'm a member. Reading between the lines, there are a handful of aspiring novelists out there interested in writing about other eras who seem to feel that the combination of the proven market clout of the Tudors and Alison Weir's ability to bridge the gap between popular history and popular fiction better than most writers, may do what lesser-known luminary of the historical crime writing world Lynn Shepherd alleged that JK Rowling was doing with her shift to adult fiction: using her celebrity to <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-26331650">suck the oxygen out of the atmosphere </a>and making it tougher for other writers to breathe.<br />
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Not that Weir is JK Rowling; she's just one of dozens of writers, ranging from those with household names (the ubiquitous Philippa Gregory) who have long made the Tudors her bread and butter, and to whom readers have gravitated as a result. (She's also earned a reputation for being far more generous than many of her peers with many of those aspiring writers, so kudos to her.)<br />
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That said: is there anything left to say about these six women?? To be blunt, they wore the crown matrimonial and weren't reigning queens. Arguably, Catherine of Aragon was significant for her heritage and the longevity of the marriage, but how many times is it entertaining to read a novel about the breakdown of the same marriage? Similarly, how many times is it fascinating to read about Anne Boleyn, when you know just how very, very badly the story ends for her? With biographies aplenty out there, and novels based on the latest scholarly research, what remains to be said? Catherine Howard met her end on the block as a teenager after a rather furtive little affair; it's tragic, but again, not the stuff of which countless novels of tremendous interest are made. Do we read the same story over and over again, or go in search of new fare?<br />
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I think the challenge for Weir will be to prove that she can approach these stories with a truly new angle. The challenge for publishers? That's a tougher one altogether. I want someone to prove to me that they are willing to take a risk and publish some novels set in less-usual eras and places, and by authors who aren't (yet) household names. For me, that means <i>no </i>Tudors, <i>no </i>Wars of the Roses, and very little from ancient Rome, World War I or World War II. In the coming weeks, I'll try to draw attention to a couple of these books -- and challenge readers to give them a chance, too.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07126482436426213023noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26623799721522957.post-29676852128134595202014-11-19T17:52:00.001-05:002014-11-19T17:52:22.800-05:00"I slipped into art to escape life..."<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Every bibliomaniac can empathize with Aaliya, the narrator of Rabih Alameddine's eloquent and simply un-put-downable novel, in her approach to literature. We may not have lived our lives in Beirut in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, dealing with everything from the civil war to overly-curious neighbors. We may not have to deal with accidentally dyeing our hair blue, or deciding which classic work of literature we will translate into Arabic. But in our own ways we have all "slipped off into art to escape life"; we have all "sneaked off into literature" at one point or another.<br />
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I read <i>An Unnecessary Woman </i>very early in the new year and am coming back to it today because tonight it will be announced whether it will win this year's National Book Award. I hope it will -- it would win my vote -- though I fear it won't. After all, its rivals include two ultra-popular novels, <i>Station Eleven </i>by Emily St. John Mandel (lots of fun, but ultimately just a particularly entertaining and creative dystopian rumination about what matters in life, with predictable answers), and <i>All the Light We Cannot See </i>by Anthony Doerr. I have to confess that I actually feel slight afraid admitting that I didn't love the latter. Did I admire the careful artistry? Sure, but I was so busy admiring that, I never forgot that I was reading a Work of Impressive Artistic Accomplishment. Which, let's admit it, is the kiss of death for a novel.<br />
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Here's why Alameddine's novel trumps both of these, and still -- months later -- is on track to end 2014 as my favorite novel of the year. And no, it has nothing to do with the fact that its heroine, Aaliya Saleh, has her own Twitter feed. It has everything to do with Aaliya herself, however, the "unnecessary woman" of the title, divorced, childless, maintaining at best a tenuous relationship with those around her, including her extended family. (She meets her nephew's children at one point and they have no idea who she is.) She came of age in the Beirut of the 1950s; now, decades later, she is elderly and she to question some of her rituals and established ways of existing -- and the decisions that led her to this point.<br />
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When the novel opens, another new year is about to begin, and Aaliya has to decide which great novel she will translate next. It is one of her private rituals; one that is most important to her sense of self. She has worked in a bookstore, keeping it open throughout the worst days of Lebanon's civil war, and it is literature that has kept her going. Her choice of translation project is ritualized: only books written in a language other than English or French (the two lingua francae of Lebanon) qualify; she then relies on both the English and French translations to complete her own undertaking: an Arabic version. When it's complete, the handwritten pages are put into a box, along with the English and French versions, and stored in her apartment, in the bedroom originally reserved for a maid. She has completed 37 such translations -- and nobody else in the world is aware of them. Is it time for 38, or is she now too old?<br />
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Other changes, too, may be looming. While Aaliya's literary passions have helped her cope with her lot as a surplus woman, with family turmoil, with war, with the loss of her closest friend, with the isolation -- she hears what each of the women in the apartment building is doing and can identify when one is in the bathroom above her or making dinner -- she now finds reality intruding to an unwelcome extent. Her family suddenly imposes on her. She struggles to decide what to translate next -- would Roberto Bolano be too much of a challenge? Her body isn't cooperating isn't as much as it once did. As she ponders her options, and travels the streets of Beirut, the reader accompanies Aaliya back in time as she reviews her life.<br />
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Alameddine handles all of these revelations about Aaliya gradually and almost delicately and the result is a work of great beauty and empathy. It's a pitch-perfect portrayal of an individual's insistence on living according to her own rules and by adhering to her own set of priorities, even in the most impossible circumstances. Aaliya herself is a fascinating and complex character: precisely the kind of person who <i>would </i>have a Twitter account, and who would use it to make scathing comments about the shallowness of much of contemporary literature (a la Peter Stothard?) Did I always "like" her? Nope, but that isn't the issue. She's fascinating, but most importantly, authentic. I'd rather spend a day sitting down and listening to her stories and opinions: she makes the characters in the other two <a href="http://www.nationalbook.org/nba2014.html#.VG0cj1fF9wQ">NBA finalists</a> that I've read (the other two, <i>Lila </i>by Marilynne Robinson, and <i>Redeployment,</i> by Phil Klay, I haven't started to read yet) look like milquetoast types in comparison. I fear that may be the reason the book doesn't win: readers (and by extension, judges) like their characters to be a little more, ahem, realateble?)<br />
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It isn't that Aaliya <i>isn't, </i>though. She isn't an unreliable narrator, or an unlikable narrator. She is a woman out of place in her era and her geography: someone with intense curiosity and intellectual passion, trapped in Beirut in the midst of a civil war, and belonging to a middle class family that values women as wives and mothers, nothing else. She stares these uncomfortable truths right in the face, and finds a way to live with them. She is devoid of sentimentality -- she even despises the too-easy epiphanies in today's "literature lite". Aaliya makes her choices, and lives with the consequences.<br />
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Oh, and did I mention that I loved the writing. Well, there's that, too.<br />
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I've read a lot of novels this year. And we've finally reached the part of 2014, when everyone is making their lists -- you know, those "best of" tabulations. And while I still have three or four candidates vying for the top spot in the non-fiction category, it's hard for me to look back and say that a single book has beaten this one out. Hans Fallada's <i>Every Man Dies Alone </i>came close, but I look at that as an older book that I'm only just discovering, rather than a "best book of 2014". And it would take something pretty damn unique to dethrone Aaliya at this point.<br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07126482436426213023noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26623799721522957.post-74397257997147038662014-11-13T18:23:00.001-05:002014-11-13T19:12:46.932-05:0042 Murdered journalists so far in 2014; Joel Simon tells the backstory in "The New Censorship"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Burma is a democracy nowadays, isn't it? The military junta has given way to an elected parliament, one of which democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi -- under house arrest until only four years ago -- is a member. Well, kinda sorta maybe. The fact is that Suu Kyi is now part of the establishment, and she's starting to draw criticism from some quarters for not speaking out as forcefully as she did when she was completely out of power, on issues that might provoke the military (who still hold about 25% of the seats in the legislature) and that divide society (such as the abuse of Muslim minorities).<br />
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Which leaves journalists to step into the breach. Journalists like Aung Kyaw Naing, a freelance reporter <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-29910773">killed while in the custody of the Burmese military</a>, who claimed he was working for a Karen rebel army, and was trying to escape custody. Some of the initial observations following his body's exhumation suggest that his injuries can't be fully explained by having been shot while trying to escape.<br />
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Burma isn't a particularly dangerous place for journalists, as these things are measured by the Committee to Protect Journalists, the organization of which Joel Simon, author of <i>The New Censorship, </i>is the executive director. Only four journalists have lost their lives as a result of being targeted for doing their job: Aung Kyaw Naing just happens to be the latest of these, and the latest to lose his life of the 42 journalists killed "in the line of duty" so far this year. Some of their names are very well known to anyone who has followed the news: they include Jim Foley and Steven Sotloff, brutally murdered by terrorists in Syria, with videos of their beheadings being posted online for the world to see. Some won't be known to many of you, like <a href="https://cpj.org/killed/2014/rubylita-garcia.php">Rubylita Garcia of the Philippines</a>, a newspaper reporter and radio personality, attacked by gunmen in her own home after exposing local corruption. Garcia, who was the same age that I am, died in hospital hours later.<br />
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The Philippines has been a difficult place to be a journalist, as Simon points out in this compelling book that goes well beyond what we think off when we contemplate the hazards of journalism -- war reporting, for instance -- to look at the day-to-day realities of combatting corruption in countries like the Philippines or confronting sophisticated autocrats like Turkey's Erdogan. A total of 77 journalists have lost their lives in the Philippines, but that includes the mass assassination of 32 reporters in the single deadliest attack on a group of media professionals on record, as they followed a political candidate on his way to file his candidacy papers.<br />
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This is a timely and thoughtful analysis of all the reasons we may be getting too little news about issues of importance -- and the reasons why it isn't even the countries like China (with its "Great Firewall") and Iran that we need to worry about most (or at least, not foremost), but the ones that we don't worry about, because we assume that reporters now are free to move around and report, because, after all, aren't the democracies? Not really, says Simon, suggesting that the phrase "democratator" is more appropriate for leaders who equate press criticism with a national security challenge. And repression doesn't have to reach murder to silence journalists and stifle freedom of speech.<br />
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All that a repressive or tyrannical regime -- or anyone else -- has to do to censor is to manipulate the impression the public has of a journalist who seeks to portray the powerful in an unflattering light. Turkey's President Erdogan sees Western journalists and those who don't toe his party's as line as waging <a href="http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/erdogan-accuses-international-media-of-waging-psychological-war.aspx?PageID=238&NID=73803&NewsCatID=338">"psychological warfare"</a> against the country. If they aren't shunned by their employers and their friends, they are imprisoned. It isn't necessary to murder them.<br />
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Then there's terrorism. Foley and Sotloff are among its most recent victims; one of the first deliberately targeted (as opposed to its accidental victims) was my friend and former colleague, Danny Pearl, <a href="http://www.washingtonian.com/projects/KSM/">kidnapped and murdered</a> in Pakistan. I first "met" Danny when he and I negotiated the terms of the Toronto/Atlanta Wall Street Journal bureau World Series bet in 1992: Danny threw himself into it, heart and soul, to the point where, after the folks in Atlanta accidentally flew the Canadian flag upside down, Danny figured out how to program the Wall Street Journal's dot matrix printers to print out an illustration of an upside-down maple leaf flag -- and set it to every bureau in the Dow Jones empire. We later bonded over music, with Danny bombarding me with recommendations for this composer or that performer.<br />
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But, as Simon so clearly explains, now that terrorists have direct access to the Internet, they don't need reporters as intermediaries. Instead, they can use the reporters' deaths as weapons. As of the time he wrote this, some 30 journalists covering Syria and areas where ISIS/IS/IL/whatever is active have simply vanished without a trace. Evaporated. Add that to the ranks of the 70 who we know are dead -- the vast majority of them local reporters, whose deaths will never make the headlines. And think about what that means for what we learn about the world we live in.<br />
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We are "deluged with data, we are blind to the larger reality." And the Internet, far from helping, may actually be making this worse, having changed the economics of the media world, making it costly to sustain overseas bureaus and more convenient to rely on local journalists as news gatherers -- the same people who are most vulnerable to pressure. In Mexico, Simon notes, one newspaper published an open letter to drug traffickers that essentially amounted to "just tell us what to print".<br />
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People fuss a lot about questions of media ownership, but this book makes it very, very clear that the problem is a far broader one. You don't need to own a paper to dictate what it says, as long as you can employ one of the means of the "new censorship". If you are remotely interested in the caliber of news you get; if you've ever found yourself saying, "but why are we seeing all the coverage of THIS, and nothing of THAT", or griping about something in the media coverage of the world beyond the borders of, say, North America and Western Europe, you might want to pick this up and read it.<br />
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A few nights before Thanksgiving, the CPJ will hold its annual gala dinner in New York, honoring a handful of individuals from around the world. I've been lucky enough to attend this on a couple of occasions, and inevitably, it's one of the most inspiring evenings imaginable -- and the most daunting, because listening to the obstacles that honorees confront daily makes every detail of my life sound like a first world problem. A computer that crashes on deadline, nasty comments on a story or even a single, solitary e-mail death threat from someone I know very well doesn't mean what they say? Piffle. And you met the most interesting people. One year, my neighbor was Elizabeth Neuffer, author of the fabulous <i>The Key to My Neighbor's House. </i>It was about to come out, and we talked all evening about her reporting into the attempt to bring justice to those who had survived civil wars in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. Buy it -- really, it's that good. Two problems: the author won't get the royalties and she won't be writing about the aftermath of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan because she herself died in Iraq in 2003. It was an accident, not murder -- but still, another death in the pursuit of news. And now the latest recipient of a fellowship set up in her honor is <a href="http://www.iwmf.org/a-journalists-life-shouldnt-be-the-cost-of-reporting/">chronicling the persecution and deaths of journalists in Honduras</a>...<br />
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Read Joel Simon's book. The writing is straightforward and analytical; it's relatively short and to the point (in contrast to this long and rambling post...) The questions it raises are anything but simple, but the least we can do is insist on staying informed about the issues.<br />
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<i>Full disclosure: I received an advance review copy of this book from the publisher, via NetGalley, in exchange for a review. My opinion is my own, however!</i></div>
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07126482436426213023noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26623799721522957.post-8527571451558471952014-11-12T16:18:00.000-05:002014-11-12T17:30:17.536-05:00Tudormania is alive and well in a bookstore near you!<br />
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I confess, I have a crush on Matthew Shardlake. Yes, I know he's a fictional character, and a hunchback, and a lawyer. But, whatever. As created by C.J. Sansom, he's an incredibly powerful and convincing character. He's human: wary, fearful, lonely. After all, it's the summer of 1546 in the opening pages of this, the latest episode of the series of mysteries featuring Shardlake, and Lincoln's Inn has just dispatched him to witness the appalling death by burning at the stake of Anne Askew. The king, Henry VIII, has determined that she and others are heretics and must die for their beliefs. Of course, Henry's views of what makes someone a heretic are somewhat erratic -- devout monks have died as traitors for denying his claim to be head of the English church, while Anabaptists die for denying the rites of baptism and mass. It's enough to make anyone's head spin, and Shardlake is determined to keep his firmly attached to his (hunched) shoulders, thank you very much.<br />
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But Shardlake is also a man of principles, and a few very strong loyalties -- one to his closest friend and ally, Jack Barak, who now works alongside him in his legal practice, and another to Catherine Parr, the king's sixth wife. Queen Catherine, a reformer, has left Shardlake alone for a year since last turning to him to help her with legal matters, aware that their association led both of them into peril. But now she has no choice. Someone has stolen the text of a manuscript of religious devotions that she herself had written -- that no one else knew existed, but that can be made to look as if she, too, is a heretic. In the wrong hands, it could condemn her to a fate like that suffered by some of her predecessors. And as his life approaches its end, Henry's ill health makes his temper more dangerously volatile than ever before. The power struggle for who will control the young heir, Prince Edward, is already beginning, and many would like to see Catherine sidelined. Will Matthew help?<br />
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And so begins Shardlake's latest adventure, and it's a doozy. Frankly, I think it's one of the best books in this series so far, and removes any doubts raised by the not-quite-up-to-snuff <i>Heartstone</i>, its immediate predecessor. Shardlake encounters printers and Anabaptists, as well as devout Catholics eager to bring down anyone they see as being affiliated with the reformers. Some of his own clients may be his worst enemies; old adversaries may become temporary allies. He leads his friends into immense peril -- and the novel ends on a note that is going to make it very, <i>very, </i><b style="font-style: italic;">very</b> hard for me to wait for the next installment of the series. Sansom is simply going to have to write more rapidly. Or I'm going to have to find a time travel machine and go back and find out what happened next.<br />
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This book won't be out in the United States until February, so if you're reading this here and gnashing your teeth in fury and irritation, you have a couple of options. Firstly, be aware that this is the sixth book in an excellent series of historical mysteries that begins with <i>Dissolution</i>; you've got lots of time to go back and read your way through 'em before Lamentation arrives. Or, if you've already encountered Master Shardlake, well, either Amazon.co.uk or BookDepository.com would be happy to ship a copy of this to you toute de suite, the former for a not-too-small fee. The latter has just resumed shipping UK titles to the US and generally does so without the shipping, but I've found them slightly less reliable.<br />
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Then, since Tudor mania is once again running rampant in historical fiction publishing circles, you'll find some alternatives on the bookstore shelves to consider while you're waiting for your package to show up. Two I can recommend heartily; two, I can only suggest that you steer clear of.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi97tyWj81oIi5d01eN1SVQNHt3DnNS9fDFEhi0wtwqQodBPHoJJhrmGWQQGVRjOBraatSTfrHWBWesoqKXiaZ9YAswRpjMsb4P1cajGf85cBDFXp2Pcv7zzHSvIdszix41kZw1nwM0s94/s1600/imgres-31.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi97tyWj81oIi5d01eN1SVQNHt3DnNS9fDFEhi0wtwqQodBPHoJJhrmGWQQGVRjOBraatSTfrHWBWesoqKXiaZ9YAswRpjMsb4P1cajGf85cBDFXp2Pcv7zzHSvIdszix41kZw1nwM0s94/s200/imgres-31.jpg" width="133" /></a>C.W. Gortner may have made his name writing biographical historical novels focusing on medieval ladies such as Isabella of Castile and her daughter, Juana la Loca (his breakthrough novel, <i>The Last Queen</i>) but the first novel of his that I read was actually originally a self-published book, <i>The Tudor Secret,</i> that became a trilogy of historical mysteries, of which <i>The Tudor Vendetta</i> is the final volume. They feature the intrepid Brendan Prescott, an ally of the princess who has, at last, ascended to the throne as Queen Elizabeth. Brendan, raised in the household of the Dudleys, is now firmly in the camp of William Cecil and the "intelligencers" of Walsingham, etc., so the enmity with which he views Dudley make sense, even if it is exaggerated for dramatic effect here. And as in Sansom's book, it is his loyalty to a queen that counts: Elizabeth, even without knowing the true story of his own parentage, entrusts him with a secret mission. Without telling either Dudley or Cecil, she says, he must find her beloved lady in waiting, Blanche Parry, who has vanished after visiting Catholic kinsmen. But the secret turns out to be greater than Brendan could ever have imagined, and it will seal the two young people together more tightly than ever before -- if, that is, the monarch and her subject can both survive the immediate perils. One warning here: you need to have an above-average tolerance for a rewriting of historical characters and what they may or may not have done in their lives. I confess that this did end up stretching my credulity to breaking point, but ultimately, it was the adventure that mattered.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3ZDmtN0vf6cFmTwy4DwmPFpnVDcW9PkclSd9wUxpb5b6TJriKun6CdGK415lSHgEDZIRRDtap_9NE97KZwzbaEuSOGWaphGDETaBhhe_T7n52h6HBMa0a4Fyn-AwXgLZYc7juvd0HNAQ/s1600/imgres-33.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3ZDmtN0vf6cFmTwy4DwmPFpnVDcW9PkclSd9wUxpb5b6TJriKun6CdGK415lSHgEDZIRRDtap_9NE97KZwzbaEuSOGWaphGDETaBhhe_T7n52h6HBMa0a4Fyn-AwXgLZYc7juvd0HNAQ/s200/imgres-33.jpg" width="133" /></a>Elizabeth Fremantle is <i>clearly </i>a historical novelist to watch. After penning an impressive debut novel about Katherine Parr, she has gone on to write something even stronger here, focusing on the younger sisters of Lady Jane Grey. Left in a perilous position after their sister's execution, Katherine -- the frivolous beauty -- and Mary -- the intelligent and quick-witted hunchback -- must navigate and survive two very different courts, that of Catholic Mary, who had signed their sister's death warrant, and that of Elizabeth. Both see the sisters as rivals, but ironically it under Elizabeth that they may end up faring worse. What I relished most about this was that part of the tale is told through the eyes of a relative outsider, the painter Lavinia Teerlinc, who knows and cares for both young women and tries to help both navigate the great power politics of their day. But Katherine has too little judgment -- first allowing herself to be wooed by the Spanish faction at court in Elizabeth's early days as Queen and later to marry without the Queen's permission. For her part, Mary, craving love and affection, is in search of a measure of freedom and independence. It's beautifully written, impeccably researched and absolutely fascinating -- something that I hadn't expected, given that the stories of both young women were already reasonably well known to me. Anyone to whom they are new likely will find it even more compelling. Run and get it now!<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9xaILoGvBWmUi0YfLH75LLucrgTjnQQpYELIdR3zddspp2BaTxi4un3ZaNqaCkCtmMCK4UBNzKQLGs9zKmtCP8jhPDQd_IW5s4OZ8NwOs8Lb_kqpWFLJ0eTWcT9ODBQiR3Z4BuYFZvfY/s1600/imgres-35.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9xaILoGvBWmUi0YfLH75LLucrgTjnQQpYELIdR3zddspp2BaTxi4un3ZaNqaCkCtmMCK4UBNzKQLGs9zKmtCP8jhPDQd_IW5s4OZ8NwOs8Lb_kqpWFLJ0eTWcT9ODBQiR3Z4BuYFZvfY/s200/imgres-35.jpg" width="129" /></a>And now for Elizabeth Tudor herself... For some reason, with very few exceptions (Susan Kay's <i>Legacy </i>being one), books about Elizabeth on the throne seem to be much less compelling than those about her struggle to reach it. Once she's there, the drama seems to shift elsewhere -- in particular, to the struggles by Cecil and Walsingham to keep her there and to fight the espionage wars. (And there are some great non-fiction books on this topic, like <i>The Watchers, </i>by Stephen Alford.) In a nutshell, that's the problem with this novel by Alison Weir. Her previous novel, <i>The Lady Elizabeth, </i>was suspenseful, even though the reader knows that she didn't end up losing her head like her mother before her but survived to become the greatest of the Tudor monarchs. This volume, as Elizabeth plays the marriage game with her foreign suitors and alternately indulges in some hot and heavy romantic interludes with Robert Dudley, while delivering verbatim set piece speeches about not making windows into her subjects souls, etc., simply isn't all that interesting. It plods along, from one year and one episode in Elizabeth's life, to the next. One suitor fades from the scene to be replaced by the next. Elizabeth ages; her vanity grows, as does the novel's tedium. You'd be better off reading a well-written biography, quite frankly. This is really a biography that takes liberties with some of the facts and throws in some dialog.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyt_M8HqmTxz7XGA88yPUdxYtsUP2knjIjzJ8F1Z1KPMrKh-nun0-XmULLFObYU7hT9szSh53abxhzpysRb4KVuYbDodxAdpTBwdmO5j2p8SHsZQbmKkQeijthHWGSzmahiO5wogSM28I/s1600/imgres-34.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyt_M8HqmTxz7XGA88yPUdxYtsUP2knjIjzJ8F1Z1KPMrKh-nun0-XmULLFObYU7hT9szSh53abxhzpysRb4KVuYbDodxAdpTBwdmO5j2p8SHsZQbmKkQeijthHWGSzmahiO5wogSM28I/s200/imgres-34.jpg" width="134" /></a>For the record, I'm not a Philippa Gregory hater. I do think that she loves to overstate her qualifications, referring to her doctorate on every possible occasion (when it's in English literature, rather than history), and I think her writing talent, as opposed to her ability to spin a yarn, is negligible. Her penchant for saying the same thing three times in essentially the same way within five sentences is inexplicable and bizarre. What I have enjoyed about some of her novels is her ability to take a different perspective on issues. For instance, her novel about Mary Queen of Scots is a great example of the late Tudor clash of the old aristocracy -- Mary Stuart, the captive queen, and her jailor, the earl of Shrewsbury -- and the upstart new merchant class, as represented by Bess of Hardwick the brisk business-minded countess of Shrewsbury. We see the beginnings of that conflict in this novel, as Henry VII and Henry VIII deliberately -- in Gregory's telling -- push away the nobles upon whom they traditionally would have relied for advice, and instead turn to parvenus to help them rule. The narrator here is Henry VIII's cousin, Margaret Pole, countess of Salisbury, born Margaret Plantagenet, who would become his oldest victim and the oldest woman ever executed when a headsman famously had to chase her around the block to behead her. But for a period of decades, she was at the center of the Tudor court, governess to the young princess, Mary, and in high favor. This is the tale of overweening ambition and pride and an inability to recognize changing realities. Normally, having an unlikable narrator doesn't spoil a book for me, but this was an exception: Margaret was an irritatingly blind and silly woman whom I wanted to shake, rather than a subtle and complex character and the writer didn't compensate for any of this. The themes, as I noted, were interesting to ponder, but once developed, I could ponder them on my own without having to read Gregory's novel. I think there's a ratio here: for every interesting novel Gregory writes, there are four mediocre to unreadable ones. This wasn't nearly as bad as <i>The White Queen </i>or <i>The Kingmaker's Daughter</i>, but you can do a lot better.<br />
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Still suffering from Tudormania? Keep an eye open for a golden oldie, Margaret George's <i>The Autobiography of Henry VIII </i>(her debut novel and still her best); the series of historical mysteries by Rory Clements featuring John Shakespeare (brother of the more famous you-know-who); and Fiona Buckley's earlier historical mysteries set in Elizabethan England, featuring Ursula Blanchard, starting with <i>To Shield the Queen. </i>They are being re-released and made available on Kindle now.<br />
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<i>Full disclosure: I received copies of "The Tudor Vendetta" and "Sisters of Treason" from their publishers via NetGalley in exchange for a review containing my honest opinions.</i></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07126482436426213023noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26623799721522957.post-1391871816596869232014-11-12T09:00:00.000-05:002014-11-12T09:31:59.434-05:00Book Porn; or, Are Book Publishers Really Dealers in Addictive Substances?<br />
Are book publishers just drug pushers in disguise? I sometimes wonder. Certainly, every time I take a step back to look at a list of upcoming books, I begin to think that for all <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/oct/12/ten-ways-to-save-publishing-industry">the agonizing that has been going on about the crisis in which publishers find themselves</a>, they really have one big ace tucked firmly up their sleeves. They have the books that we all want to read.<br />
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Sorry, but I'm just not queuing up to read a vast number of the books that are made available by <a href="http://www.seattleweekly.com/news/955189-129/the-perks-pitfalls-and-paradoxes-of">Amazon's own publishing divisions</a>, however intriguing I find their business model and however delighted I am that it has created new career options for many authors whom the short-sighted business policies of the New York behemoth publishers have left to flounder. I've tried several and thus far my reactions boil down to "meh". I'll keep trying, and I'll let you know if that changes.<br />
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I'll always, always, always be scrutinizing new offerings from a handful of smaller publishers that have firmly established themselves as my favorites, based on my tremendous success with their offerings. A while back, <span id="goog_1544059724"></span><a href="http://uncommonreading.blogspot.com/2011/07/some-publishers-i-keep-close-eye-on.html">I summarized some of these</a><span id="goog_1544059725"></span> and listed their attractions. Today, I'd add the likes of Graywolf Press to the list, thanks to books like <i>The Empathy Exams </i>by Leslie Jamison, which I'll try to get around to discussing one day soon on these cyber pages.<br />
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But around this time of year, I sit down to pull together a list of books that I am desperately eager to read, and I realize just why book publishers might do very, very well as peddlers of various illegal and intoxicating substances of the kind of things our parents told us we're supposed to "just say NO" to. Their wares are seductive and appealing. And I know that just like a <i>really </i>great drug might do, they'll take me away from ugly realities -- or at least, catapult me into someone else's ugly reality, reminding me that my own really isn't all that bad, after all. They'll make me believe in some greater wisdom. They'll inspire me. They'll show me wonderful imaginations at work; tremendous writing. And yes, there will be some disappointments, too, but that's part of the game.<br />
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And unlike the drug pushers, they get to promote their wares publicly. So to share some of the pain of anticipation, I'm going to tell you about some of the books that I'm most eager to read in the coming few months. Call it drugs; call it book porn; call it whatever you want. All I know is that, one way or another, by hook or by crook, these are the books that will be finding their way onto my shelves or my Kindle. A book habit can indeed become a very, very scary thing.<br />
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<b><u>December 2014</u></b><br />
<i>Moriarty </i>by Anthony Horwitz (my most coveted and most elusive mystery books of the winter!)<br />
<i>The Lonely War: One Woman's Account of the Struggle for Modern Iran </i>by Nazila Fathi (timely...)<br />
<i>The Convert's Song </i>by Sebastian Rotella (people keep telling me this is an author to read)<br />
<i>When Books Went to War </i>by Molly Guptill Manning (if they packed 'em, I want to know why)<br />
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<b><u>January 2015</u></b><br />
<i>Honeydew </i>by Edith Pearlman (yum, more short stories by this truly amazing author)<br />
<i>The Honest Folk of Guadeloupe </i>by Anthony Williams (new author, but from Soho Press)<br />
<i>The Girl on the Train </i>by Paula Hawkins (lotsa buzz about this suspense novel)<br />
<i>Once Upon a Revolution </i>by Thanassis Cambanis (likely to be a good book about the Arab Spring)<br />
<i>The Orphan Sky </i>by Ella Leya (yes, set in Azerbaijan, but why not?)<br />
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<b><u>February 2015</u></b><br />
<i>Shame and the Captives </i>by Thomas Keneally (WWII POWs in Australia)<br />
<i>The Siege Winter </i>by Ariana Franklin (finished posthumously by her daughter)<br />
<i>Discontent and Its Civilizations </i>by Mohsin Hamid (non-fiction anthology by a fave novelist)<br />
<i>H is for Hawk </i>by Helen Macdonald (falconry; grief; it just won the <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/04/samuel-johnson-prize-helen-macdonald-h-is-for-hawk">Samuel Johnson Prize</a>)<br />
<i>We Are Pirates </i>by Daniel Handler (Lemony Snicket writes for grownups!)<br />
<i>When the Doves Disappeared </i>by Sofi Oksanen (Estonian resistance to the Soviets; lotsa buzz)<br />
<i>The Last Good Paradise </i>by Tatjana Soli (I loved her debut novel)<br />
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<b><u>March 2015</u></b><br />
<i>The Buried Giant </i>by Kazuo Ishiguro (how to resist??)<br />
<i>Leaving Berlin </i>by Joseph Kanon (a 50/50 chance of being a winning suspense yarn)<br />
<i>Epitaph </i>by Mary Doria Russell (the sequel to <i>Doc</i>; it's time for the OK Corral...)<br />
<i>The Porcelain Thief </i>by Hsu Huan (scouring China for buried... china?)<br />
<i>Mademoiselle Chanel </i>by C.W. Gortner (a move to the 20th century for this author)<br />
<i>Meet Me in Atlantis </i>by Mark Adams (the quest for the lost city...)<br />
<i>Rebel Queen </i>by Michelle Moran (historical fiction about the Indian mutiny)<br />
<i>Last Wake </i>by Erik Larson (The Lusitania's sinking; marking the centenary)Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07126482436426213023noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26623799721522957.post-85482080072519561352014-11-11T02:33:00.001-05:002014-11-11T11:33:03.849-05:00World War I: From guiding you through the trenches to guiding you through the stacks of books<br />
Back in the summer of 1978, two fellow Canadian teens who lived on the same street that I did in Brussels, came rushing over. Did I, they enquired, want to go and work in France for the rest of the summer and work as a tour guide at a World War I battlefield? I'd have to live in a youth hostel in Arras, cycle 11 kilometers each way to and from the site at Vimy Ridge every day and spend eight hours taking visitors on guided tours through the part of a restored section of the tunnels where soldiers preparing to assault the ridge overlooking the coalfields of northern France lived for years before the battle finally came at Easter 1917. At the time, I was working three half-days a week, babysitting a two-year-old boy who was partway through potty-training: he had learned that he needed to sit down on the potty, but had yet to understand the concept of pulling down his pants before letting fly. I was sick of the endless cleanup, and the lack of adult converation; a 22 kilometer bicycle roundtrip seemed like child's play by comparison. Of course, I said yes.<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgH0S84jIfvxTaewfeEKj5x_BoGeoMBbtmoXFJfz8gyLHPF-CYMpHtnt3sm6IRW2NcpUCkOqLqBw2HeWQWcAvnUGD_9Oo2JXmHaYa2lPZfcfzB3OtDyZ2DZFAZKmukSu9OY3k_nATWMQ9o/s1600/1415207_10152132229488455_1773661956_o.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgH0S84jIfvxTaewfeEKj5x_BoGeoMBbtmoXFJfz8gyLHPF-CYMpHtnt3sm6IRW2NcpUCkOqLqBw2HeWQWcAvnUGD_9Oo2JXmHaYa2lPZfcfzB3OtDyZ2DZFAZKmukSu9OY3k_nATWMQ9o/s1600/1415207_10152132229488455_1773661956_o.jpg" height="200" width="138" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sitting next to the trenches at Vimy Ridge, June 1980</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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And so began what would be my summer job for my teenage years until my family left Europe in 1980. It wasn't all wonderful. I rear-ended a car while riding my bicycle on the autoroute. (Don't ask...) My sweatshirt fell onto the space heater in the bureau des guides and nearly started a fire. The bike ride was grueling, taking me past freshly-manured fields every morning. On the other hand... I lived in the youth hostel and met travelers from all over the world. And I learned about the war from the locals, including people who had lived through it, or who had heard stories from those who had. About how, when the autoroute was built nearby, countless skeletons were unearthed, and enough live ammunition to fight another war. I met veterans of the Vimy battle, one of whom cried when he couldn't find where he had scratched his name on a wall of the tunnels. I went spelunking down some of the closed-off sections of the tunnels -- strictly against the rules -- and aggravated my already horribly bad claustrophobia. And I developed an endless curiosity about this war, the physical legacy of which I could see all around me. Giant craters pockmarked the landscape and filled up with water when it rained -- leftover from the efforts of sappers to blow up the trenches and tunnel networks. In the woods -- one pine tree planted for ever Canadian soldier killed at Vimy -- unexploded shells worked their way to the surface almost daily, so sheep were used to keep the grass trimmed. Every so often, some hapless sheep would blow himself or herself to kingdom come -- and every so often, some foolish picnicker would come running to the guides to tell us about a strange metal object that at first had looked like a great flat surface to use as a table, and then...<br />
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So, I still read a lot about World War I. Not everything, especially this year, when so many new books about the Great War are hitting shelves to mark the centenary of its outbreak. Still, enough that over the years, I've found some favorites, both in fiction and nonfiction. Here are a few of 'em -- and be aware, they're not going to be the conventional histories. Those, I figure, you can find under your steam.<br />
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<b><i>The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell</i></b><br />
Really, if you're interested in World War I, you shouldn't be without this book. Not exactly obscure -- Modern Library named it one of the best 100 NonFiction works of the 20th Century -- it's still not mainstream. But it's riveting. Think of it as cultural history. What was the war like for those in the trenches? How did it transform their sense of who they were and how they fit into society, and how was that reflected in their writings, from their letters and diaries to their poems? How did the language itself change as the war progressed?<br />
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<b><i>Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Modern Age by Modris Eksteins</i></b><br />
This flows logically from Fussell's book -- it's about the birth of modernism, and the way that the destructive urge altered and fundamentally reshaped the forces of creativity. If you're curious about Dorothea Dix, George Grosz, and the art, music and literature of the interwar years, and how the bloodbath of 1914-1918 led to new artistic trends, this is the book to read. (And as I write this, it's only $2.99 on Kindle...)<br />
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<b><i>The Daughters of Mars by Thomas Keneally </i></b><br />
This novel was one of my favorite books of 2013. It's the story of the two Durance sisters, both nurses, Australians, who serve first at Gallipoli and then at the Western Front. There are tensions underpinning their own relationship but the war forces them to form new bonds and brings them a sense of at least being useful, along with a sense of despair. "Young men were smashed for obscure purposes and repaired and smashed again," Naomi Durance muses. It's not about conflict itself, but life on the fringes of war, dealing with its detritus. "There's no rest for anyone until it's all over," one character points out, testily. "Unless it's the sort of final rest they dish out in Flanders and on the Somme." And there's no easy sentimentality here, either. And don't miss Keneally's other book about the Great War, the equally powerful, but very different, <i>Gossip From the Forest. </i>It's the chronicle of the 'negotiations' leading up to the Armistice in the Forest of Compiegne, which took effect on November 11, 1918. It's a heartbreaking and powerful novel.<br />
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<b><i>Back to the Front by Stephen O'Shea</i></b><br />
O'Shea set out to literally walk the length of the entire Western Front, from Flanders to the Swiss border, and chronicled what he saw and thought along the way. It's a slim book, but still thought-provoking and well worth a look.<br />
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<b><i>Regeneration (the Trilogy) by Pat Barker</i></b><br />
Yes, this trilogy -- especially the first book -- deserves every single speck of hype and buzz associated with it. (My least favorite is probably the middle book, but, whatever -- it's still a remarkable achievement.) Barker has captured the horrors of the final years of the war and the literal insanity of persisting in the same strategies, throwing men into no man's land in vain, and contrasted it with the treatment of men rendered insane by these military strategies by William Rivers of Craiglockhart. What is the real insanity? It's a question Barker poses repeatedly, in myriad ways, in what may be the consummate antiwar novels.<br />
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<b><i>To End All Wars by Adam Hochschild</i></b><br />
The senseless of the carnage is a theme of Hochschild's magisterial book as well. He focuses on those who resisted, from the conscientious objectors to the suffragettes, and their conflict with the die-hard loyalists, as well as those, like Kipling, who found their loyalties grievously tested as the years dragged on. Moving, because it sheds light on those whose names and stories should never be forgotten.<br />
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<b><i>Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden</i></b><br />
I am a massive fan of Boyden's prose, and it was this novel that converted me. Two Cree Indians are recruited as sharpshooters -- snipers -- for the Canadian army. The novel is told through the eyes of one of them being taken home to his own community, horribly wounded, addicted to morphine and written off by the army as likely to die. A healer from his own community who has known both boys since their childhood is taking him back -- the journey of the title -- but it's also a journey toward an attempted healing. What did Xavier and Elijah do -- and what did it cost them? It's a brutal, gritty tale, but unbelievably compelling.<br />
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<b><i>The Missing of the Somme by Geoff Dyer</i></b><br />
"What passing bells for these who die as cattle"? Wilfred Owen wrote in his "Anthem for Doomed Youth. Doomed himself, Owen is commemorated in war memorials -- and in the pages of this book, which examines the ways in which we remember. It's personal journalism, and it transcends raw facts and figures without ever tumbling over into banalities or sentimental claptrap. It's brilliant, pure and simple. Read it, don't read my rhapsodies about it.<br />
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<b><i>Zennor in Darkness by Helen Dunmore</i></b><br />
Perhaps an outlier in such august company, but I wanted to steer away from the obvious suspects -- Remarque, Brittain, Enid Bagnold, etc. In this novel, the war is the backdrop, but an integral part of the story, because it's about suspicion that surrounds foreigners/outsiders in times of war. The foreigners, in this case, are DH Lawrence and his German wife Frieda, cousin of a German war ace, Baron von Richthofen, and the setting is the remote tip of Cornwall, Zennor, near St. Ives, where the Lawrences sought refuge from war fever. Not up to the high standards of Dunmore's two later novels, <i>The Siege </i>and <i>Betrayal</i>, but something different.<br />
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<b><i>Paris 1919 by Margaret Macmillan</i></b><br />
Why, oh why, after such carnage, did Europe go back and do it all over again only two decades later? The answer lies in the Versailles treaty, and no one is better than Margaret Macmillan to lay out the whys and wherefores of the bastardized compromises and victor's justice that continue to shape the world we inhabit today. (Just look at the Middle East...)<br />
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<b><i>A Very Long Engagement by Sebastien Japrisot</i></b><br />
Another outlier, but again, worth trying. Made into a so-so film, it was a great popular novel, in which the intrepid Mathilde Donnay sets out to find out just what happened to her fiancé, Manech, one day in the trenches when five men were shot for cowardice. Was he one? Could he have survived? It's no easy task, Mathilde is no easy heroine to like or admire. But she bulldozes her way to a truth of sorts.<br />
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If you live in the United States, you can't buy a poppy to wear on November 11. But maybe you can pause for a moment of silence at 11 a.m. and remember the 16 million who died and the 20 million wounded during the 1914-1918 war -- and the millions more who died in the wars it spawned and continues to spawn.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4JwgcdJCF-4MCPNB6DwxsaL0tx3qypwtT47yCEwRNDoMzKb6L1Pp5ZZCRvcUDba1o68sn1Wsu05erqaxVKeLmUkHdrSRNa5ylmKH9Y0xNx478iX-05V6mcbnciqiEDZawMKxUwSY_TbM/s1600/images-2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4JwgcdJCF-4MCPNB6DwxsaL0tx3qypwtT47yCEwRNDoMzKb6L1Pp5ZZCRvcUDba1o68sn1Wsu05erqaxVKeLmUkHdrSRNa5ylmKH9Y0xNx478iX-05V6mcbnciqiEDZawMKxUwSY_TbM/s1600/images-2.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The most of the Tower of London, filled with ceramic poppies, one for every one of the nearly 900,000 British fatalities in World War I.</td></tr>
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<b><i><br /></i></b><b><i><br /></i></b>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07126482436426213023noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26623799721522957.post-60513781207603582162014-11-10T10:12:00.000-05:002014-11-10T11:57:37.120-05:00Mystery Monday: When a literary novelist writes mysteries, the result proves magical<br />
So, I promised that my return to blogging would be based on being critical; no cozy cheerleading here. Of course, I also pledged to be rigorously honest in my views and opinions. So if I now end up going all fangirl (horrible phrase, but the only one that possibly applies in the circumstances) in my first post, I'll take refuge by pointing to the second part of that pledge.<br />
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And just who, or what, is causing the excitement? It's the pending release of the fourth of what the author plans to be ten mysteries set in Egypt in the years leading to the events of the Arab Spring in 2011, <i>The Burning Gates </i>by Parker Bilal. But to understand the reason why I did a small dance of joy when I downloaded an advance review copy of this book (due in bookstores next February) from Bloomsbury via NetGalley), I have to rewind to early last year, when I picked up Bilal's first book in the series, <i>The Golden Scales. </i><br />
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From the first pages, I was hooked, as a desperate woman scours the streets of Cairo for her daughter. Flash forward, and the reader learns that Liza Markham, the woman, is still looking for the little girl, whom she hasn't seen since 1981, when she was four. And there is another missing person, too, this one of far more apparent importance to Cairo's powerbrokers, that of a young footballer and protegé of its shady, threatening owner, Saad Hanafi. Both of these mysteries land in the lap of Makana, a Sudanese political exile and former cop turned private investigator, living on the margins of Cairo society. But why would someone like Hanafi -- who has access to all the resources he could possibly want -- hire the likes of Makana to retrieve Adil, the missing footballer? And what, beyond Makana's involvement, links the two cases?<br />
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This is set in Cairo of 1998, a city of which Mubarak has firm control but in which Makana's life is precarious. We learn slowly (at just the right time, in the right way) how it happened that he fled Khartoum and what happened to his wife and child during that traumatic flight; we also understand how that shapes his own view of the case and these other two missing children. Murder follows, and Makana's sense of justice is horrified. He pursues the case in the face of Egyptian oligarchs, Russian mafiosi and yes, Islamic militants.<br />
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What I loved about this series from the first book onward was the rich level of detail. An outsider, Makana will never be accepted in Cairo, and his life reflects that status. He even lives on a rickety, decaying houseboat moored to a bank of the Nile, making little effort to do more than exist in this exile's life until his cases engage him to the point where he becomes reckless in the pursuit of justice. Cairo, in lesser hands, would simply become a backdrop for this story, but instead emerges as another character in its own right. Makana's Cairo isn't just the souks where the tourists gawk at the merchandise for sale, but seedy little hotels, neighborhood cafes and tea shops, the ubiquitous traffic jams, the offices where underlings cater slavishly to powerful men. There's a pervasive sense of menace in the air.<br />
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You can read these as straightforward mysteries, but also as political novels. Parker Bilal doesn't just <br />
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write detective novels but also literary novels, under his "real" name, Jamal Mahjoub, several of which have examined broad political themes in Africa, so it's hardly surprising that if you scratch the surface of his "Makana" books -- excellent in their own right -- you'll find similar concerns lurking. A razor-sharp critique of political opportunism? Check. Politicians using and exploiting religious convictions in their own pursuit of power? Absolutely. If Makana's decaying houseboat home is always just about to vanish beneath the Nile's surface, Egyptian society as a whole -- however affluent it may look -- isn't in much better shape, as Bilal's novels point out.<br />
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The second novel, <i>Dogstar Rising, </i>once again sees Makana with two cases to solve. He has been hired to investigate apparent threats to the head of a dilapidated and dysfunctional travel agency, and, working undercover there, discovers that the thread leads to sectarian religious conflicts and some ugly past secrets. Sectarian conflicts are emerging elsewhere, however: the bodies of young boys -- mutilated -- are showing up in Cairo's alleyways, and it is all too easy for opportunists to point the finger of blame at the Coptic Christian community.<br />
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Early this year, I snapped up a copy of <i>The Ghost Runner </i>as soon as it was released in the UK -- I didn't want to wait to read it until it became available in the United States. It was a bit of a departure, literally: this time, Makana leaves the crowded, noisy streets of Cairo for the eerie quiet of Siwa, an oasis town. If you're thinking "oasis" as in "desert paradise", however, you may want to rethink... Makana is in pursuit of the truth behind the burning of a young woman, Karima, whose family roots lie in Siwa. Could her estranged father -- formerly a criminal, now a born-again jihadi -- have set fire to her to restore the family 'honor'? Siwa's citizens, however, don't want to give up their secrets and Mahjoub/Bilal himself confirms, in an interview with Publishers Weekly, that he saw Makana as riding into the remote community rather in the same way that the outsider in search of truth and justice shows up in a Western movie shot by Sergio Leone. Unsurprisingly, the outcome is a tremendously vivid literary equivalent of what you might have seen in one of those Westerns -- with a 'War on Terror' twist, since the novel is set in 2002.<br />
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Now I've got my hands on book #4, <i>The Burning Gate, </i>which may be my Thanksgiving reading treat for myself. Certainly, I can't imagine not eagerly snapping up each book in this series as soon as possible: there are some circumstances in which self control simply isn't a virtue, and this is one. I want to know how Makana fared after his misadventures in the desert. I want to know whether he'll ever find out what happened to his daughter, and how he'll fend off the next attempt by his Sudanese nemesis -- his former underling in the police department -- to coax him back into harm's way?<br />
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And another next step, of course, will have to be to seek out some of the works by Parker Bilal's alter ego, Jamal Mahjoub. Having read the first of John Banville's mysteries (written under the pseudonym of Benjamin Black) and having discovered Mahjoub/Bilal, I'm becoming convinced that this particular combination is a slam-dunk win -- especially for readers who prize great, atmospheric writing, impeccably suspenseful plots and compelling characters. And really, what more do you need in a great mystery?<br />
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<i>Full disclosure: I received advance review copies of The Golden Scales and Dogstar Rising from the publishers via NetGalley, in exchange for my honest opinion. </i><br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07126482436426213023noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26623799721522957.post-68207299800370956852014-11-09T20:36:00.000-05:002014-11-10T07:16:32.926-05:00Tiptoeing Back Into the Blogosphere...<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGrSTC8KKx2F7l8tmcs3IJ3_pimPtAMdSQaEOJj4u7uqnv8q_McZv4lqmL4wH3DDgD8Qjrq-OseRZEY6gcHIFfc7BSx_JvS0mWME1uQ_C916OOJmbIHae0lAvCLwCbA7EeIFm92T-DTw8/s1600/UncommonReadingOpen1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGrSTC8KKx2F7l8tmcs3IJ3_pimPtAMdSQaEOJj4u7uqnv8q_McZv4lqmL4wH3DDgD8Qjrq-OseRZEY6gcHIFfc7BSx_JvS0mWME1uQ_C916OOJmbIHae0lAvCLwCbA7EeIFm92T-DTw8/s1600/UncommonReadingOpen1.jpg" height="200" width="132" /></a>Suddenly, literally overnight, I stopped blogging about books. It happened a little over two years ago, and I remember precisely what happened. I had been attending the National Association of Business Economics conference in downtown Manhattan and, after a very long day of listening to people talk about the business cycle, employment data, commodities prices -- and interviewing Sheila Bair about financial market regulations -- I staggered home to Brooklyn. I let myself in the gate in the fence that surrounded the brownstone in which I had an apartment, and lifted up the flap of the mailbox affixed to that fence. Up until that day, I had always been grateful for the large flap -- it meant that if I wasn't home, USPS, UPS, etc. could simply put any deliveries from Amazon, Book Depository or elsewhere in the big metal container. There was no problem about getting oversized mail.<br />
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As it turned out, there was also no problem in receiving other, less desirable, substances. A short while previously, I'd received an advance review copy of a new book by a debut author. I <i>really</i> hadn't liked it. I had said so in my review. I hadn't used any vulgarity; I hadn't commented on the author; I hadn't told people that they should burn their copies. I just said that my experience of the book made it one I wished I hadn't read at all, and listed the reasons. Usually, when I pick up a book like that, I put it down -- I return it to the library and forget about it. In this case, I had made a commitment to review it, and did (although not on this blog.) I didn't Tweet about the review, or otherwise draw attention to it. Nonetheless, instead of allowing the review to sink into obscurity, the author, as I recently chronicled <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/oct/22/amazon-vine-book-reviews-blogging">in a recent column for The Guardian about the perils of book reviewing</a>, took offense -- great offense. So did a great number of her fans. Someone -- I have no way of knowing who it was -- decided to wrap some dog sh*t in a piece of paper, on which were printed some of the same phrases that the author had used on her blog to castigate me. In my hurry to get home, I had reached my hand into the mailbox and straight into the poop.<br />
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Of course, I called the cops; I preserved the "evidence" for a few days, until it was clear that they weren't going to show up to get it and conduct DNA tests or whatever one does with such unwanted gifts, at which point it went into the trash. My sweater went to the drycleaners. My hands got scrubbed with disinfectants, using a rough nailbrush that subsequently went into the trash. And I stopped blogging. Because, let's face it, why deal with loonies?<br />
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I still reviewed for Amazon's Vine program, and resurrected the dog poop experience, at my editor's insistence, when I sat down to write about the democratization of reviewing, and how getting a bad review can temporarily unhinge some authors. Not that that is anything new, of course. Richard Ford spat in Colson Whitehead's face after a bad review, and shot a bullet into a copy of a book by Alice Hoffman after she also failed to appreciate his genius. It's fairly safe to say that you won't see me weighing in on Ford's prose here, especially since my recent reading of <i>Canada</i> left me underwhelmed. Pissed off writers with guns worry me considerably more than those with blogs and fans with dogs and dog poop.<br />
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Writing the column for the Guardian made me stop and think, however. I hate bullies. I don't know who was responsible for shoving that dog shit in my mailbox -- the author (who removed the offensive content from their website after I contacted the publisher), their spouse (who admitted harassing me with a series of messages), or one of the author's fans, from whom I also heard. I'll never know. But whoever it was, was a bully -- and that person took advantage of my reluctance to fight back. After writing and posting that review elsewhere, any review I posted on my blog ended up with my e-mail box full of obnoxious messages and lots of messages here for me to wade my way through and delete so that they wouldn't affect what a handful of readers enjoyed -- the discussion about books. But why give in to bullies?<br />
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I also read author <a href="http://www.matthaig.com/a-blog-about-blogging/">Matt Haig's wonderful post about blogging.</a> Haig spoke out, via Twitter, in favor of "a critical culture in books", arguing that we need "people to say what they want about books", even if it isn't unrelentingly positive cheerleading. He acknowledges that he himself has felt under pressure to say "nice things I only half mean". And that not all books can be good. Finally, of all people, I listened to a presentation by Peter Stothard, editor of the Times Literary Supplement, at the Boston Book Festival. To be clear, I think <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/sep/25/books-bloggers-literature-booker-prize-stothard">his views about blogging</a> cross the line into elitism -- certainly, he'd have no time for someone like me -- but he did make several arguments that I couldn't help but agree with. Firstly, talking about books isn't just talking about what you "like" -- in fact, he skillfully eviscerated his final questioner of the day, someone who clearly was expecting a sympathetic reaction when she identified herself as a professional reviewer who explained her dilemma -- that she only found herself reviewing what she "liked", because, after all, life is too short. Stothard looked at her in disbelief. "You don't need to like a book to think about it critically," he said. Clearly, in his eyes, professional reviewers like her were as much of a problem as amateurs like myself. "If everyone only reviewed what they liked..." And words failed him, which I suspect doesn't happen to the likes of Sir Peter Stothard very frequently.<br />
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So, with all of the above in mind, I'm tiptoeing back into book blogging. We'll see how it goes. Whether I love a book or loathe it, what you'll continue to read here are my honest opinions. Perhaps I could do worse than to borrow some other words of wisdom from Stothard: one "should never say anything in a review that one wouldn't say to the author's face." I think that's generally good advice for anything in the public domain, in any event. On the flip side, I think reviewers need to feel able to voice an opinion without worrying about what's in their mailbox or -- far more heinous -- being <a href="http://groupthink.jezebel.com/richard-brittain-violently-assaults-book-reviewer-1649170122">cracked over the head with a bottle of wine</a> while out shopping.<br />
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Happy reading, everyone.<br />
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07126482436426213023noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26623799721522957.post-13113439572090358172012-10-15T03:03:00.001-04:002014-10-24T13:58:27.453-04:00Mystery Monday: With roots in the Arctic, no wonder this is a chilling tale...<br />
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I can't even remember any more where I first heard about Giles Blunt's series of novels set in a fictional northern Ontario city named Algonquin Bay (a thinly-disguised North Bay), but I do know that I'm very glad that someone mentioned them to me! At their heart is John Cardinal, a middle-aged detective who once played in the big leagues in Toronto, and whose daughter is trying to make it in the art world's big leagues in New York. I'll try to avoid some spoilers -- this is one of those series in which major life events shake up the main protagonist from one book to the next -- but will say that Cardinal, while world-weary, still has an ability to empathize with those who suffer and a strong sense of justice driving him.<br />
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In the latest book in the series, both will be taxed by the events that unfold. It is winter in Algonquin Bay, and the freezing wind is blowing so fiercely that when Cardinal wakes up one morning, he sees it blow the ice fishing shacks clear across the lake. He is called out to the scene of a crime -- a man is dead and a woman is missing, feared dead. But when a woman's body is found, it isn't that of Laura Lacroix, but rather the wife of a Canadian businessman turned politician, who vanished hundreds of miles away in Ottawa. Oddest of all, when she is found, she has been chained up and left to die -- but dressed in warm clothes and abandoned with a thermos beside her, as if her murderer wanted to give her some kind of fighting chance -- or just prolong her agony.<br />
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At first, the excerpts from a 20-year-old diary kept by a member of an Arctic expedition are a puzzling contrast and an interruption to the main flow of the narrative. I was just as eager as Cardinal's colleague (and increasingly close friend) Lise Delorme to understand whether the former rock star and current sex club owner was responsible for the crime, given his track record. I wanted to know how the Algonquin Bay cops would cope with the arrival of a brash and arrogant Toronto hotshot, with an inability to work well with others but a tremendous reputation. But slowly, Blunt's portrayal of the Arctic world captured my attention, from the natural landscape and its perils to the struggle of a small group of scientists cooped up together to coexist in isolation, grabbed my interest just as much or even more -- especially when the ominous link between the contemporary crime(s) and the history slowly emerges.<br />
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This isn't a pitch-perfect mystery novel. There are a few implausible elements in the sub-plot featuring Lise Delorme and her attempt to hold someone responsible for a past crime, for instance, and Loach, the obnoxious newcomer, was a two-dimensional figure who didn't really add all that much to the central tale. But Cardinal himself is anything but two-dimensional, and the setting -- Northern Ontario in the depths of winter -- is a vivid and authentic backdrop to a compelling mystery. Read it -- but start off with Blunt's debut, <i>Forty Words for Sorrow</i>, which introduces both Cardinal and Delorme and also is set in a fierce winter. One reviewer in Toronto's Globe and Mail argued that Blunt does for Northern Ontario what James Lee Burke does for Louisiana's Cajun country, and having just read my first Burke novel, I'd have to agree.<br />
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For some unknown reason, while the first few books are easy enough to find in the United States, the later ones have yet to be published here, so you'll have to order them from an Amazon vendor or Amazon.ca. For my part, I haven't regretted doing so yet -- this has rapidly become a "must read in hardcover; can't wait until the paperback is released" series. A solid 4-star book; recommended. Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07126482436426213023noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26623799721522957.post-88250869241313348892012-10-12T23:30:00.000-04:002012-10-12T23:30:00.596-04:00Was the Irish famine genocide? The latest addiition to the debate...<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
<br />
"By the summer of 1847, newspaper readers in North America and Europe
could be forgiven for thinking the only thing the Irish knew how to do
any more was die."<br />
<br />
That sums up the horrific story of the Irish
Potato Famine of 1845-1848ish, a dreadful event that was sadly in need
of a new and readable history. That is what John Kelly has delivered --
in spades. He does the world a service by not arguing that the collapsed
of the potato crop was artificially manufactured and created by the
British with the express purpose of triggering what ended up becoming
the equivalent of a genocide of the Irish, nor does he romanticize life
in pre-famine Ireland. What he does do is deliver a crisp,
well-researched and authoritative history of the cataclysm and its
consequences.<br />
<br />
This is a book that appears to be causing quite a kerfuffle amongst readers who are committed to the proposition that the tragic famine was a deliberately genocidal act, readers who focus their attention on the use of English forces to export the country's grain crops and sustain commercial/mercantile contracts at the expense of human lives. (In fact, for commenting that this seems to me to be the outcome of stupidity, extreme callousness, lack of imagination, etc. rather than an explicit intent to exterminate the Irish, which is what needs to be in place to rise to the level of genocide, I have been told in other forums that I am callously genocidal myself; I'm happy to entertain fact-based, rational debate and disagreement on this in the comments section, but will remove any comments that descend to vituperation and personal hostility; civil discourse is fine, but reasonable people know how to disagree reasonably without descending to that level.) In spite of the hostility of some readers, it is clear that in Kelly's eyes, the English are responsible for the astonishing level of fatalities -- about a million people died; at least
another million emigrated -- but it's of a different kind than that
assumed by those who say the intent was genocidal.<br />
<br />
English policies of the era was not benign, as Kelly spells out for readers. Bizarrely to our eyes, a series of politicians and civil servants somehow seized on the crisis as
an opportunity to exercise some "tough love" (for want of a better
phrase) and force the Irish into what they viewed as a better way of
life. That they were wrong in their prescriptive approach appears
probable from Kelly's detailed analysis of the famine's aftermath; within a few decades, for instance, land ownership
once again was widely dispersed, with small plots being at the heart of
the agricultural system. Were they wrong in their analysis? Perhaps
not: certainly, utter dependence on a single foodstuff is a recipe for
catastrophe, especially given that the tremendous crop failures of the
mid-1840s had been preceded by several devastating but more minor ones;
certainly, the fact that Ireland (outside the major cities) had little
in the way of a "modern" market economy or even a cash economy
exacerbated the impact of that crop failure, so transformation seems to
have been a reasonable objective. But to prioritize such a
transformation in the midst of a crop failure, famine and disease?
That's something else again, and Kelly illustrates in damning detail
just how each decision made that prioritized policy ideals over the
preservation of human life proved devastating. (He devotes a lot of
attention to the government's determination that no one should interfere
with the "free market" operations by providing free grain, or selling
grain below the market price, for instance, at the heart of the actions that have convinced many that the English authorities were deliberately genocidal.) <br />
<br />
Few of the English politicians and civil servants whose actions and inaction doomed so many Irish to starvation, disease or forced emigration come across looking rational, reasonable, etc., (much less
humane) in Kelly's book. But what the author does do is to remind us that their starting point
was a radically different way of thinking than ours today is. More than
160 years ago, it seemed reasonable to Victorians to view the crop
failure as some kind of divine judgment, whether on the island's
over-reliance on the potato crop, the antiquated land ownership system
or simply the fact that the Irish were Catholic or lazy. Hard to conceive
today, especially with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, but then, it was difficult
for many Austrian and German Jews in the mid-1930s to view Hitler as
anything more than the harbinger of a new kind of survivable pogrom. (It
is with the benefit of hindsight that many of us can and do say 'why didn't they just
flee when they could?') Kelly reserves a particular kind of icy cold vitriol for
Irish landowners who used the famine and the epidemic of typhus that
followed as a way to depopulate their estates, evicting their tenants
and forcing them onto what amounted to plague ships. He doesn't need to
use hyperbole or even dramatic rhetorical flourishes: the facts speak for themselves, as
when he paints a portrait of a team of doctors in the St. Lawrence
River, with the masts of ships stretching far up river, unable to keep
pace with ships that were arriving with holds full of stricken, dead or
dying "emigrants".<br />
<br />
I have spent a reasonable amount of time in Ireland in the last decade, including visits to the archives of the country's famine museum in Co. Roscommon, and have talked to some of the historians working there. Their stories were more chilling and horrifying than the only major history of the events that I have read (which was thorough but dry). So Kelly's deft marshaling of the complicated
facts and the juxtaposition of these against some vivid writing and an
anecdotal style made this a compelling read. To me -- as a reader whose
interest is in what happened, rather than defending English policies or
insisting that authors label this a deliberate genocide -- it emerged as
a compelling narrative that clearly spelled out the tragic consequences
of people who are convinced that they know better than others, and
those who put political ideals or social engineering ahead of
humanitarian considerations. He pulls no punches, but he does let the
facts speak for themselves -- which I appreciated. I read it cover to
cover in two nights. And yes, the story gave me nightmares. Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07126482436426213023noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26623799721522957.post-43886616401633180382012-10-12T00:15:00.001-04:002012-10-12T00:16:06.252-04:00Just Added to My Shelves:<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
The books just keep coming and coming and coming... The "good" news is that I was able to donate about 970 volumes from my non-cyber library to the Brooklyn Public Library's annual sale!<br />
<br />
Here are some of the latest additions, however...<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>From Germany to Germany by Gunter Grass (Amazon Vine ARC)</li>
<li>The Goldberg Variations by Susan Isaacs (Kindle)</li>
<li>The Liberator by Alex Kershaw (NetGalley)</li>
<li>From the Ruins of Empire by Pankaj Mishra (Brooklyn Public Library)</li>
<li>The Resistance by Peter Steiner (Brooklyn Public Library)</li>
<li>The Potter's Hand by A.N. Wilson (Amazon UK purchase)</li>
<li>The Casual Vacancy by JK Rowling (Kindle)</li>
<li>When it Happens to You by Molly Ringwald (Kindle)</li>
<li>Joseph Anton by Salman Rushdie (Kindle)</li>
<li>The Chemistry of Tears by Peter Carey (Brooklyn Public Library)</li>
<li>How to Think More About Sex by Alain de Botton (NetGalley)</li>
<li>Tombstone by Yang Jinsheng (NetGalley)</li>
<li>The Watchers by Stephen Alford (NetGalley)</li>
<li>Semper Fidelis by Ruth Downie (NetGalley)</li>
<li>Man in the Empty Suit by Sean Ferrell (NetGalley)</li>
<li>Better Off Without 'Em by Chuck Thompson (Kindle)</li>
<li>In Sunlight and In Shadow by Mark Helprin (Amazon Vine ARC)</li>
</ul>
Too many books, too little time... Hence the deaccessions. I was fairly ruthless: if a book didn't strike me as something I was highly likely to re-read, had no sentimental value or isn't in an area of interest of mine, I marked it for disposal. I now have open shelf space once more -- well, for the time being... Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07126482436426213023noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26623799721522957.post-11057655082132870782012-10-11T15:52:00.001-04:002012-10-12T10:37:25.228-04:00Books with Buzz: Justin Cronin's "The Twelve" -- and a Giveaway of "The Passage"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
Trilogies are tricky. No matter what you do, if the first book has been a slam dunk success the way that Justin Cronin's <i>The Passage </i>was two summers ago, you'll struggle to deliver something that fans find just as overwhelmingly impressive. On the flip side, the story isn't over yet: your second novel is a bridge that readers need to find compelling enough that they'll read it through and come back for the final installment. None of that is easy.<br />
<br />
That said... if you loved <i>The Passage</i>, you'll find a lot in this sequel to like, and maybe you'll even end up loving it, too -- if not quite as much. (Just don't try to read this as a stand-alone book; you'll struggle to make sense of what is going on.) It's just as convoluted and dense a novel, jam-packed with characters. It's actually slightly more confusing, because while in <i>The Passage </i>Cronin began with the events of the year Zero and then moved forward to his main time frame, 97 years later, focusing on the small group of survivors in the Colony in California and the challenges that confronted them, in <i>The Twelve </i>he is trying to wrangle a larger number of characters and a much larger canvas, one ranging from the very real survivor community of Kerrville, Texas, to the surreal/fantastical "world" that Amy visits as part of her own quest. Indeed, each of the main characters is on a kind of quest here, and the novel's focus skips and jumps, back and forth in time and into different parts of the post-viral era to give the reader a complete view of what's afoot. The problem is that there is so much happening that I was a third of the way through the book before I even began to see how the various bits and pieces fit together. And I was more than halfway through before I reached the stage where I couldn't put the book down and do something else. <br />
<br />
So, what's the sequel all about? Well, when it opens, the surviving members of the Colony's expedition to take Amy to Colorado are now mostly scattered. Alicia and Peter are still together, but in the Expeditionary, hunting the twelve disciples of "Zero" in hopes to eliminating the viral menace. Michael is working on the oil road, keeping Kerrville supplied with fuel and power. Amy has joined a group of Sisters and is overseeing five-year-old Caleb, the son of Theo and Mausami. But the "survivors" aren't just from the colony; Cronin takes us back to the year zero, and re-introduces us to figures like Lila, Carter and even Wolgast, and introduces us to new characters to help fill in some of the backstory for some of his main ongoing characters and help set the stage for what will happen in the final third of the book. Cronin does a good job of managing the myriad narrative threads and alternating breathtaking suspenseful segments with more thoughtful passages that remind us that there is a new kind of everyday life still going on in the widely-dispersed survivor communities. The question becomes: what kind of survivor existence will triumph? It's hard to say more about the plot without venturing into spoiler territory, but the bottom line is that while it's a less straightforward narrative than in <i>The Passage, </i>the sequel offers a dystopian future that is less nuanced than that Cronin depicted in the Colony, but even more chilling for being more explicit.<i> </i><br />
<br />
Something that struck me more forcefully in this book, and that had begun to irritate me toward the end, is that this novel is even more intensively visionary, with more explicit religious imagery of a Christian nature. There are the Twelve of the book's title -- only instead of apostles, they are virals. Yes, they consume flesh and blood as Jesus invited his apostles to do at the Last Supper -- but they consume human flesh and blood. There's a sacrifice, late in the book, with someone pinned to a Y-shaped frame rather than a cross, preparing to sacrifice their life for their comrades and fellow humans. There is the image of pursuing the light, and the fact that virals (like vampires) cannot sustain themselves in the light. There is resurrection, of sorts, and transformation. There are the labels like "Michael the Clever, Bridger of Worlds" or "Amy of Souls". At times, this simply became too heavy-handed for my taste, and my religious views aren't such that I would be offended by the hijacking or distortion of the Biblical narrative; those who are likely to take offense to the above, even in the midst of a book whose core message revolves around salvation and divinity, should probably avoid this at all costs.<br />
<br />
This isn't a literary novel. Yes, the book is well-written, but ultimately it's an up-market thriller, with Big Themes and Big Ideas, but characters who will be familiar to anyone who has ever read a Good vs Evil chronicle. Admittedly, Alicia appears to be a complex character in this book -- but while her body may be divided, her heart and soul are in the right place. There's really none of the moral ambiguity or grey areas that, to me, characterize a complex narrative. Here, the complexity is reserved for the sprawling plot, and Cronin certainly has enough on his hands dealing with that. Think latter-day "Lord of the Rings" in nature, with (obviously) a very different kind of plot, writing style, characters and setting, but not that different in scope and essential nature.<br />
<br />
If you loved <i>The Passage</i>, I'd certainly suggest trying this -- although be careful of letting your expectations become too high. If you haven't read <i>The Passage</i>,
don't try this until you have -- and even if you already have read the
first book in Cronin's proposed trilogy, it might be a good idea to
re-read it before diving into this sequel. Be patient, and brace
yourself for the slow pace of the revelations. <br />
<br />
I obtained an advance readers' edition of <i>The Twelve </i>from the publishers at BookExpo (BEA) in June. <br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><span style="font-size: large;">The Giveaway!!</span></i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Yes, I can almost see you, tapping your toes in impatience, asking when I get to the giveaway... </div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
I am giving away one copy of the promotional paperback edition from BEA AND one Kindle version of <i>The Passage </i>to two randomly selected winners. You <i>must</i> be a follower to enter; e-mail me at uncommonreading@gmail.com and tell me which version you would prefer. (Yes, you have to pick either the dead-tree mass market paperback <i>or </i>the cyber-version.) One entry per person, please. Make sure I have your e-mail address, and I'll let you know directly as well as posting the winner's names here. The winner of the dead-tree book will need to provide his/her mailing address, and the e-book winner will need to give me the e-mail address associated with their Amazon account. Sorry, I'm not set up yet to do this via Nook. </div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
The deadline? Next Wednesday, October 17, the day after <i>The Twelve </i>hits bookstores. I'll select the winners at 11 p.m. (Eastern) North American time. </div>
<br />
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07126482436426213023noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26623799721522957.post-9165946423348325202012-10-09T23:30:00.000-04:002012-10-09T23:30:06.851-04:00My Pick for the Booker: The Garden of Evening Mists<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
Later this week, the suspense will finally be at an end, and we'll know which of the half-dozen novels on this year's shortlist will win the Man Booker Prize. While I loved Hilary Mantel's sequel to <i>Wolf Hall</i>, <i>Bring Up the Bodies</i>, my favorite candidate has to be this nearly perfect novel by Tan Twan Eng, <i>The Garden of Evening Mists. </i>It's one of those rare novels to which I want to award a sixth star, just for reminding me that there is always something new to discover in the world of books, and that there are authors out there capable of crafting prose that I have to stop and savor every few pages.<br />
<br />
When this novel opens, Yun Ling Teoh's professional career is ending; she is retiring after many years as a judge in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur, a career that began when, in her early 20s, she joined the team prosecuting Japanese soldiers for the crimes they committed during the World War II occupation of the then-British colony of Malaya. As we soon realize, Yun Ling's life -- however successful she has been in her career -- essentially ended when, at the age of 17, she herself became one of those victims, and the sole survivor of a hidden camp in the Malayan jungle. Tan Twan Eng deftly steers the reader back and forth from the past to the "present" (the 1990s), as Yun Ling's experiences during the war and her later attempts to come to grips with them at the height of the Malayan "emergency" in 1951 (a Communist insurgency) are set in the context of her final attempt to bring about a kind of resolution.<br />
<br />
At the heart of this story is the garden of the title. It was designed by a former gardener of Emperor Hirohito, a Japanese expatriate named Aritomo, whom Yun Ling seeks out after the end of the war, in 1951, to ask him to design a garden in memory of her sister, who died at the hands of the Japanese. Aritomo refuses -- but he agrees to accept her as an apprentice. In order to achieve her goal, Yun Ling must find a way to swallow her revulsion for Aritomo -- a Japanese, and moreover, one connected to the emperor himself -- and learn from him. While the garden itself, Yangiri, seems to be a place disconnected from time and space, it proves to be anything but, as the Emergency becomes more intense, martial law is enforced more stringently, and the terror-style tactics of the Communist guerillas threaten Yun Ling, whose recent legal cases have involved prosecutions of some captured leaders. All this is set against a much later narrative, as Yun Ling returns to Yangiri -- now her own property -- for the first time since the Emergency -- to finally address all her demons. By the novel's end, we have learned the answers to the questions that emerge gradually as the story unfolds; how Yun Ling came to be the only survivor from her camp; how she came to own Yangiri and why she has allowed a Japanese scholar to visit her now to study Aritomo's ukiyoe prints.<br />
<br />
One of the elements that made this novel especially vivid for me was the fact that I had visited the Cameron Highlands, where it is set, in the 1980s, and was left stunned by its beauty (imagine, for a moment, seeing poinsettias growing wild against a backdrop of tree-covered mountains shrouded by a hazy mist) and fascinated by its history. It's the kind of landscape in which mystery and concealment are eminently possible; indeed, at one point, Eng introduces the reader in passing to one Jim Thompson, a former intelligence agent turned silk entrepreneur in Bangkok, who would later vanish while out on a Sunday walk in the same area. Eng captures the setting and the atmosphere of the various time periods in which he sets this novel, especially the Emergency, which he portrays mostly through the eyes of three different kinds of outsiders -- Aritomo, a Japanese; Yun Ling, member of the Straits Chinese minority (a privileged group) and Teoh family friend Magnus Praetorius, a South African Boer with little love for the British colonial rulers of Malaya.<br />
<br />
Any attempt to describe this book is almost certain to be inadequate. To me it's the epitome of what a novel that wins the Booker should be: beautifully written (that's a given), with strong characters and a vivid setting, but, above all, a narrative that makes the reader stop, think, re-read, and stop to ponder once more. It has won a spot on my personal "top 100 books of all time" list, although I confess I haven't yet decided which book to kick off it to make room. Just read it. I can't imagine that you'll be disappointed. Although I will be if it fails to win the Booker, despite the fact that it has some tough competition this year.<br />
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07126482436426213023noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26623799721522957.post-16676561133308483712012-10-08T14:17:00.000-04:002012-10-08T14:17:16.373-04:00Mystery Monday: Inger Ash Wolfe's Identity Revealed!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
I've been wondering for a while who the author of the rather compelling series of mysteries featuring small town Ontario detective Hazel Micallef might be. The books themselves -- which I began reading with the debut of "Inger Ash Wolfe" a few years back -- are interesting. The setting appears to be the traditional kind of backdrop for a "cozy" (aka "cosy") mystery -- a small town, plenty of people who know each other well and have for decades, lots of domestic conflict that might escalate to the point where one person flings a cup of scalding Darjeeling over another, or someone keys the brand-new car purchased by their rival. Until a serial killer comes to call, that is. It's that odd mismatch of what appears to be a tranquil backwater and some really gritty, complex crimes that captured my attention -- and the character of Hazel herself. She is feisty and cantankerous; in her 60s, divorced and with a characteristically ambivalent relationship with her ex-husband. (Book #2, <i>The Taken, </i>opens as she is recuperating from back surgery in the basement of the home her ex shares with his new wife; they are stuck looking after her because her octogenerian mother -- just as feisty and cantankerous -- isn't physically able to do so. )<br />
<br />
It is Hazel and her attitude that has kept me reading these books. She is a welcome antidote to the usual breed of supersleuths found in many mysteries, or the women who often feature in those books -- women who are in the book to provide a love interest, or who end up feeling torn between their personal lives and their police careers, etc. etc. With the exception of a handful (Val McDermid's Carol Jordan, for instance, or the character of Vera Stanhope, created by Ann Cleeves, with her tendency to call everyone "pet" while fixing them with a laser-like glare), there are relatively few women around whom a series has been built that remain interesting characters from book to book. Above all, she is human and fallible. As she admits to her sidekick, James Wingate, midway through <i>The Taken, </i>she has ""a man trapped in my computer, live animals and body parts appearing on
my desk, a CO who thinks I've outlived my usefulness and expensive gifts
coming from missing friends, I also happen to have a pill problem ...
So I'm slightly less than OK."<br />
<br />
So who, I wondered, was behind the fictional creation of Hazel Micallef? All that readers were told was that Inger Ash Wolfe was the nom de plume for a Canadian novelist, and I mentally ran through a list of candidates, trying to figure out who that might be. Turns out all my guesses and wildest speculations were off base -- and mostly because I committed the tremendous <i>faux pas </i>of assuming that because (a) the author's name was female and (b) Hazel was female, the author must be female. Whoops... As it turns out, the author is Michael Redhill, who confessed <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/the-real-inger-ash-wolfe-stands-up/article4444252/?cmpid=rss1">in a column for the Globe & Mail in Toronto</a> that he had long been fascinated by here the idea of "being
inside another mind that you had to create out of yourself." At a younger age, he had tried acting; now, he decided to immerse himself inside the personality of another kind of writer, a crime novelist and a woman.<br />
<br />
Readers' responses to the Ash Wolfe/Redhill novels have varied, but I have relished them, including the one that just landed in bookstores, <i>A Door in the River. </i>As before, the author blends the image of a small Ontario community with the reality of an ugly underbelly, the two meeting in what Micallef is one of the only people to suspect might even be a crime. When Henry Wiest is found dead, apparently of an allergic reaction to a bee sting after stopping off at a smoke shop on a local Indian reserve (a smoke shop being the place where the tribe is able to sell cigarettes free of taxes), Hazel can't help wondering. Henry didn't smoke -- so what was he doing there? And what bees are out and stinging at night? Hazel has never played well with others, so it's no surprise that when she starts investigating she ruffles feathers at the reserve, where a thriving new casino might explain Wiest's presence on the reserve -- if not his death. But what she uncovers turns out to be far uglier than a gambling addiction, and what starts off as a police procedural mystery ends up being a gripping suspense novel.<br />
<br />
A bonus: the first two books are available <i>very </i>cheaply if you have a North American Kindle (less than $3 each) and the paperback editions aren't that much pricier if ordered from Amazon.com. Start with <i>The Calling</i> and read them in order so that you don't get irritated by the failure of Ash Wolfe/Redhill to provide a lot of background with each new book. The middle book in the series is slightly weaker, but only slightly, and the latest is gripping and compelling reading -- even if it does end with a new character arriving on the scene and the fate of an old one hanging in mid air. Oh well, let's just hope Mr. Redhill is writing very, very rapidly and that book #4 in this series will be making its debut soon...<br />
<br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07126482436426213023noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26623799721522957.post-19648574212159944362012-08-17T02:55:00.000-04:002012-08-17T21:11:25.205-04:00Just Added to My Shelves:<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
The obsession continues.... That said, this <i>is </i>a shorter list than the last one. The downside? It's only been about a week since I put together the last list. Sigh. And yes, the above would be my dream armchair. All the books I might need, within easy reach.<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>Above All Things by Tanis Rideout (Amazon Canada purchase)</li>
<li>Until the Night by Giles Blunt (Amazon Canada purchase)</li>
<li>Forget About Today: Bob Dylan's Genius for (Re)invention, Shunning the Naysayers and Creating a Personal Revolution by Jon Friedman (from publisher directly)</li>
<li>Shake Off by Mischa Hiller (LibraryThing Early Reviewer program)</li>
<li>Say You're Sorry by Michael Robotham (NetGalley)</li>
<li>Dreamers of the Day by Mary Doria Russell (Library)</li>
<li>And When She Was Good by Laura Lippman (Kindle)</li>
<li>A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (Kindle)</li>
<li>The Devil's Cave by Martin Walker (Amazon UK purchase)</li>
<li>The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng (Amazon UK purchase)</li>
<li>The Secret Keeper by Kate Morton (NetGalley)<br /> </li>
</ul>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07126482436426213023noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26623799721522957.post-42294747530916014982012-08-16T19:29:00.000-04:002012-08-16T19:29:12.560-04:00"It's like something you'd read in a novel."<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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That's putting it mildly. Dan Fesperman's latest suspense novel is an entertaining homage to the entire genre of spy novels, as well as being one in its own right, and the combination make this even more entertaining than it might otherwise have been. Let's start with the fact that the advance reader copy of the book (which is due to be published next Tuesday) arrived in one of the most curious packages I have seen. Normally, these advance galleys are simply softcover versions of the eventual hardcover book, printed on lower-grade paper, with no illustrations and often with acknowledgments and other miscellaneous additions missing. Occasionally, the publishers won't even go that far, and will just slap a generic cover onto it with some text or some blurbs from well-known writers. This time, however, Knopf went overboard: the image here, on the right, is what showed up in my mailbox. inside the box from Amazon.<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEga1Y85I-1u9ggwBHcwWaV8LxQUXeCnAE9VUEhk6G0JFMGqxysHl3Dwu5NlDXuplzlp2iH2idU_UJW_ZuZ4LYPB6xRDKOuHJXUquNsdbcE97dmPIo617ZC890N3hy_7ZN_I3MDv8zEO5VM/s1600/DSC00019.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEga1Y85I-1u9ggwBHcwWaV8LxQUXeCnAE9VUEhk6G0JFMGqxysHl3Dwu5NlDXuplzlp2iH2idU_UJW_ZuZ4LYPB6xRDKOuHJXUquNsdbcE97dmPIo617ZC890N3hy_7ZN_I3MDv8zEO5VM/s200/DSC00019.JPG" width="150" /></a><br />
OK, the book itself wasn't really wrapped in brown paper and tied with string, just encased in a wrapper cleverly designed to make it look as if it was. Which is, in itself, a nod to the book's plot, which has protagonist Bill Cage, a middle-aged PR guy in Washington, DC, thoroughly disillusioned with his life, head off to central Europe in an apparently quixotic quest to prove that one of his youthful idols, reclusive spy-turned espionage writer, Edwin Lemaster, may in fact have been a double agent. Once, years ago when Cage was still an ambitious journalist, he had unexpectedly scored an interview with Lemaster, and even more surprisingly winkled out of the novelist the admission that he had contemplated becoming a double. "For the thrill of it. The challenge." When Cage publishes his story, the news becomes a brief sensation, Lemaster becomes still more reclusive and never grants another interview. That's where this particular novel begins, linking Cage, Lemaster and Cage's father in espionage and tales of espionage. But what is reality? It ends up seeming just as difficult for Cage to discern as a mysterious series of letters (written on distinctive paper he keeps locked up in his study at home) spark his investigation and questions swirl about the real meaning of a mysterious series of book sales and exchanges dating back decades -- all of the books wrapped in brown paper and tied up with string.<br />
<br />
Fesperman doesn't have the prowess of Ambler or LeCarre, but fans of those iconic figures can still delight in this book as a tribute to their heroes. Segments of classics of the espionage genre are clues, ushering Cage on his way at critical points in his quest to discover the truth about Lemaster. A mysterious handler -- clearly a former "spook" far better versed in CIA tradecraft than is Cage, whose knowledge has been derived from the spy novels he devoured in his youth -- is paving his way, but to what end? And who else might be interested in discovering the truth about Lemaster, or perhaps about other Cold War secrets long buried? Each step Cage takes seems to take him closer to some of those discoveries -- perhaps... -- but also further back into his own personal history. The clues lead him from one to another of the cities he inhabited at the height of the Cold War, a motherless child whose father was posted to U.S. embassies in Belgrade, Budapest, Prague, Vienna and Berlin. Cage's handler seems to know an awful lot about his personal background as well as his interest in Lemaster -- and could Cage have played more of a role than even he suspected in those long-ago events. Is Bill Cage now starring in his own spy novel? And if so, who is the author; who is scripting the action?<br />
<br />
There are many entertaining twists and turns here, and even if some of them are slightly predictable, I would have felt churlish complaining about that, given the intricacy of the narrative, as Fesperman entwines his own story with that of the history of the espionage thriller itself. Certainly, watching Cage transform from a former devoted reader of classic spy novels -- a passion he once shared with both his father and Lemaster -- into a participant in the Great Game. Ultimately, it simply didn't matter much to me that this novel isn't as accomplished as many of the classics that Fesperman cites. It was simply a fun read, both in its own right and for the "wink, wink; nudge, nudge" factor as the author drags in one twist after another ripped from the pages of those classics. Fan fiction at its best, and a "thumping good read" in its own right. What is artifice and fiction, and what is reality? Not even the characters seem to know, all the time. "Next you'll think I'm acting like someone in a book, and I'm guessing I won't like the comparison," one character tells Cage midway through the novel, rather bitterly.<br />
<br />
The bottom line? If you're looking for nonstop thrills, chills and action, this isn't the book for you. (It's more like Alan Furst's novels than those of Daniel Silva, with the emphasis on character and a gradually increasing sense of tension, rather than violence.) It's a novel about the secrets that spies keep -- both professionally and personally -- and the layers that must be unraveled in order to arrive at something resembling the "truth". I'm giving it 4.5 stars, and recommending it heartily to fans of the genre.<br />
<br />
My copy of this book -- complete with the imaginative packaging -- came from the publisher via Amazon.com's Vine reviewer program.<br />
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07126482436426213023noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26623799721522957.post-67436293261416897252012-08-08T22:55:00.000-04:002012-08-08T23:19:46.482-04:00The Fabulous Adventures On Which An Unreliable Narrator Can Take You...<br />
I happen to believe that unreliable narrators -- yes, including ones who aren't all that appealing -- are among the biggest gifts that an author can present to his or her readers. It's easy -- relatively speaking -- to come up with a likeable character: all you need to do is imagine someone you'd love to spend time with or fall in love with, endow them with all kinds of characteristics, from beauty and wisdom to wit and charm, and send them marching through a plot that is calculated to show all those qualities to best advantage. Wrangling an unreliable or dislikeable narrator, on the other hand, is far trickier. Somehow, you need to delicately, over time, make it clear to the reader that this is a flawed person, someone who perhaps can't be trusted, but still the only person able to tell this particular tale the way it should be told. Someone you can't rely on, but whose narrative and character quirks you can resist, even as you sometimes end up squirming in discomfort.<br />
<br />
I've run across a few novels of this kind in recent months that I found extraordinarily good -- all have ended up on my "best books of the year" longlist -- and although none of them need all that much more publicity, I can't prevent myself from giving them another round of applause on this blog.<br />
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First of all, there's the tour de force that is <i>Gillespie and I </i>by Jane Harris, published last year in London, and which appeared on the Orange Prize shortlist early this year. It's a tribute to an author's skill in bringing to life an unreliable narrator, this time in the form of one Miss Harriet Baxter, spinster, who recounts her experiences in Victorian London from the "safety" of London in 1933, many decades distant. It's hard to go into details without delivering spoilers, so let's just say that Harriet is telling us the story of her relationship with the painter Ned Gillespie -- unjustly overlooked, in her eyes -- and his family. Throughout, we get a lot of reasons to second,
third and even fourth-guess ourselves and the narrator -- which could
have been bad news had it not been that Harris's hands are very
trustworthy ones for any reader to find him/herself in. Great Literature?
Nope. But it's creative and imaginative in a very different and yet
familiar way -- combining what feels like a Victorian gothic with a
classic suspense novel. I was surprised to see that Politics & Prose
(my fave bookstore in Washington, DC) had classified it as a mystery -- at that point, I had read the first
60 pages or so -- but after finishing it, I understand why. But in contrast to a conventional mystery, this story is full of mysteries, layers upon layers of them, and the author can never be entirely sure if the narrator is misleading herself as well as us. If all this sounds oblique, it's
because to say too much about it gives away some of the joys of
discovery. What I most delighted in is the extent to which, even at the
end, Harris still leaves a lot to our imaginations. Could it be
that...??? This was a 4.8 star book for me -- and a "thumping good read".<br />
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<br />
My second candidate, <i>Gone Girl</i> by Gillian Flynn, is still up there on the bestseller lists -- and rightfully so. (I liked it so much that I raced out to get one of Flynn's earlier novels, <i>Dark Places</i>, which also promises to be excellent but perhaps even darker....) By the time Nick Dunne, one of Flynn's <i>two </i>unreliable narrators in this suspense novel, tells us that he is "a big fan of the lie of ommission", we've already figured it out, thanks to Gillian
Flynn's masterful ability to drop one twist after another into this
chilling tale, in such as a way to cause a kind of literary double take
of such magnitude that if it were a physical response, I'd by now be
hospitalized with whiplash. We know he is a liar -- we just don't know what lies it is that he is telling, to whom, and about what. Until Flynn slips the truth in slyly and takes the reader's breath away. In all likelihood, this is the best thriller
I'll read this year, and possibly this decade -- and I don't say that
lightly. Flynn took me on a hair-raising journey, the equivalent of
speeding along a slick, twisting highway at night, with not even a
railing separating the car from a plunge down a cliff and into the ocean
-- and I simply couldn't put the novel down. Every time I thought I had
figured out where she was taking me -- and at what point this novel
would relapse into classic "thriller mode", with a relatively
predictable denouement -- she proved me wrong. Better yet, she made each
twist completely convincing.<br />
<br />
The novel itself is the saga of an
unraveling marriage that climaxes in the disappearance of Amy Elliott
Dunne, Nick's wife, on their fifth wedding anniversary. It's an ironic
nod of sorts to so many true-life tragedies (there's even a vitriolic
Nancy Grace-style television commentator!), but also a deep dive into a
kind of toxic relationship that had me thinking three or four times
about every individual I've come into contact with. Amy is the
photo-perfect victim: blond, beautiful, the model for her parents'
best-selling series of children's books featuring "Amazing Amy". But
just how amazing is Amy? Well, fairly -- if perhaps not in the sense
that we are used to viewing our "victims". Because, you see, Amy is our <i>second </i>unreliable narrator -- how much can we rely on what she tell us through her diary, or in person? The slow and gradual
revelation of the layers of this story is tantalizing; the nature of
what is revealed is chilling. And the real climax of the book is quite
possibly the best I've read in any thriller -- Flynn shuns any thought
of the "easy out" when looking for a conclusion. Good to hear this already has been optioned by Hollywood (Reese Witherspoon has apparently picked up the rights.) The bad news? Well, be prepared to distrust everything that anyone tells you and question even your relationship with your spouse. That's how convincing a tag time of unreliable narrators can be in creating an ominous atmosphere. This is going to stay with you for weeks, and will chill you to the bone no matter how hot it is outside. 4.5 stars. <br />
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Anne Enright's latest novel, <i>The Forgotten Waltz, </i>is a different kettle of fish. It's a literary novel, not a mystery or suspense yarn, and the narrator isn't consciously deceiving us, her readers. Rather, she is deceiving herself -- but it's up to the reader to decide when that takes place. Are her lies about not being interested in the married man she first meets at her sister's holiday barbeque? Or is she lying about being happy later, after both she and he have left their spouses (not a spoiler: it becomes clear that this is the denouement fairly early on in the novel) and moved in together? When Gina first meets the man who will become her lover, she reflects, he "is just a little rip in the fabric of
my life. I can stitch it all up again, if he does not turn around."
This novel captured for me, better than any other I have yet read, the
irrationality and occasional downright inconvenience of unexpected love.
Gina Moynihan knows not only that this is a person who is married and
thus technically out of bounds, even if she weren't already with the man
who will become her husband; she is also clear-eyed, at least in
retrospect, about the many ways in which she finds him odd or even how
he should not appeal to her. And yet... Gina evaluates her own behavior and finds
it as irrational as others might; describing and not really falling into
the trap of rationalizing or excusing her actions. But is she deceiving us?<br />
<br />
To many, Gina will end up being not merely a mildly unreliable narrator but a downright unappealing one, to boot. She's an adulterer -- and apparently is rewarded for her misbehavior, in contrast to Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina, who suffer miseries before they expire for their sins. Unacceptable, immoral behavior to many. But it's about real-life situations, and it's a story about
getting what you think you want and then realizing that life is still "real life". Gina recognizes this: "I thought it would be a different life, but
sometimes it is like the same life in a dream: a different man coming
in the door, a different man hanging his coat on the hook... I don't
know what I expected. That receipts would not have to be filed, or there
would be no such thing as bad kitchen cabinets .... Sean exists. He
arrives, he leaves. He forgets to ring me when he is late and so the
dinner is mistimed... sometimes the intractability of him, perhaps of
all men, drives me up the wall."<br />
<br />
Enright has found a lot of critics for letting the story be told by a relatively unrepentant and unapologetic Gina rather than by one of the "victims" of the story. But Enright doesn't ask us to approve of Gina's choices or even to let her off scott-free with her rationalizations or self-justifications. It's one woman's story, and I rated it 4.4 stars despite the occasionally rambling, discursive style that left me feeling claustrophobically trapped inside the narrator's head. <br />
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Three very different books; three different kinds of unreliable narrators -- and three very good novels.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07126482436426213023noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26623799721522957.post-23068581657269518882012-08-07T01:17:00.001-04:002012-08-07T01:17:19.665-04:00Just Added to My Shelves:<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
Given that the image above is probably fairly close to wish fulfillment on my part, perhaps it's not that surprising the shelves keep groaning under the weight of new additions...<br />
<br />
Herewith, some of the latest additions. As always, I'll be reading and commenting on some of these on this blog in the coming weeks and months, but who knows which ones, much less when!<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>The Double Game by Dan Fesperman (ARC from Amazon Vine)</li>
<li>The Thing About Thugs by Tabish Khair (Kindle, Amazon Sale)</li>
<li>Salvation of a Saint by Keigo Higashino (ARC from Amazon Vine)</li>
<li>Midnight Riot by Ben Aaronovitch (Kindle)</li>
<li>Mission Flats by William Landay (Library)</li>
<li>The Fear Artist by Timothy Hallinan (NetGalley ARC)</li>
<li>The Victory Lab by Sasha Issenberg (NetGalley ARC)</li>
<li>The People of Forever are Not Afraid (NetGalley ARC)</li>
<li>Red Ink by David Wessel (NetGalley ARC)</li>
<li>Homesick by Roshi Fernando (ARC from Amazon Vine)</li>
<li>Triburbia by Karl Taro Greenfeld (ARC from Amazon Vine) </li>
<li>Winter Journal by Paul Auster (ARC from Amazon Vine)</li>
<li>Living, Thinking, Looking: Essays by Siri Hustvedt (bookstore purchase)</li>
<li>Ghost Milk by Iain Sinclair (bookstore purchase)</li>
<li>Ransom River by Meg Gardiner (Library)</li>
<li>The Romanov Conspiracy by Glenn Meade (Kindle)</li>
<li>Invisible Murder by Lene Kaaberbol and Agnete Friis (NetGalley ARC)</li>
</ul>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07126482436426213023noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26623799721522957.post-77413203275118593992012-08-06T14:40:00.002-04:002012-08-06T14:42:01.976-04:00Mystery Monday: Gamache Sans Three Pines??<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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When the boatman who transports Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of Quebec's
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Sûreté on the long journey through isolated bays in the Quebecois hinterland to the remote monastery of Saint-Gilbert-entre-les-Loups, he is convinced that within minutes he'll be ferrying them away once more. Outsiders are never admitted to this cloistered home of the Gilbertine monks, even though many now are trying to gain access to hear the community perform live the Gregorian chants they made famous through a recent recording. To the boat owner's surprise, the gate opens to Gamache and his assistant, Jean-Guy Beauvoir. Not because the monks are any more eager for visitors, but because one of their number, the prior and choir master, has been found dead in the abbot's private garden -- violently murdered. What kind of cacophany exists beneath the pure harmony of the chants to which these monks devote their lives, and how could it be so discordant as to lead to murder?</div>
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Saint-Gilbert-entre-les-Loups is a unique place, caught between two worlds. "A netherworld. Between the vibrant life of Quebec. The bistros and brasseries, the festivals. The hardworking farmers and brilliant academics. Between the mortal world, and Heaven. Or Hell. There was here. Where quiet was king. And calm reigned. And the only sounds were the birds in the trees and plainchant. And where, a day ago, a man was killed." (And yes, Louise Penny's writing is that choppy and staccato. If you want to read this book, you'll need to adjust. And yes, it's one reason her novels likely will never get more than four stars from me. Because it feels like sitting in a car. Whose driver keeps nervously tapping on the brakes. When there is no reason to do so.)</div>
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Fans of Louise Penny's will rejoice to see Gamache's return in this latest novel; it will be interesting to see how many will embrace a book that isn't set in Three Pines and doesn't feature that fictional town's assortment of eccentric and lovable characters. Frankly, that made this latest mystery from Penny more appealing rather than less so. Let's face it, there are only so many complex murder cases that can plausibly be expected to occur in the same small community in the space of a year or two, and I think Penny has been pushing that limit for a few books now. Perhaps this heralds a parting of the ways, with Penny writing mysteries featuring Gamache and non-mysteries (or else much more cozy "light" mysteries) involving the residents of Three Pines? Regardless, I have become a little exasperated with the way that Three Pines characters have become almost caricatures (I know, sacrilege...) and even predictable. </div>
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Not that Gamache himself can't become irritating. The man is almost saintly -- always having the best intentions; morality above reproach, unstained in an organization in which corruption apparently runs rampant. As Gamache and Beauvoir pursue their investigations, this becomes even more apparent, as Gamache's boss, Francoeur, shows up to throw spanners into the works and generally to disrupt Gamache; his hatred of the pure investigator transcending his interest in solving a high-profile crime, it seems. Gamache, by contrast, soars above such petty politicking in the same way that the monks' chants soar into the rafters of their church. </div>
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Thank heavens for Jean-Guy Beauvoir. When the book opens, the troubled detective seems to have found himself an oasis of peace and love -- as the reader learns within only a few pages, he and Annie Gamache, the inspector's daughter, are now a couple, and it's True Love. His demons are put aside; Beauvoir is content at last, with only one hurdle remaining: the couple still must confess to Gamache pere and mere the truth of their current relationship. As Gamache must leave Reine-Marie to venture off into the wilds and behind the walls of an enclosed monastic order, so must Beauvoir leave Annie and he finds himself clinging to a string of love e-letters written and read on his Blackberry. Will that be enough of a lifeline for him to ward off an atmosphere in the abbey that he finds oppressive -- and resist the games that Francoeur wants to play at Gamache's expense? And what will become of Gamache's attempt to save Beauvoir from himself?</div>
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The psychological tension between the three policemen grows to rival that among the various factions in the abbey itself, as Gamache moves closer to identifying the villain. I've rated this 4 stars, largely for the distinctive setting, the plot that revolves around the chants within the abbey and details of abbey life, and Penny's deep understanding of Quebec today as well as its history. I'm never going to become a Louise Penny fangirl, however -- but that's just fine, as I think she has thousands of them already! I obtained an advance copy of this mystery from the publisher at BookExpo in June; the publication date is August 28. (In other words, only three weeks to wait...)</div>
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Scheduled Publication: August 28, 2012 </div>
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07126482436426213023noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26623799721522957.post-6489790574498451112012-08-03T16:24:00.000-04:002012-08-03T16:26:15.701-04:00Frayn Does Farce -- And Very Nicely, Too!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMNSzIjJP-Pguu_kKRVRDsGszX00JIU2zX9Dcc1aezf1JkNSNK2NLnCJAyvhg_HVd73yxZRMk_HtpqYKakEk3B56_JFPQRlvdKjSmZWdUKyhZ6zqEnuob-y_wGcZvxKKO2yQZZ0aosdgk/s1600/147241566.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMNSzIjJP-Pguu_kKRVRDsGszX00JIU2zX9Dcc1aezf1JkNSNK2NLnCJAyvhg_HVd73yxZRMk_HtpqYKakEk3B56_JFPQRlvdKjSmZWdUKyhZ6zqEnuob-y_wGcZvxKKO2yQZZ0aosdgk/s320/147241566.JPG" width="213" /></a></div>
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Why is a mysterious woman attending a gala event at a prestigious international foundation, wrapped only in mosquito netting? Why is she being pursued by apparently identical Greek taxi drivers? What's <i>really </i>going on involving the mysterious Greek financier and the even more mysterious Russian oligarch, and the swimming pool being built for the foundation's guests? Why is the mobile phone belonging to the much-lauded keynote speaker for the gala event residing at the bottom of a different swimming pool at the other end of the island, Skios? And who is the mysterious and mysteriously attractive Oliver Fox, who has appeared in place of that guest speaker (and adopting his identity), to bamboozle and charm Dr. Norman Wilfred's intended audience? Why does Georgie find herself trapped at a villa with Dr. Wilfred, and taking refuge in the bathroom from him and an apparently insane cleaning woman? Above all, will the cool, cool, cool Nikki Hook -- the epitome of grace under pressure -- do so well organizing the gala event that she becomes the next director of the Fred Toppler Foundation? <br />
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By the end of Michael Frayn's new novel, <i>Skios, </i>you'll have answers -- of a sort -- to those questions and many, many others. But as with a lot of novels, the fun isn't about what you find on the last page but what you experience along the way. And in this case, that's a lot -- Frayn has crammed a considerable amount of mayhem into 257 pages and events that stretch out over perhaps 36 hours, if that. Think Shakespeare's comedy -- no, I'm not comparing Frayn's prose or even his wit and humanity to the master, but a lot of the themes are that venerable. And many of them have popped up before in Frayn's work, although those who know him best as the author of <i>Copenhagen</i>, the tour de force drama featuring a debate about the nature of the universe and the meaning of life between physicists Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, are likely to feel a bit taken aback by the radically different nature of this novel. On the other hand, my first exposure to Frayn was waaaay back when one of his early plays, <i>Noises Off</i>, was appearing in the West End in London -- it was my senior year of high school, and was one of the plays we saw on that occasion. (And I definitely enjoyed it far more than I did <i>Coriolanus</i> at the age of 16....)<br />
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<i>Skios </i>is farce -- high farce, of a kind that will be familiar to fans of British comedy. Its characters aren't yukking it up -- they are deadly serious. Nikki wants the job (and true love); Georgie wants a fling. Norman thinks he wants to deliver his already well-traveled lecture (yet again), although -- hmm, maybe not? And Oliver -- well, Oliver is a professional charmer finally being taken seriously, although it seems only when he dons someone else's identity. And yet, the novel has all the hallmarks of the classic drawing room farce. Its characters lose their way, their luggage, their mobile phones, their identities and even their sense of self and their minds in this romp of a novel that takes great joy in poking fun at the whole phenomenon of Davos, Aspen and similar gatherings of "the great and the good."<br />
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I had a lot of fun reading this novel -- it's light and frothy and silly and, if you follow the self-important stuff that happens at Davos and Aspen, you'll enjoy the parody, too. Is it a "Booker novel"? In other words, does it deserve its slot on the longlist? Hmm, I'm not sure. It's nice to have a well-written book that doesn't take itself ponderously and seriously, by an author who is obviously having fun writing it. Is it memorable? I'm not so sure. I'm in no hurry to de-accession my copy (obtained thanks to the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program) but, as with even the best kinds of cotton candy, a little can go a long, long way. 4 stars.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07126482436426213023noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26623799721522957.post-62973221254548835992012-08-02T15:59:00.000-04:002012-08-02T23:02:47.652-04:00Books I Can't Wait to Read...<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
Oh, the temptation...<br />
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Every so often, I get a peek at what's coming up in publisher's catalogs, and it's hard to avoid drooling outright. Here are a random selection of what has piqued my curiosity, in no particular order whatsoever (including, as you can tell, publication date or genre...<br />
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<i>Illuminations</i></div>
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Mary Sharratt</div>
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Oct 9 2012<br />
Why? Because it's about Hildegard of Bingen, a fascinating medieval woman -- a mystic, a nun and a composer of haunting music. <br />
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<i>Eight Girls Taking Pictures</i><br />
Whitney Otto<br />
Nov. 6, 2012 <br />
Why? I wasn't that interested by her last novel, but the idea of a narrative linked by young women photographers is intriguing. Possibly a library book.<br />
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<i>The Last Runaway</i><br />
Tracey Chevalier<br />
Jan. 8, 2013 <br />
Why? Chevalier switches her focus to North America. <br />
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<i>A Possible Life</i><br />
Sebastian Faulks<br />
Dec. 11, 2012<br />
Why? I liked his non-fiction book about English "heroes" who burned out early; it seems this linked narrative of five lives might be a fictional equivalent. <br />
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<i>Chinese Whiskers</i><br />
Aiyar Pallavi<br />
Dec. 11, 2012 <br />
Why? The story of two cats in Beijing. Why not? I'm sure it will be whimsical, but that's just fine.<br />
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<i>The Testament of Mary</i><br />
Colm Toibin <br />
Nov. 13, 2012<br />
Why? Written by a gay Irish Catholic, this is bound to be interesting -- and not a little controversial. And Toibin is such a fabulous prose stylist...<br />
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<i>Hand for a Hand</i><br />
Frank Muir<br />
Nov. 13, 2012 <br />
Why? A new mystery series set in Scotland, published by one of my "most trusted" publishers. Hey, I'll take it on faith.<br />
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<i>The Marlowe Papers</i><br />
Ros Barber <br />
Jan. 29, 2013<br />
Why? Debut historical mystery -- yes, Christopher Marlowe -- getting good buzz from readers in the UK. <br />
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<i>The Green Lady</i><br />
Paul Johnston<br />
Feb. 1, 2013<br />
Why? Well, it's a birthday present -- the return of Alex Mavros, Greek/American detective, whose puzzles always seem to relate to Greece's bumpy and often violent political past.<br />
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<i>The Forgetting Tree</i><br />
Tatjana Soli<br />
Sept. 4, 2012<br />
Why? I really liked the author's first novel, set in wartime Vietnam, and while I'm not as curious about this one's background (California citrus ranching??), it's worth a shot.<br />
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<i>Above All Things</i><br />
Tanis Rideout<br />
February 12, 2013<br />
Why? Great buzz on this, so much so that I decided not to wait until the US publication date or even my next trip to Toronto. Order placed with Amazon.ca, so that I can read about Everest explorer George Mallory. </div>
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<i>The Return of a King </i></div>
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William Dalrymple</div>
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April 2, 2013<br />
Why? I simply love Dalrymple's writing and his keen eye for detail. This book focuses on Afghanistan's history. </div>
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<i>The Heat of the Sun</i></div>
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David Rain</div>
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Nov. 13 2012</div>
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Why? I'm an opera fan; in <i>Madame Butterfly</i>, Pinkerton and Cio-Cio san had a baby son. This is his story. How could I resist?</div>
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<i>Not My Blood</i></div>
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Barbara Cleverly</div>
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August 21, 2012<br />
Why? Because it's the next in the Joe Sandilands series, of course, and I have a biblio-crush on Sandilands.</div>
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<i>The Twelve Rooms of the Nile</i></div>
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Enid Shomer</div>
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August 21, 2012<br />
Why? Gustave Flaubert and Florence Nightingale were in Egypt at the same time in the 19th century. Fact. What if... Fiction -- but why not?</div>
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<i>The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds</i></div>
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Alexander McCall Smith</div>
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Oct. 23 2012</div>
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Why? The Isabel Dalhousie series is the one of his that I'm still following; I'm always curious to see how the author applies applied philosophy and ethics to fictional situations.</div>
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<br /></div>
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<i>The Marseille Caper</i></div>
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Peter Mayle</div>
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Nov. 6, 2012<br />
Why? Mayle's novels are uneven, but sometimes a lot of fun. Good brain candy or beach reading? We'll see.<br />
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<i>Blessed Are Those Who Thirst</i><br />
Anne Holt <br />
Dec 18, 2012<br />
Why? I loved <i>1222</i>, the first Hanne Wilhelmsen mystery by this author to be released in the US. A new one is coming out in the UK in December, so <i>of course </i>it's on my hit list.<br />
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<i>A Question of Identity</i><br />
Susan Hill<br />
Oct. 25, 2012 <br />
Why? Because it's the new Simon Serailler mystery, coming out in the UK -- and I can't wait until it's out here...</div>
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<i>The Confidant</i></div>
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Helene Gremillon</div>
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Oct. 30 2012</div>
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Why? A debut French novel that has created some buzz there; the plot is a bit of an old chestnut (heroine explores mother's mysterious past after her death) but it might be fun.<br />
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<i>The Casual Vacancy</i></div>
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JK Rowling</div>
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Sept. 27 2012<br />
Why? If I need to spell it out, well, we're in trouble here!<br />
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Unless noted, all of the dates above are US/North American releases; in a few instances, I'll be ordering books from the UK (because I'm impatient...) </div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07126482436426213023noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26623799721522957.post-26521503497556067422012-08-01T02:03:00.000-04:002012-08-01T02:03:00.344-04:00"I guess there are times when war doesn't exactly make sense"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The American soldiers stationed in a remote outpost in Afghanistan in this excellent novel by Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya don't want to become "just another failed tribe", and fall victim to the region's apparently endless and ugly battles. Some want to make a difference in the lives of the region's inhabitants; others have a different mission, seeking revenge for the terrorist attacks of 9/11 or combating an ideology they despise, even if they don't understand the difference between someone who wears a black turban because he's Taliban and someone who wears it by right of descent from the prophet Mohammed. And then there are a handful who can only think of getting home alive. Regardless of their widely-varying wishes and hopes, they are all stranded together in this isolated locale when a serious attempt to overrun them is made and only barely repulsed. A few days later, a young woman -- or, at least, a figure in a burkha -- appears with a cart. Nizam, like Antigone before her in the classic Greek tragedy, has come to claim the body of her brother, who led the raid. But the soldiers have already told their headquarters that they have the body of a Taliban leader (as they believe) and as soon as dust storms clear, helicopters will come to carry the corpse off for public display by the new Afghan regime. But until then, the woman and the soldiers are trapped, one on the outside of the razor wire protecting the camp, and the others on the inside.<br />
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The author does an excellent job of capturing the ensuing tension between the men and Nizam, and among the men themselves, in this claustrophobic environment. Nizam's arrivals has caused all certainties to evaporate: whereas the men could fight together to repel armed invaders, she disarms them, literally and rhetorically. Nizam is "outside the template", as the first sergeant remarks to the captain, and her presence in the midst of what had been a battle zone leads to predictable yet unanswerable questions -- why are we here? who are the good guys? what is justice?<br />
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The nature of these questions may be predictable enough, but it's Roy-Bhattacharya's ability to get under the skin of the characters that is most striking. We understand and grieve for the first lieutenant's lost idealism -- he has read and acted in Antigone, and now lives out a classical Greek tragedy of his own. There is an angry young Afghan interpreter, who is among the most insistent that Nizam may be a man under the burkha, and almost certainly is a Taliban "plant", and who also insists on casting the Americans in the role of defender of his country's citizens and their rights -- to their own discomfort. As one enlisted man remarks, dryly, he's only doing his job. <br />
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As the standoff drags on -- Nizam refuses to leave; the soldiers refuse to relinquish the (now decomposing) body of her brother -- the tension grows and misunderstandings multiply. We see the chain of events through a series of narratives, with Nizam's coming first in that sequence -- and only gradually do we recognize the extent to which those misunderstandings are merely small-scale versions of the larger ones between nations and peoples. For instance, the lights that Nizam believes are designed to keep her from sleeping at night turn out to have a far more compassionate purpose, as we discover when the anecdote is told from someone else's perspective. Ultimately, it's impossible not to feel empathy for everyone, from the rigid officer with a limited imagination, to the veteran sergeant, who has seen it all and is exhausted by the emotional damage done by war. Roy-Bhattacharya has succeeded in making Greek tragedy contemporary -- and reminding his readers that the very nature of tragedy is human, and not specific to any era, part of the world, or nationality. <br />
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I confess I cried when I finished this novel -- it doesn't happen often, but what affected me was the fact that the narrative itself was so unsentimental, even as it dealt with emotional issues ranging from death and betrayal to comradeship and despair. This isn't an "anti-war" novel, any more than it is a "pro-war" one; rather, it's the story of the people who are caught up in any war and how they try to resolve the conflict that that always exists between their role as warriors and their nature as human beings. If you have read Sebastian Junger's excellent chronicle of life in the forward battlefield posts in <i>WAR</i>, this would be a great fictional counterpoint. 4.4 stars; definitely recommended. (As a side note, I also relished the author's previous novel, <i>The Storyteller of Marrakesh,</i> which adopted a similar technique, recounting a central narrative by using several narrators and points of view. If that approach annoys you, you'll probably want to avoid both novels, but in my opinion, Roy-Bhattacharya does a great job keeping the narrative tightly focused in both books and particularly in this one.)<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07126482436426213023noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26623799721522957.post-13819699477146562362012-07-27T13:12:00.005-04:002012-07-27T13:26:29.961-04:00It's Booker Time Again!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The longlist for this year's Man Booker Prize was published earlier this week. It's often an interesting list as it is open to the best work published in the UK in a given year by a citizen of the UK, Ireland or the Commonwealth. This includes most of the English-speaking world outside North America -- books published in India, South Africa, Australia, chunks of the Caribbean and elsewhere all are eligible for the prize.<br />
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The criteria? It is to be awarded to "the <i><b>best novel</b></i> in the <i><b>opinion of the judges</b></i>." And here's where the fun begins. Those judges change annually, and are often a fairly eclectic group. For instance, while this year's panel is headed by literary critic Peter Stothard, last year's was chaired by Stella Rimington, former head of MI-5 (yeah -- spooks!) and an author of suspense thrillers. Rimington's choice -- and her choice of books -- sparked fury and outrage among the literary establishment and cognoscenti last year, as she opted for books that are great reads. The shortlist looked like this:<br />
<ul>
<li>The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt</li>
<li>Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan</li>
<li>Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman</li>
<li>Jamrach's Menagerie by Carol Birch</li>
<li>Snowdrops by A.D. Miller (already reviewed here)</li>
<li>The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes</li>
</ul>
Some of these books aroused fury and ire among literary purists, who argued that if Barnes as the only
member of "literature's sacred groves" (to quote an article in the Guardian) didn't win (he did), the world would end; justice would not have been
done; the Man Booker Prize would have been sullied beyond repair. Etcetera. As it happened, I didn't love any books on the shortlist -- I felt that Barnes and lots of other writers have tackled very similar material in very similar ways in other novels -- but what bothered me a lot was the nature of the debate. Rimington's camp insisted that popularity/accessibility/readability
should factor into their decision. I disagreed and agreed at the same time: often, the best
novels challenge us in some way; at the same time, a novel like John
Banville's <i>The Infinities </i>(which I happened to love) is likely to
fly over the heads of 99.9% of readers who don't happen to have an
extensive classical education and who will thus catch only the most
obvious of analogies. (Note: that novel wasn't eligible for last year's
award.) Does being oblique, opaque and uber-literary make a novel
better? Not in my opinion. So irate and huffy were authors like Banville, Pat Barker
and David Mitchell that they began supporting the creation a new prize -- a
kind of anti-Booker, that they claim will recapture the "spirit" of the
old Booker -- to be called the Literature Prize. (Curiously enough, Banville seems prepared to have his cake and eat it simultaneously, as he writes
above-average "popular" detective novels under a pseudonym, Benjamin
Black.)<br />
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Well, the world didn't come to an end, and we're into another Booker season. This time around, Peter Stothard says the panel is emphasizing works and not authors -- which is why some high-profile authors with new books just out, like Martin Amis, Ian MacEwan, Zadie Smith and, yes, John Banville, didn't make the list. Also, Stothard wanted to identify books he felt people might want to read on beach -- but that they definitely would want to bring <i>back </i>from the beach to re-read, and that, on re-reading, they would find more and more there in the pages to ponder. So, here is this year's long list, which will be trimmed down to half-a-dozen finalists in September. (An asterisk indicates titles that are available in the United States.)<br />
<ul>
<li>*Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel </li>
<li>Phillida by Andre Brink</li>
<li>Communion Town by Sam Thompson</li>
<li>*Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil</li>
<li>Swimming Home by Deborah Levy</li>
<li>The Lighthouse by Alison Moore</li>
<li>The Yips by Nicola Barker</li>
<li>*Skios by Michael Frayn</li>
<li>The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Ewan Eng</li>
<li>The Teleportation Accident by Ned Beauman</li>
<li>Umbrella by Will Self</li>
<li>*The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce</li>
</ul>
As those of you who have read my review of Rachel Joyce's novel, below, may suspect, this time it's I who am a bit surprised that a particular novel made it into the shortlist! It's a pleasant enough novel, but there's little or nothing in it that would cause me to be interested in re-reading it. (If a woman in her 30s were the main character, and the issues she confronts on her tramp across England were reshaped accordingly, it would probably be labeled chick lit.) So some of those applauding this list may be in for a surprise when they read this not-very-literary novel!<br />
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But the two lists do have one important thing in common: both are ignoring new works by iconic authors in favor of lesser-known or new writers. (I'll be curious to say if critics are as ferocious about Stothard bypassing Banville, Amis and MacEwan as they were about Rimington overlooking books by Amitav
Ghosh and Michael Ondaatje last year.) But one of the things I do like about both shortlists--
regardless of my thoughts about specific books -- is that it shakes up
the landscape a bit. Whether or not some of these authors and books on the
shortlist will go on to have a career like those of Amis, MacEwan or Ondaatje and emerge as
revered literary icons, who knows? Does it matter? After all, authors who have already made a name for themselves are going to attract critical but respectful attention by reviewers and attention by bookshop buyers and readers, who know theyse are authors they <i>should </i>read. What I enjoy about both lists is that they draw attention to books that may be every bit as good -- perhaps even better -- but which, because they are written by authors who may be younger or have a lower profile, wouldn't automatically command attention.<br />
<br />
Moreover, what critics of the
prize's judges last year have overlooked is that picking the "best book of the
year" <i>should </i>be controversial because one person's "best book"
will always be different from someone else's candidate; even their
criteria will differ. True, there are basic standards as to the kind of
book that should be considered for a prize of this kind -- but I don't
think those are ever gregiously violated. Let's be honest: none of the
shortlisted books were penned by Sophie Kinsella or James Patterson, or
are formulaic stuff churned out at the rate of a book a year. And once
that basic threshold is crossed -- well, all bets are off. I think it's
quite reasonable for a panel of judges to conclude that a book by an
unknown made more of an impact on them -- even if imperfect -- than a
technically accomplished book by someone already in the canon that
happened to underwhelm them.<br />
<br />
So -- on with the race! I'll be reading Michael Frayn's novel shortly, and already have raved about Mantel's sequel on this blog. There are two or three others that I'll want to read and probably will review, especially Andre Brink's <i>Phillida. </i>Stay tuned!Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07126482436426213023noreply@blogger.com1