"The Sinner's Grand Tour": Review and Giveaway!

Tony Perrottet may have given his book, The Sinner's Grand Tour, the subtitle "A Journey Through the Historical Underbelly of Europe", but let's clear up any misconceptions right away. Perrottet is really interested in only one kind of sin (sloth, greed and envy may all qualify as "deadly", but they are of the less compelling variety in his eyes, it's clear!) and the body parts involved don't have much to do with the underbelly. Well, not technically, anyway.

That said, while this isn't really a G-rated book and thus can't be described as "good clean fun", it's an entertaining romp through the history of sexual adventurism over centuries across England, France, Switzerland and Italy. "The entire continent is still littered with secret boudoirs, perverse relics, and ancient dungeons," Perrottet rhapsodizes, "many of which, I was convinced, could be found." And so he sets out in search of any traces left by famed libertines (including Lord Byron, Casanova and England's Edward VII) and anonymous sexual adventurers in remote villages in the French Pyrenees. Perrottet's wife and two young sons are along for the ride -- the latter are intrigued by the idea of dungeons, but far more interested in good old-fashioned thumbscrews than any of the more sexually exotic stuff that Perrottet stumbles over.

Some of the anecdotes he unearths are fascinating, bizarre or just downright hilarious. For instance, who knew that a visit to Paris's most famous brothel was described on the itinerary of visiting dignitaries as being a “visit to the president of the Senate”? That, Perrotet describes, eventually backfired when the Queen of Spain did want to meet the real president of the Senate -- but was taken instead to visit the brothel... Perrottet, discovering he's directly descended from one of the Marquis de Sade's key employees, uses that to try to talk his way into the 18th century libertine's dungeons, scene to many infamous orgies but now the property of fashion mogul Pierre Cardin. He also tries to talk his way into a bathroom in the Pope's private quarters in the Vatican decorated with erotic frescoes by Raphael by claiming an academic interest in the impact of myths on Renaissance art.


There are points where this teeters on the border that separates amusing from downright weird or even slightly creepy. Some of the souveniers he unearths made me grimace with in distaste -- and some of the sexual antics that belong to history were probably more fun to participate in than to read about after the fact. But overall this is a lively and utterly different book, however odd the juxtapositions between the trials and tribulations of a family vacation and of seeking out orgy locations might seem. Probably a great book for those who enjoy "traveler's tales" -- first person stories of misadventures and discovery. Fun in a "wink, wink; nudge, nudge" kind of way.

THE GIVEAWAY! 

 

So, if you're mildly intrigued or titillated by the premise of this book, here comes the best part: Courtesy of the publishers I am giving away 1 (ONE) pristine copy to a randomly-selected follower next Tuesday. Entering is easy: make sure you're a visible follower, then shoot me an e-mail at UncommonReading@gmail.com by midnight (Eastern) Monday night. I'll pick the winner on Tuesday morning, and the book will be in the mail to him or her that day. Good luck, or as the Marquis de Sade would have said, bonne chance!

Man Booker Prize Longlist: "Far to Go" by Alison Pick

I'm not a literary prize shortlist junkie. But I reserve the right to make exceptions to this rule... For instance, if I hadn't decided to sample some of the previously-unknown or relatively unknown authors on last year's Man Booker longlist, I wouldn't have stumbled over The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas, which I loved, much less The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson -- which I said I hoped would win the award when it was still a long shot. (It did...)

This year's longlist was announced on Tuesday, and now that all the frenetic speculation about who's going to be on it is over (notable by their absence are authors like Amitav Ghosh and Graham Swift), I'm deciding which of the 2011 nominees I'll read. The first book I picked up turned out to be [Far to Go] by Alison Pick, a novel that has been released in paperback in the U.S. but that seems to have sailed under the radar so far -- a pity, as it's a very good novel that certainly meets the threshold for being a "thumping good read", even though I'd be surprised to see it make the leap onto the shortlist in a few weeks' time.

You'll need a bit of patience to get into Pick's tale, which starts out with some kind of omniscient observer ruminating on toy trains (with obvious parallels to the cattle cars of the Holocaust, which is the background against which the novel is set), leaps to an archived document, another first person segment, then what turns out to be the story of the sibling of one of the main characters in the book. Finally, you'll get into the main story, told through the eyes of Marta, the Czech (and Christian) nursemaid to the Bauer family, secular and Jewish, living in the Sudetenland in 1938. If you're a historical junkie like me, you'll immediately realize that those facts and dates spell trouble ahead, and you'd be right.

But rather than trying to recount the horrors of the Holocaust itself in fiction -- something I think is doomed to failure -- Pick opts to tell an essentially domestic story of love and betrayal, set in the midst of the years when it finally became clear just what was happening; by the time realization had set in, it was too late for many trapped Jewish families to act. Again, Pick makes a clever decision by choosing to tell the story through Marta's eyes (for reasons that only become clear at the end of the novel); if the Bauers are stubborn in refusing to grasp the implications of the Munich pact, Marta is even more bemused; she simply can't understand why anyone else, especially her lover and the Bauer plant's manager, Ernst, would view the Bauers as anything other than Czech.

But there are undercurrents in the domestic situation. Anneliese Bauer is a troubled woman: her elegant and polished surface conceals much. Pavel Bauer thinks of himself as a Czech nationalist, only to become aware too late that his Jewish identity is something of value. Their five-year-old son, Pepik, clings to Marta in the face of the upheavals that follow the "Kristallnacht" riots. And those tensions lead to betrayals that seem inconceivable.

Pick does a brilliant job of capturing the atmosphere of a small-town Czech community and its cultural divisions; of Prague in the early years of the German occupation; of the world and concerns of the Holocaust researcher whose first-person narrative occasionally interrupts the main story. From the letters and other documents included in the text, we come to know the fates of all the main characters, including the fact that Pepik is one of the children separated from their families and whisked away to safety in the "Kindertransport". What we don't know is how those events come to pass -- or the narrator's relationship to the Bauer family, specifically. Why has the narrator chosen to tell us about this particular family, rather than one of the thousands of others? When that became clear, I was forced to take a step back and rethink the entire nature of the narrative and the concept of the 'unrealiable narrator' took on a new twist. And I suspect it's that revelation -- about the very nature of the story that we've been told -- that raised this novel to the level that it was placed on the Man Booker shortlist.

This is the third novel I've read this summer that focuses on World War II as a domestic event. I've already blogged here about my thoughts on Rosie Alison's The Very Thought of You, in which a child's evacuation from wartime London transforms her life and future. Equally underwhelming (to me, at least) was 22 Britannia Road by Amanda Hodgkinson, which displayed the author's heavy hand in the plot from start to finish, and where even the writing succumbed too often to the floridly banal. Both hovered in the 3.3 star range. Where those two failed to rise above the mediocre, this succeeds, despite the initial confusion in the rapidly-shifting perspectives in its first pages. I'd rate it 4.2 stars, and recommend you hunt it down. Available in paperback! and affordably on Kindle, as well.

Run! (Don't Walk...) to pre-order "The Magician King"

Reading Lev Grossman's absorbing sequel to The Magicians is a bit like riding an invisible roller coaster that no one else has ridden and thus no one can really prepare you for. With every page you turn, Grossman opens up new and ever-wilder and ever-wider vistas, exploring the roots of magic itself in a novel that I can only describe as a tour de force.

When The Magician King opens, Quentin is a king of Fillory, the Narnia-like realm he and others had once believed was confined to the pages of a series of books. As Quentin and his friends from Brakebills -- the magical college -- had discovered in the first novel, Fillory was very real indeed. After a series of perilous adventures, the prior book (SPOILER ALERT!) had ended with Quentin flying off to join Eliot, Janet and Julia on the thrones of Fillory.

But even ruling as a king over a magical land like Fillory has its downside, it seems. A few years later, Quentin is restless, and itching for a new adventure or a quest. At first, chasing after a magical Seeing Hare seems like the answer, but that ends in tragedy. So Quentin decides to set off for an island on the outer fringers of Fillory -- so remote that it barely appears on maps -- to collect overdue taxes from residents. He holds a jousting match to select the kingdom's best swordsman to join the expedition and sets off with Julia and a giant talking sloth in the ship's hold. The last thing he expects when he discovers a magic key, is that it will lead to a portal that dumps both he and Julia back on the front lawn of his parents' home in the "real" world. "Quentin, King of Fillory, needed Fillory more than Fillory needed him," he realizes.

Is Quentin's real quest going to be just to get back to Fillory? Or does it have some kind of broader meaning or purpose? Each time you turn the page, the narrative moves and twists in unexpected directions, from a Venetian palazzo to an encounter with a dragon; a magical safe house in the South of France and a kind of Underworld for dead souls. Grossman jousts with big questions here, from the nature of courage and heroism to the nature and origins of magic and gods; The Magicians was merely a warm-up act for this novel. Reading it can be as unnerving as contemplating the meaning of life and the history of the universe, but the darker themes Grossman explores here are offset throughout by his trademark deadpan humor.  When it comes to Quentin's quest(s), he realizes that not understanding what he's looking for is normal. "Relative ignorance wasn't necessarily a handicap on a quest. It was something your dauntless questing knight accepted and embraced." However, Grossman has one of his characters point out, "it's not like the Holy Grail was actually useful for anything." Preparing to cast the biggest spell of their lives, one they hope will reveal the nature of magic itself, a group of elite magicians have to wait for the FedEx guy to show up with some of the supplies they need. There are a lot of tongue in cheek and sardonic asides that made me chortle and grin even in the midst of the narrative tension.

One of the fascinating elements of this sequel is how well Grossman does in tying up the loose ends of Julia's life. A high school classmate of Quentin's, she hadn't been admitted to Brakebills -- but the spells designed to wipe the admissions test from her memory hadn't stuck. In this novel, the reader learns how Julia emerged as an exceptionally powerful hedge witch -- and the price she paid for her powers. In the end, we learn of the link between Julia's experiences, Quentin's quest and the nature of the threat to the entire magical world.

This novel joins its predecessor on my list of "best books of 2011"; if you haven't read The Magicians yet, well, you've got another ten days or so before The Magician King appears in bookstores, and it's a great summer book to read. I'd recommend both highly; both are 4.6 star novels. Can't help wondering whether someone has snapped up film rights to these yet? Properly done, even though they'd have to be R-rated, they'd knock the Harry Potter films out of the ring.

Full disclosure: I received an advance copy of the book from the publisher via NetGalley.com.

Europa Challenge: Algerians in Europe

By accident rather than design, I ended up reading two books published by Europa Editions by Algerian writers with similar themes: both deal, at least in part, with the experience of emigrants from the "bled" -- the hinterland of countries like Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia -- in contemporary Europe, specifically France and Italy. While the books couldn't be more different in nature, both shed light on the struggle that surrounds European efforts to develop a "multicultural" tolerance.

The Clash of Civilizations over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio by Amara Lakhous, takes the lightest of approaches to this weighty subject, veering occasionally to the comedic elements: even as those residents from other parts of Italy (who despise the foreigners in their midst in the apartment building in Rome that is the heart of the story) look down on each other as being non-Italian -- supporters of the wrong football team, perhaps, or from Naples. The only individual whom each of them believes he or she can clearly see and admire is Amedeo. And yet it's Amedeo who seems to be at the heart of the police questioning that elicits the "testimonies" from the apartment building's residents that make up the bulk of the book (interspersed with diary-style comments from the absent Amedeo.) Because it seems that Amedeo is the prime suspect in the death of an unlamented hooligan named "The Gladiator", an Italian, to be sure, but one who few residents liked half as much as they admire Amedeo. So much do they admire Amedeo, in fact, that they universally reject the idea that he's an immigrant himself, whatever they are told.

The individual tales are poignant and hilarious; the commentary from Amedeo that follows each shows the ways in which individuals deceive themselves by sharing with the reader the details of his interactions with the character in question, and the "truth" of the matter. Their mutual misunderstandings come to a head in conflicts around the use of the elevator that they must share -- all except Amedeo, who fears the enclosed space and opts to take the stairs. ( Benedetta, the concierge, interprets that as a sign of consideration for her personally, in one of the typical misunderstandings.) And it is in the elevator that the body of the Gladiator has been found...  Only toward the end of this novella do we learn the truth about Amedeo himself, something so dark that even the murder of the Gladiator seems anticlimactic. This was a humorous, wry and sardonic look at the way humans view the "other", and at our willingness to break down these barriers and make exceptions to our rules on occasion. Lakhous has unveiled the truths that lie behind prejudice and preconceptions of all kinds. 4.2 stars.

The German Mujahid is an altogether darker vision of the relationship between immigrants from North Africa and the French who accommodate them only reluctantly in their midst. Malrich Schiller is the son of a German father and Algerian mother, now living in one of those housing estates on the outskirts of Paris that the rest of the world hears about only in context of riots and rebellion. Malrich, however, has a first-hand view of the way that Islamists are seizing control of the estate and creating a nation within a nation -- a world that has as little tolerance for those who are non-compliant as did Nazi Germany. And that's a comparison that Malrich is forced to come to grips with on a personal level, when his elder brother Rachel (Rachid Helmut) dies, and Malrich inherits his diary and their father's personal effects -- including SS medals from World War II. On their father's death in a remote Algerian community -- possibly at the hands of Islamists -- Rachel had initially seen him as a victim, only to realize that he may have been a perpetrator of a different and yet related horror. After exploring his father's history, Rachel finds his conclusions impossible to live with; Malrich, by contrast, takes a different path...

Sansal's strength is his ability to deliver two parallel tales in utterly different and utterly convincing voices -- that of a mature man whose world collapses, and that of an adolescent who must decide on 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 the more sober and analytical; both are utterly convincing. Who is guilty? And what does it mean to resist? These are weighty topics; Sansal does an excellent job of dealing with them to the extent that any author can. 4.3 stars, definitely recommended.

Mystery Monday: Quirky Crime in Thailand

Colin Cotterill's series of mysteries featuring Dr. Siri, the only coroner left in Laos after the 1975 victory of the Communist Pathet Lao, have been ranked among my favorite crime sagas since I began reading them a few years ago. With seven books out in that series (starting with The Coroner's Lunch) and an eighth due out early in the new year, Cotterill has branched out with Killed at the Whim of a Hat (the title is drawn from one of George W. Bush's malapropisms), which feels as if it might be the beginning of a new series?

Cotterill isn't venturing too far, geographically -- moving from Laos to the southern coast of Thailand. But the characters and settings actually feel far more exotic than in the Dr. Siri books, as Cotterill has assembled possibly the quirkiest cast of characters imaginable, guaranteed to make the sober Thai tourist authorities recoil in dismay. At the heart of it all is Jimm, a former crime reporter in her 30s, who has relocated with her family to a tiny fishing coast after her mother spontaneously decides to buy the dilapidated beachfront establishment known as the "Gulf Bay Lovely Resort and Restaurant." Jimm, on the verge of becoming the top crime reporter in the northern city of Chiang Mai and now trapped hundreds of miles away, learning how to gut fish from a YouTube video, while her bodybuilder brother Arny is stuck rolling treetrunks up and down the beach (there's no gym nearby) and her elder transgender sister, Sissi, is living the life of a recluse back in Chiang Mai, making money off Internet scams.

Then, a miracle happens. Or rather, back-to-back miracles, at least in Jimm's view: a local farmer unearths a buried Volkswagen van containing two skeletons, and a local Buddhist abbot is murdered - and found with a bizarre orange hat on his head. Great stories for Jimm -- and a puzzle for her to solve, with the help of a very camp gay Thai policeman who may prove to be sharper than he first appears.

This was a fun and entertaining romp of a mystery, although the solution the crime turns out to be rather improbable. So, too, are some of the adventures that Granddad Jah (confined to the traffic police until he retired because of his refusal to take bribes) gets up to when he encounters another incorruptible ex-cop, or Jimm's mother, who goes out prowling with rat poison after dark. But a good part of the fun is just to hop on board and enjoy the ride. Cotterill himself moved from Chiang Mai to southern Thailand a few years ago and knows the country that he's writing about; he has a great eye for the detail the makes it all "click" into place as a convincing tale. Recommended; despite the body discoveries, at heart, this is more of a "cozy" crime series than a police procedural, with most of the bad guys being corrupt or stupid rather than vicious and evil. A fun weekend read; 3.9 stars. The Dr. Siri books are better still; just as much of a sense of time and place, but with more intriguing and darker plots tied to then-current events in Indochina.

Just Added to My Shelves:

Well, the temperatures hit 105 or 106 degrees Fahrenheit here in New York on Friday, depending on which media outlet you believe (although both seem to agree that, factoring in humidity, it felt like 115 degrees). And it wasn't much better Thursday. So I hope you'll forgive me if my rate of posting has slowed somewhat! Between work and the heat, this has been a sluggish end to the week, to put it mildly.

However, I have been adding books to my shelves, both real, borrowed and cyber. My fellow Kindle afficionados may be pleased to learn that there is another big sale underway, with prices on an esoteric array of books slashed to as little as 99 cents or a maximum of $3.99. Needless to say, some of these now reside on my Kindle...

Here's the update:

• Galore by Michael Crumney (Kindle sale)
• Let's Kill Uncle by Rohan O'Grady (library)
• House of the Hanged by Mark Mills (UK purchase)
• The Kashmir Shawl by Rosie Thomas (UK purchase)
• The Vault by Ruth Rendell (eGalley from Simon & Schuster)
• The Three-Arched Bridge by Ismail Kadare (Kindle sale)
• On the Road to Babadag by Andrzej Stasiuk (Kindle purchase)
• In an Antique Land by Amitav Ghosh (Library)
• Who Are We - And Should it Matter in the 21st Century? by Gary Younge (Kindle purchase)
• Balthasar's Odyssey by Amin Maalouf (Kindle sale)
• The Women of the Cousins' War by Philippa Gregory et. al. (eGalley)
• Nairobi Heat by Mukoma wa Ngugi (NetGalley)
• After Midnight by Irmgard Keun (NetGalley)
• Ghosts of Belfast by Stuart Neville (Kindle Sale)
• A Jane Austen Education by William Deresiewicz (Library)
• Murder on Sisters' Row by Victoria Thompson (Library)
• Two Lives by William Trevor (Library)
• Limassol by Yishai Sarid (Library)
• Eros by Helmut Krausser (Library)
• Cooking with Fernet Branca by James Hamilton-Paterson (Library)

You may well wonder whether any of these library books actually make it back to the library. When I borrowed many of these, I was astonished that it was possible to renew them as many as 99 times. Now I'm just grateful...

See you back here when the heat abates a bit!

The Reason I Keep an Eye on Literary Prizes...

...is because sometimes their longlists and shortlists draw my attention to fabulous books that otherwise wouldn't cross my radar screen. For instance, the longlist for this year's George Orwell Prize generated two books that I'd number on my "best of 2011" list, Death to the Dictator by Afsaneh Moqadem (a chronicle of what befell a young Iranian who found himself becoming a democracy activist during his country's last elections) and Chasing the Devil by Tim Butcher, a gripping travel yarn that follows the author's prior expedition through the Congo by a little jaunt through some of the most remote parts of Liberia and Sierra Leone.

It was on the shortlist for this year's Orange Prize (awarded for the best work of fiction published in English by a woman writing anywhere in the world) that I stumbled across The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna, where it kept company with books like the wonderful Room by Emma Donoghue and the less-impressive ultimate winner of the prize, The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht. Both Obreht's novel and Forna's have one thing in common: they deal with the aftermath of conflict in a society other than our own. But while I found Obreht's plot often too clunky and opaque, and thought her elegant writing occasionally had a "look what I can do!" quality to it, Forna's book grabbed me from the first pages and never let me go until I had turned the final page. No, it's not flawless; in some places it's overwritten, and there are the occasional signs of florid writing or spots that a ruthless editor should have trimmed back. But for me, those sink into the background when compared to the novel itself.

Forna sets her tale in Sierra Leone, and weaves her relatively complex plot around three men and the women in their lives. Adrian is a British psychologist, on a one-year assignment in a country that he can't begin to understand -- he just knows he wants to help its citizens deal with the trauma of a horrific war. Kai, who survived some of those horrors, is a talented surgeon, wrestling with the obvious needs of his countrymen and the call to follow his closest friend -- and countless other medical professionals -- overseas. In the hospital where they work lies Elias Cole, a professor of history, who watched as his country began to disintegrate shortly after independence -- and whose own involvement in that breakdown of civil society may have been greater than he is prepared to admit even to Adrian, a stranger who listens to his memories of his obsessive love for Saffia, a colleague's wife, and his own selective memories of what happened to them and to Saffia's husband, the charismatic Julius.

At its heart, this novel is less about war and its aftermath than it is about the human need to keep secrets and about shame; and about the way keeping those secrets deforms those who must keep quiet. Even one of Adrian's patients is driven into a fugue state -- she wanders, oblivious, around the city and the countryside, driven into a state where she can't cope with any reality at all, by the nature of her war-related family secret. Admittedly, when Forna eventually unravels all these secrets, some of the encounters feel slightly artificial, but not the secrets themselves, or the impact on the characters in this beautifully-written and deeply moving novel. I came away with a realization that tragedy can be almost mundane in a world like that of Sierra Leone. One character points out to Adrian the ultimate futility of "curing" some of his traumatized and disturbed patients -- only to discharge them back into in a world of insanity. Forna even jousts with some of the most complex issues, such as where responsibility lies for the kind of nightmarish civil strife and war that Sierra Leone has endured. “Everyone talks about they. Them," one of her characters muses. "But who is they? Who are they?” -- the "they" in question being those responsible for the war and the atrocities.

This is a startlingly good book, a rare example of an "issue" novel that works on all levels and that doesn't sacrifice character development or style in pursuit of the author's overwhelming need to convince the reader of the justice of his or her cause. I got a sense of the beauty of Sierra Leone; of the people who have chosen not to abandon their country even as it became a failed state, as well as the issues that the author wanted me to focus on, such as the way that people lie to themselves and others to survive both physically and psychologically. Ultimately, despite the undertone of despair and loss, this is a novel that celebrates that survival. 4.4 stars, highly recommended -- and onto my "best books of the year" list.