Mystery Monday: A Classical Whodunnit

I suspect that any novel starts with the author wondering to himself or herself, "what if..." and then simply following where his or her imagination leads. In the case of The Pericles Commission, Gary Corby started off asking himself some intriguing questions: What if Socrates had had an older brother? And what if that older brother had been asked by none other than Pericles (in the days before he became an Athenian hero in his own right) to become something that Athens had never seen before: a private detective, or inquiry agent? Those questions, coupled with Corby's excellent writing and knowledge of classical history, along with some nifty characters and plot twists, prove to be a recipe for a top-notch mystery, one that kept me awake far too late last night until I finished it and one that now has me lamenting (in the manner of mourners at an ancient Greek funeral) that I'll have to wait until November to read the next book in the series, The Ionia Sanction.

Corby's fictional hero, Nicolaos, is simply out a morning stroll when suddenly, "a dead man fell from the sky, landing at my feet with a thud." Nicolaos, son of sculptor, is no fool, and quickly shows the reader that he's good strong investigative skills: "It doesn't normally rain corpses, so where had this one come from?" It turns out that he'd been shot (with an arrow, since guns wouldn't appear in Greece for a few more millennia) and had fallen, already dead, from the Areopagus, the rock on which the city's most elite statesmen gather. And the victim? Well, it turns out that he was Ephialtes, the political leader who only days earlier had taken the final steps that turned Athens into the world's first democracy. Did his death mean the end of those democratic aspirations?

Ephialtes and his murder are a matter of historical fact, and Corby has wound a compelling mystery tale around them, one in which Nicolaos finds himself investigating the dead man's tangled personal life (with the aid of the latter's illegitimate daughter, who's a priestess-in-training) as well as his political connections. Pericles quickly reveals himself to be an idol with feet of clay to Nicolaos -- whenever the latter's investigation leads him in unwanted directions (such as toward other leaders of the democrats), Pericles is angry and eager to bury unwelcome evidence. Being civic-minded is, Nicolaos slowly discovers, more honored in principle than in practice in the 5th century BCE in Athens...

I enjoyed every page of this mystery, although usually procedural mysteries (which is essentially the category to which this belongs) become tedious and predictable. But whenever the drama of Nicolaos's investigation flagged, Corby introduced some plot element or detail of life in Ancient Athens, such as how those immense marble statues were transported from one place to another, or the nature of ritual sacrifices, that I found absolutely fascinating. I particularly enjoyed the points when the very young Socrates, ugly and precocious, steps in to help his big brother solve the puzzle. Sometimes, foreshadowing is clumsily handled in historical novels, but not this time; when Nicolaos heaves a sigh before telling his inquisitive younger brother, "Try not to think so much Socrates. It will only get you into trouble," all I could do was laugh out loud. Best of all, I never felt as if I needed to read a basic guide to Greek history to follow the plot -- an outline at the beginning was all I needed; Corby did an excellent job of incorporating the historical background and context into the narrative almost seamlessly, so I never once felt as if I was being lectured to by one of the characters (a big, unavoidable flaw in many historical novels.)

There have been a lot of mystery novels set in Ancient Rome to make their appearance in recent years, of which the series featuring Gaius Petreius Ruso as a physician in Roman Britain is the only one to have piqued my curiosity. (I've tried the books by Steven Saylor and Lindsey Davis, but haven't found them compelling enough to continue with.) Perhaps it's the fact that Corby has done such a good job blending the background with an exciting plot, or perhaps it's just that Ancient Greece is new and obviously fertile ground for mysteries, but I found this grabbed my attention far more did Caveat Emptor, the most recent Ruth Downie novel featuring Ruso that I read last month. Recommended to all mystery buffs; 4.2 stars.

Bleakly humorous look at the life of one man and his penguin...

Let's start with the fact that the main protagonist of Death and the Penguin and Penguin Lost, would-be novelist Viktor, has a pet. Fair enough. But this being the world that author Andrei Kurkov has created for his characters -- based on life in the post-Soviet Union Ukrainian capital of Kiev -- Viktor's pet isn't the standard issue cat or dog. It's a penguin; to be precise, an Emperor penguin named Misha, whom he adopted when the Kiev zoo is forced to de-accession its animals because it can no longer afford to feed them.

When the first of these two novels opens, Viktor is a bit worried about feeding Misha, too. Newspapers keep rejecting his stories, and he's wondering how to keep buying the frozen fish that Misha favors. (Luckily, there's lots of cold water on hand for Misha's swimming expeditions in Viktor's bathtub.) Out of the blue, it seems, he is wooed and flattered by a senior newspaper editor into writing a series of obituaries of prominent figures in the new Ukraine that can be kept on hand until their subject dies. Suddenly, Viktor can afford to feed Misha the occasional piece of frozen salmon or even shrimp, and he's having fun exercising his creative energies on the obituaries, including all the details of their seedy schemes and criminal acts, despite the fact that he despairs of ever seeing his byline in print -- after all, most of the figures he is profiling are healthy and surrounded by bodyguards. Until the day when one of them dies -- and suddenly, his obits are the talk of the town. Then he and his penguin, inexplicably, are in hot demand to attend some of the funerals...

What makes this novel work -- and caused me to laugh out loud even as I was gasping with appalled fascination -- is the naive figure of Viktor himself, who seems largely unaware of the bigger forces swirling around him. It's not that he's incurious, simply that he realizes that the world he inhabits is a complex and dangerous place. That's underscored by the fate of his friend and penguin-sitter, Sergey, who is whisked off to join the Moscow police and then isn't heard from, or by the disappearance of Misha-non-penguin, a Mafia-type figure who has befriended Viktor and who leaves him with his four-year-old daughter Sonya before himself vanishing from view.

When Viktor realizes what is really going on -- and his own possible fate -- he seizes the chance to escape. His return, in the second book, is do justice to the one companion for whom he has genuine feelings: Misha the penguin. But Misha is missing, and Viktor undertakes an odyssey to locate him, from the circles of Kiev's corrupt politicians to the Moscow underworld and eventually to a darkly horrific Chechnya, where he is hapless witness to what happens to the war's victims. Reunited with Misha, Viktor plans at least to take control of his own destiny -- but life has one last little surprise for him...

These are wonderful novels, books that play with the idea of "reality" as something absurd and even surreal, and that show how readily an ordinary man and his penguin can carve out an ordinary life and routine against a backdrop of chaos and anarchy.  The relationship between Viktor and his penguin is a tour de force -- I'll never be able to read books about a man and his dog in quite the same way again. And yet Kurkov also does justice to the peripheral figures in the story, who are sketched out quite clearly for the reader to observe even though we always see them through Viktor's eyes: the jovial and yet sinister editor; the generous mafioso; the young woman, Nina, who arrives as Sonya's nanny and becomes Viktor's lover, and who promptly begins agitating for a dacha in the country.

While I loved both these tragicomic novels, the first (Death and the Penguin) is certainly the stronger of the two books (4.5 stars), with a narrative that is focused in both time and space. It is in that book that we meet Viktor and Misha; that the absurd plight in which both find themselves becomes clear to us. In contrast, Penguin Lost (4 stars) exists to wrap up the loose ends left dangling at the end of the first novel -- where is Misha? What happened to Viktor? What about Sonya and Nina? You'll want to read the second book to find out, but it's more rambling and easier to put down. Death and the Penguin is already available; the sequel will be released in September by Melville House. Full disclosure: I obtained advance electronic copies of both books from the publisher via NetGalley.

Just Added to My Shelves:

It's dangerous to let me loose in bookstores, or even in the vicinity of the Kindle books page on Amazon.com, it seems...

At any rate, here are some of the new additions to my shelves, some of which will be reviewed on this blog in the coming weeks & months!

• When the World Spoke French by Marc Fumaroli (purchase)
• Except When I Write: Reflections of a Recovering Critic by Arthur Krystal (purchase)
• The Magician King by Lev Grossman (NetGalley)
• The Prague Cemetary by Umberto Eco (NetGalley)
• Sand Queen by Helen Benedict (NetGalley)
• Heliopolis by James Scudamore (purchase)
• Is Journalism Worth Dying For? by Anna Politkovskaya (NetGalley)
• Nat Tate: American Artist by William Boyd (LibraryThing Early Reviewer)
• Blue Monday by Nicci French (UK purchase)
• The Hidden Child by Camilla Lackberg (UK purchase)
• Before Versailles by Karleen Koen (Kindle purchase)
• Bone China by Roma Tearne (Library)
• Chalcot Crescent by Fay Weldom (Library)
• Carte Blanche by Carlo Lucarelli (LIbrary)

Stay tuned for feedback on these and other books! And a big welcome to all my new followers...

What's Life Without a Challenge?

One of the publishers I noted a day or two ago as being one of those that has an uncanny ability for generating a disproportionate quantity of "I gotta read it!" and even "I gotta buy it -- NOW" books is Europa Editions. So much so, that when they announced they were launching the "Europa Challenge", I decided that I'd have to join in.

The challenge is to read (no hardship at all) a number of Europa titles (again, no hardship) between July 1 and the end of 2011. If I read 4, I win the title of Europa Ami; if I hit 7, I rise to become a Europa Haver (Hebrew for 'friend') and if I hit 14, I'll become an Europa Amante. Since I'm feeling pro-Italian this week, I'll opt for the Amante title, which will mean I'll have to devour about two or three Europa titles every month. Eh, nessun problema; possa fare questo! And just for the fun of it, I'll try to win the "Passport Holder" designation (by reading books from different countries, published in different languages) and will ponder becoming a "perpetual" reader -- in other words, to read all the Europa titles.

So far, I've read A Novel Bookstore by Laurence Cosse; Muriel Barbery's two novels; In a Strange Room by Damon Galgut and the books that I've reviewed here by Kazimierz Brandys, Anna Gavalda and Luis Sepulveda. I've got about four that I have purchased but that linger unread, and a few more I've obtained from the library, so all I have to do now is decide whether to kick off with Chalcot Crescent by Fay Weldon, Heliopolis by James Scudamore or Carte Blanche by Carlo Lucarelli. Decisions, decisions...

I'll be cross-posting my reading on the Europa Editions challenge blog here -- and if you feel like it, why not read along or join the challenge for yourself?

Happy reading!

When Individual Decisions Lead to Societal Mayhem

I've been reading Unnatural Selection by Mara Hvistendahl this week as I've been editing the galleys for the paperback edition of my own book, Chasing Goldman Sachs, (which you can order online today, or can find in bookstores after the paperback release date in October!) but I don't think it's a coincidence that as I made my way through the pages of Hvistendahl's impeccably-researched tome I began to recognize some parallels. What happens when we are reluctant to admit that some of our most closely-held beliefs might have an ugly underside? (In Hvistendahl's, it's the right to abortion as a cornerstone of a woman's right to control her fertility; on Wall Street, it's the right to pursue profits of all kinds.) Why don't we acknowledge that simply because something is legal, and reasonable for one person to do, that doesn't mean everyone can do it without the gravest potential consequences? (It's OK for one person to select the sex of their unborn child, or to buy a $500,000 house with a weird mortgage, no down payment and an income of only $30,000 a year, but when a significant number of people do so, the balance is no longer sustainable.) Above all, why can't we recognize that just because we can do something, practically and legally, that doesn't mean that we should? Why can't we learn to think about the wider context and just say no?

Admittedly, Hvistendahl doesn't get that philosophical in her excellent book. What she is trying to do is show just how badly out of whack birth rates have become not just in countries like India and China (where the preference for boys has already been well documented) but also Korea, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Albania. And, she worries, this is likely to spread to other countries as the level of affluence grows together with the wide availability of the technology that is needed to verify the gender of a fetus -- before aborting it if it's a girl. Don't think for a moment that cultural mores about the value of human life will stop them from doing so, she warns -- she provides evidence that in some of the worst offenders, such as China, abortion was traditionally thought of as heinous and not viewed in matter-of-fact terms, at the time the transition began. Hvistendahl doesn't stop with diagnosing the problem, but extends her analysis to the early signs of how male-dominated societies appear to function: ironically, women are less valued as individuals and viewed only as scarce sexual partners; those who can't find wives or partners in Taiwan and China venture to neighboring countries and buy or even kidnap brides, forcing them into marriage or prostitution.

This thought-provoking book made me wonder and ponder what happens when multiple cherished ideals collide. We want, for instance, a "sustainable" planet, not one where everyone sets out to maximize the number of children they have. At the same time, we want women to be able to control their fertility -- to have that right. And we cherish the idea of personal freedom. But what happens when these are incompatible? Hvistendahl looks at the panic of the 1950s and 1960s, when under the influence of U.S. population control "experts", governments cracked down on their citizens' fertility using forced abortions and forced sterilizations -- ironic, given that affluence has led people to voluntarily restrict the size of their families. Now the problem is the opposite one: how to tell people that their single child can't be a boy; that they can't select what gender child they have but must put up with what comes along. Not surprisingly, no government has been willing to grasp that thorny challenge. Rules banning sex-selective abortions are honored only in principle, not in practice in nations like India.

The kind of world that is created when there are seven men for every five women (or whatever ratio emerges) is likely to be an ugly one, Hvistendahl argues, convincingly and with considerable data. And until we see the impact of our individual decisions decades from now -- when the problem will be far worse -- we're not likely to do anything about it. (Global warming, anyone?) And the challenges are significant. Already, Hvistendahl notes that activists are using sex-selective abortions as a way to try and remove the access of all women to any king of abortion. The intentions were good -- give parents a way to ensure they'd have a boy early on in their reproductive careers, and they'd have fewer children trying -- but ended up fitting in poorly with the reality that parents were ready to limit family size anyway.

This is a book that is straightforward and simple -- no scientific or statistical terms to make you wrinkle your brows in puzzlement -- and that ultimately I couldn't put down as I became just as caught up in the narrative as I would have been in any thriller. Hvistendahl writes with style and panache, and at the same time never lets her own anger and frustration overtake her reason. The only point at which she fails to do justice to her argument is in a few pages late in the book, when she attempts to argue -- awkwardly -- that the level of violence in U.S. society has something to do with the male-dominated frontier traditions of the 19th and early 20th centuries (when women were scarce) and their prevalence in popular culture. I looked for evidence -- she is scrupulous when providing proof of her theories everywhere else -- but beyond the data of the demographic makeup of the frontier societies during the Gold Rush, etc., Hvistendahl doesn't bother providing facts supporting this part of her theory. (There's no study showing that men who commit violent acts have a disproportionate fondness for TV shows or movies set in the old West, for instance.) That sloppiness stands in odd contrast to her punctilious approach in the rest of the book, and is the reason I can't give more than 4.4 stars to what could have been a 5-star book. But it's still a very important analysis of an under-reported problem. Or rather, while the problem is often remarked upon, no one until now has dared to tackle a rigorous analysis of why it exists and what may happen next.

The reason I bumped this to the top of my "must read" list? Well, I stumbled across this article in the Daily Telegraph about Indian parents paying surgeons to turn healthy baby girls, whose gender is very clear at birth, into baby boys -- albeit sterile baby boys. (This isn't the same as taking a child born with confusing genitalia into one or the other gender -- a very rare condition.) In their quest for boy children, parents, it seems will not only abort a six-month fetus but put their baby girls through unnecessary and dangerous surgery. For the record, regardless of what I myself might do, I"m staunchly in favor of giving any woman the right to choose whether to carry a pregnancy to term. But after reading this book and this article, I felt as if my support for what I still believe to be an important issue (no woman who has been raped, in my opinion, should be forced by others to bear her rapist's child if she chooses not to) has been abused. These are important issues, not just in terms of the principles and beliefs we cling to, but for the future of our planet. Hvistendahl points out very carefully the perils of meddling in them -- a lesson we should try to recall if policymakers set out to try and reverse the gender imbalance by a fresh series of equally ham-handed policies.

I won a copy of this book in a publisher giveaway on Twitter! And yes, it's from PublicAffairs, one of my "must watch" publishers... (That's how I heard about the giveaway in the first place -- I'm a Twitter "follower"...)

Some Publishers I Keep a Close Eye On...

I was making my way through the stack of catalogs that made up part of my haul at BEA (BookExpo) back in late May -- also known as "book porn" -- when I realized that there are a handful of publishers whose catalogs were responsible for inflating my "must read" list to an extent that was completely out of whack. I've mentioned one of these here in these pages -- the folks at Europa Books -- but thought it might be amusing to try to round up a list of them. So, in no particular order, here's who they are and why they're so dangerous to my budget and my groaning bookshelves.

Europa Books (to start with the obvious one) publishes high-quality literature that I might otherwise never hear about at all or never be able to find if I did. So far, I'm batting 1000 with their books, and I've decided to participate in their Europa Challenge (more of which in a later post.) Authors include such well-known figures as Muriel Barbery and Jane Gardam, but if you're looking for something completely different in the fiction world, their backlist is a great first stop.

Soho Books: I confess! I am a mystery addict. And Soho publishes some of my favorite authors, including some of the ones who don't automatically warrant a place in the tables at the front of the bookstore, but whose books are often better than some of the ones that you do find occupying prime real estate. I woke up to the pattern slowly -- d'uh -- but any imprint that has introduced me to authors like Qiu Xialong (his post-Soho books haven't been as good, alas), Colin Cotterill, David Downing and Jassy Mackenzie needs to have an eye kept on it. Coming up, I'll be reading some more offerings, like books by Michael Genelin.

Basic Books and PublicAffairs: These two imprints fall under the broader label of the Perseus Books Group, and publish some of the best and most accessible narrative non-fiction about serious subjects. I've just finished reading Unnatural Selection by Mara Hvistendahl, a must-read book about sex selection at birth and the impact of these policies on our world, a BasicBooks offering. (Stay tuned for a review in the next 24 hours.) The list of interesting books is endless -- Cambodia today, Lisbon during World War II, the last day of the life of the Soviet Union...

Bloomsbury: I suppose it's technically Bloomsbury Walker, but I don't really care. Besides, I drooled over the logo on the catalog so much that  it's no longer visible. I could actually whimper when reading through their list of upcoming offerings. A new MI5 thriller from Stella Rimington. Stephen O'Shea's newest book, The Friar of Carcassonne. Dava Sobel writing about Copernicus; a new novel from Lloyd Jones (author of Mr. Pip), something from Amin Maalouf and countless other goodies. I'd add to the list, but then I'd cry in frustration and the catalog would end up covered in tear stains as well as drool. Horrifying.

New York Review of Books: Not content with churning out a must-read newsmagazine about books, these folks are actually printing (or rather, reprinting) must-read fiction and non-fiction. Tove Jansson's books for adults are on the list, but also books like the one I snaffled on my most recent bookstore foray, When the World Spoke French, about how the possession of a lingua franca spread Enlightenment thought.

Melville House: Shamefully, for a moment I thought these guys might be jumping aboard the "Christian fiction" bandwagon. No idea why that thought crossed my mind, other than the fact that I'd never really heard of them. But anyone planning to introduce the entertaining subversion of Andrei Kurkov's novels featuring Viktor the writer and his penguin Misha is someone whose adventures in publishing I want to follow. They are off digging up intriguing novellas by well-known classic writers -- you'll know the author's names but the books won't be familiar to you -- introducing writers like Imre Kertesz and non-fiction like Is Journalism Worth Dying For? (the final writings of Anna Politkovskaya) and Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler's Germany. (No, the author takes Hitler seriously, but is pointing out that the ability to laugh at an oppressive regime can sometimes lead people to resist it.) The newest addition to my MUST WATCH! list.

Little, Brown & Co., is part of Hachette and thus one of the "big boys" in the publishing world. But their fall list includes a new novel by the author of Winter's Bone, Daniel Woodrell, and an intriguing new thriller (under the Mulholland imprint) The Whisperer by Donato Carrisi. I don't turn my backs on them... Another great Hachette imprint is Twelve, which publishes a single book a month; the winter releases include something from Christopher Hitchens and a book by Eric Weiner about humans and God. (His last book was about the happiest places in the world; I suspect Iceland is a wee bit less happy than when he was there, pre-crash.)

Farrar,  Strauss & Giroux/Faber and Faber has an astonishing list that includes Dante in Love by A.N. Wilson, new novels from Jeffery Eugenides and Andre Aciman, and, from Faber, an intriguing looking book by Siddhartha Deb, The Beautiful and the Damned, about the new India. They publish interesting authors like Elif Batuman and Marilynne Robinson; Faber & Faber has an amazing backlist of poetry and drama. (Stoppard, anyone?)

Just because a publisher isn't on this list doesn't say anything about the caliber of what's in their catalogs, just that these publishers appear much more likely to focus on the kind of stuff I like to read. When I'm looking for a "plain vanilla" novel, I'm pretty much label agnostic. But if I'm not keeping up with these guys, I know that I'm going to risk missing out on something that will be a wonderful discovery, including a book that will be on my list of best reads for the year or a new favorite author.

Books to Help Beat the Heat: "Bloodmoney" by David Ignatius

"Revenge," muses one of the protagonists in David Ignatius's excellent summer thriller, Bloodmoney, "comes in different flavors. Sometimes it is a swift act of rage that shatters the mast the oppressor has created for you. Other times it is a slow process in which the mask is an essential shield to cover actions that the oppressor could not imagine." Ignatius's novel is all about revenge; even the title comes from the idea that by paying a sum of money or providing something else of value, it is possible to settle a blood feud in areas of the world like Waziristan, the frontier region of Pakistan that is home to Omar. In the first pages of the thriller, Omar loses his entire family to a missile fired by an unmanned U.S. drone and resolves to take his revenge on those whom he holds responsible.

Flash forward in time, and westward in space, and the reader is catapulted into the world of Sophie Marx, recently named head of "the Hit Parade". It's really not an entertainment business, but a deniable offshoot of the CIA located in Los Angeles, undertaking tasks that the administration really wants done, but doesn't want to know about. But now the Hit Parade's agents abroad -- all of whom should have impeccable, unbreakable covers -- are being assassinated, and it's up to Sophie to figure out why.

In many ways this is a standard thriller, but like most good thrillers, there are bad guys on both sides of the battle, and good guys to be found in some unexpected places. I had a great time following Sophie's efforts to unravel the puzzle of how and why the agents were being detected and eliminated, a process that takes her undercover in a London hedge fund and into harm's way in Pakistan.  True, the whodunnit was well-flagged, given the introductory chapter, but that didn't hamper my enjoyment. After all, just because you know a big loop is coming on a rollercoaster doesn't mean you don't enjoy the ride, does it? And there are plenty of surprises looming in the final pages of this novel, and a few great twists. As a writer of spy thrillers, Ignatius may not rank alongside the caliber of John LeCarre -- but then, how many do? This was a great summertime novel, a "thumping good read" that offers up a bit of food for thought about revenge and honor codes even as it entertains. 4.1 stars, recommended.