Mason’s newly published version of the Odyssey takes a post-modernist approach–casual, playful, earthy, and even scatological. At one point in Mason’s version of The Lost Books of the Odyssey, Odysseus muses about the fact that “I was ideally suited to be a bard, a profession fit only for villeins, wandering masterless men who live at the pleasure of their landed betters, as my father reminded me when I broached the idea. He and his men would say things like, ‘We are here to live the stories, not compose them!’” And then Odysseus imagines himself as bard, intoning “Sing, Muses, of the wrath of god-like shit-for-brains, hereditary lord of the mighty Coprophagoi [excrement eaters], who skewered a number of other men with his pig-sticker and valued himself highly for so doing,” an obvious, raw satire on the earlier, more poetic translations. Using the traditional story of the Odyssey as his starting point, Mason gives his own take on various episodes from that epic, jumping around in time and place, changing major aspects of the story, adding new episodes, and providing unique points of view.
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In the fourth of the Inspector Erlendur series, Gold Dagger Award-winner Arnaldur Indridasson creates a challenging and thought-provoking mystery by revisiting the political complexities of Iceland during the height of the Cold War in the 1970s and 1980s. At this time, many Icelandic young people were resentful of the US presence and its huge naval air station in Keflavik, accusing the US of “spreading filth.” While the US and NATO were using this base for strategic defense against possible USSR aggression, many students, often from poor families, were accepting the chance to study in East Germany at the University of Leipzig, then returning home with their socialist and communist messages. For Inspector Erlendur Sveinsson, busy solving contemporary crimes, this past history has been unimportant, but when an earthquake leads to the unexpected draining of Lake Kleifarvatn, a skeleton, weighed down with a Russian transmitter, emerges from the depths, a large hole in its skull. With no other evidence available, Erlendur’s only hope of identifying the remains rests with his investigation of missing persons from the late 1970s and 1980s.
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Hilary Mantel has never “written the same book twice,” a writer of literary fiction who is so versatile and original that she defies genre. Though this novel is a thorough and detailed look at the British court and its players from 1529 – 1535, it is so different from the traditional “historical novel” in its themes, massive scope, detailed character development, careful research, and lack of romance that it becomes its own genre, closer to fictionalized biography than to the blood and thunder bodice-rippers that sometimes characterize “historical fiction.” This novel is realistic, with no compromises of actual history for the sake of story, but it succeeds in being lively, often humorous, filled with exciting scenes, and peopled with fascinating characters from Henry VIII to Sir Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell. In an unusual twist, Mantel turns history as it has been depicted in other literature of this period on its head. Sir Thomas More, the saintly subject of A Man For All Seasons, is shown here to be rigid and hard; Thomas Cromwell, often depicted as the evil scourge of More, is, instead, something of a hero here.
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Aware that nearly all the history books about Indonesia begin with the discovery of the sea routes from Europe to Asia, thereby reflecting a western slant, a young teaching assistant in Jakarta in 1964 reflects the growing desire among Indonesians for a history of “their own.” Indonesia had been a Dutch colony for three and a half centuries, and had been occupied by the Japanese for much of World War II. Though long-time leader Dewi Sukarno declared the country’s independence–and became President–after the defeat of the Japanese, the Dutch remained a dominating presence in the country’s economy, to their own benefit far more than the Indonesians’. By 1964, when this novel opens, resentment against westerners is peaking. The Dutch are being arrested without warning and forcibly “repatriated,” the Chinese and Russians are exerting significant influence, Communism has become so popular that the president and the army fear a coup, and violence has become a way of life. “The police can kill anyone nowadays,” a teacher remarks, “and we just say, ‘Hey, there’s a dead body,’ without really knowing, or caring, who it was.”
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Don’t plan to see this film and then go out for a lively night on the town. You will be so spent after the one hundred forty-one minutes of this gut-wrenching film that when the lights come on at the end, you’ll need a minute to figure out where you are, and then additional downtime to process all you’ve seen. Days later, you’ll still be thinking about this slice of life–and Edith Piaf.
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