If there is truly a separate genre known as a “Jewish novel,” then this novel would have to be its crowning achievement. An expansive and wide-ranging novel about the many facets of being Jewish (or “Finklerish,” as Treslove sees it), The Finkler Question examines the lives of three friends: Julian Treslove, a now forty-nine-year-old Gentile, has always been fascinated by all things Jewish. A romantic who has never been able to maintain a relationship, Julian has been abandoned by all of the women he’s known in the past, including the two who bore his sons. Sam Finkler, Julian’s former classmate, writes wildly popular (and popularized) editions of philosophical ideas “for all occasions.” Libor Sevcik, almost ninety, their former teacher, who eventually became a commentator on the entertainment business, has just lost his devoted wife of over fifty years, and his former students have been trying to see him more often because he feels so lost. As the three interact and share their lives with each other (and the reader), often hilariously, the author takes the unusual approach of showing how these actions reflect both their interdependencies and their religion–or lack of it.
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Earth and Ashes, a small novella, packs more feeling and more power into its few pages than most other books do in hundreds of pages, and few, if any, readers will emerge from it unscathed. Author Atiq Rahimi, an Afghan national now living in France, has recreated the Afghanistan he remembers when it was occupied by the Russians (1979 – 1989). He was seventeen at the time, and life has not improved much for the populace since then. Only the enemies have changed, and they now include many factions from within. Without preamble or any lengthy setting of the scene, the author introduces a main character who is faced with a family crisis from which he may never recover, then tells that story in plain, direct, and straightforward language which gains impact from its very simplicity. Earth and Ashes resembles some of the very best short stories by Steinbeck, Hemingway, and Andre DuBus, all of whom compress, compress, and then compress some more the images and details with which the reader comes to a full understanding of the author’s purpose.
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Posted in 9b-2010 Reviews on Jan 23rd, 2011
Author James Church takes his series of mysteries set in North Korea in new directions with this surprising fourth novel. Church, a former intelligence officer with the U.S. government, has spent much time in Asia, and presumably North Korea, and he makes a foray here into speculative fiction–not speculating on life in North Korea in the far distant future, but in the very immediate future. When this novel opens, it is 2016, and Inspector O, the iconoclastic officer who has been the fascinating main character of the three previous novels, has been happily retired from action and living in blessed isolation on a mountain top. Suddenly, he is visited by officers he cannot refuse to accompany and is brought back to Pyongyang. He is needed for a special assignment–to work with, and take orders from, Major Kim from South Korea, who is working in North Korea to bring about some kind of co-operation between the countries.
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Massimo Carlotto, who has achieved as much fame for his noir mysteries involving the Mafia in Italy as he has for his seven year incarceration for a murder he did not commit, puts his knowledge of law enforcement, lawyers (one of whom betrayed him personally), the criminal justice system, and the Mafia to use in this up-close-and-personal look at the growing power of international Mafias. Set primarily in Padua, on the Po River, just west of Venice, making it a good landing spot for illegal drugs brought in from the Adriatic, the novel introduces Marco, “the Alligator” Buratti, the owner of a small bar called La Cuccia, in which he shares ownership with Max La Memoria, “The Memory.” Together they also do investigations. Beniamino Rossini, a smuggler and armed robber, who was in prison with both of them, is also available to help out. When Sylvie, Beniamino’s belly dancer-lover vanishes without a trace, the three men set to work turning the underworld upside down, finding evidence to suggest that the kidnapping was related to a huge drug robbery from two years ago.
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Newly translated into English, The Blindness of the Heart, a debut novel by Julia Franck, spans the period between the two world wars in which Germany took part, focusing on the effects of these wars on seemingly ordinary German citizens who were somehow detached from full knowledge of the causes for which they were required to fight. In the dramatic Prologue, which takes place in 1945, a young boy and his mother arrive at a train station from which there is a chance that they might escape the post-war horrors. For the boy, however, the horrors are just beginning. His mother abandons him at the station, without any warning, leaving behind his suitcase and instructions to whoever discovers him on where he should be delivered.
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