Though the characters of these three mesmerizing novellas are all looking for “bridges,” they face personal voids instead, gaps between their perceptions of past and the present, and dislocations in time and place. All are hoping to make true connections which will allow them to resolve the conflicting aspects of their inner lives. Each of the characters has traveled to a new place from the “homeland” where she or he was born, and each now lives in a new culture into which she or he does not quite fit. As these characters deal with the disconnections in their lives, the author creates almost mystical scenes—not quite real and not quite nightmare, with fantasy and reality overlapping, both for the characters and for the reader. The miscommunications and lack of communication that occur among people living in foreign cultures add to the burdens each faces, and as one would expect of these explorations of cultural confusion, each of the novellas ends inconclusively, leaving the “bridges” still to be sought, even by the reader.
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In the wake of the popularity of Scandinavian mystery writers like Jo Nesbo, Arnaldur Indridason, Henning Mankell, Jussi Adler-Olsen, and Stieg Larsson, this mystery by wildly popular Austrian novelist Wolf Haas has just been translated into English, the first of seven novels featuring Simon Brenner to be available in the U.S. Here the novel’s smart-alecky and in-your-face first person narrator, with his appreciation of irony and his uniquely hilarious observations, keeps the reader smiling even as horrific murders are taking place. The narrator himself does not appear to take the characters in his story seriously, and the novel’s resulting style is closer to that of an “entertainment” or farce, in which the narrator becomes the main character directing the show, than it is to the dark and often cynical mysteries clearly identifiable as “noir.” Brenner, a former policeman, is now working as a chauffeur for “The Lion of Construction,” a fifty-year-old man named Kressdorf, who runs a major development company with offices in Munich. Kressdorf’s much younger wife, a physician, works in Vienna, where she operates a clinic offering abortion services. The Kressdorfs’ two-year-old daughter Helena is kidnapped when Brenner stops to fuel up on his way to Munich. There is no dearth of suspects. The novel has some problems with structure and its tone, but it is likely to be wildly popular here, as it is in Europe.
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From the explosion of the U.S. battleship Maine in Havana Harbor on February 15, 1898, to the killings of prisoners by the Cubans and Spanish in the aftermath of the Protocol of Peace on August 12, 1898, American news correspondent Sam Carleton records his day-by-day actions during the Spanish-American War. Sam Carleton is only “six weeks into his twenty-seventh year” when he arrives in Cuba, a five-foot six-inch, one hundred-twenty pound man with a bad cough, who feels that “his literary future is behind him.” The author of a book about the Civil War published in 1895, Carleton, a pseudonym for author Stephen Crane, had abandoned the idea of war as an epic, full of heroes making courageous decisions and willingly sacrificing their lives for a cause. Instead, he focused on the specific – the small, personal aspects of daily life among ordinary Union soldiers – describing how the soldiers feel, what they are thinking, and even, in some cases, their fear. Time moves back and forth, in and out of the past, and in and out of Carleton’s imagination as his story of the Spanish-American war takes place. Another story evolves in parallel with the story of Sam Carleton. Appearing and reappearing without warning throughout this novel, George Fleming, son of Henry Fleming from The Red Badge of Courage, accompanied by Esther Slone, travels to a collapsed mine in western Pennsylvania to help rescue sixty trapped miners. Filled with facts about the life of Stephen Crane, all of which are included in footnotes at the end of the book, the novel creates a powerful picture of Crane’s life.
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Cayetano Brule, an unemployed Cuban who is living in Valparaiso with his well-connected Chilean wife, escapes the tedium of a cocktail party one evening by disappearing into the library of the estate where the party is being held. Appropriating a wing chair, he begins to muse, perhaps even doze, until he hears footsteps behind him and meets Pablo Neruda who is also escaping. Neruda is dying, and he has a task for Cayetano – to locate Dr. Angel Bracamonte, whom he has not seen for thirty years. Though the doctor has been researching local plants used in native cancer treatments, Neruda wants to see him for other reasons, personal ones. Cayetano’s task takes him to Mexico, Cuba, East Germany, and Bolivia. While the search is on, author Roberto Ampuero also reveals the political situation in Chile from 1971 – 1973, with the main characters, including Neruda, being supporters of Marxist president Salvador Allende. The situation becomes tense as the two plots overlap. “Machismo” takes on new meaning as the book builds to its climax in revolution.
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Lysander Rief, the actor-son of famed Shakespearean actor Halifax Rief, is in Vienna, as the novel opens in August, 1913, seeking treatment for an embarrassing sexual problem. A close friend has suggested psychoanalysis, and Lysander has gone there for treatment. His doctor, a believer in “the fabulating function” of Bergson, not the methods of Freud, has told him that “If the everyday world, everyday reality is a fiction we create, then the same can be said of our past – the past is an aggregate of fictive realties we have already experienced – our memories.” His goal is nothing less than to make Lysander change the damaging “old fictions” into a unique blend – “a union, a fusing – of this individual imagination and reality.” What is real versus what merely seems real is obviously the primary theme here as Lysander deals with his problem, even as Europe deals with its problems and past histories in the lead-up to World War I. Additional themes of love and sex, and life and death as they overlap with the ideas of reality and fantasy enhance the main theme and bring it to life in new ways. However well drawn the themes may be (and the fiction vs. reality theme is extremely well done), the novel is memorable primarily for its good story, a trademark of author William Boyd throughout his long career. Providing plenty of well-developed background for his main characters, Boyd also leaves mysteries in their lives, developing these mysteries to add complexity to his plot as the novel progresses.
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