In this newly reprinted novel from 1938, considered the “first jazz novel” ever written, author Dorothy Baker takes the reader into the mind and heart of a young white boy whose desire to excel as a creative jazz musician is so overwhelming that he lets nothing get in his way – not the fact that he is only a child when he begins to pursue his interest, not the fact that he is an orphan living virtually alone with a young aunt and uncle who are home only once or twice a week, not the fact that he is supposed to be in school, and not the fact that he has no instrument at all that he can play. Born in Georgia, Paul Martin has recently moved to a poor section of Los Angeles where his guardians have found work. Though he is not a good student in his school’s assigned subjects (and cannot remember how much seven times seven is), he has learned to read music and “could memorize like a flash anything that had any swing to it, anything that he could take hold of rhythmically.” Becoming a truant in order to practice piano in a mission church, Rick eventually switches to the trumpet and eventually finds success in jazz clubs in California and New York. The obsession of creative jazz musicians for perfect moments is clearly depicted here, and the author’s ability to bring the reader into the mind of the creative artist is stunning. The obsession of Rick Martin for more and more and more, and his inability to take a rest, as he begins relying on alcohol to keep going, shows the powerful drive of some creative talents such as that of Rick (and for the model for this character, Bix Beiderbecke)
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Reading something fun by Daniel Silva always seems to be connected with my summer reading, and this novel is no exception – though not as interesting or challenging as his previous novel, The Fallen Angel, which dealt with on-going Arab-Israeli conflicts, a planned terrorist attack on an Israeli site in Europe, and the possibility that there is a very early Jewish temple built underneath the al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount. The English Girl, by contrast, feels much more “domestic,” concerning itself for much of the book with the kidnapping of a young woman who has been the lover of the Prime Minister of England, a circumstance which the prime minister’s political friends want resolved privately and as quietly as possible. Gabriel Allon, an Israeli art restorer who also works for the Israeli secret intelligence agency, has connections to intelligence services throughout the world as a result of his international work, and when he is contacted by the deputy director of MI5 in England, he agrees to try to find and free Madeline Hart, the woman being held hostage in some unknown place. The novel divides into two parts In the second part, and the novel becomes more complex and more relevant to present day international relations. When, during his investigations, Allon finds evidence that the Russians are interested in drilling for oil in the North Sea, he calls on Viktor Orlov, once one of the richest oligarchs of the Russian oil industry, for more information. The maneuvering for the European oil market becomes the main plot in the second half of the novel.
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In this deliciously wicked new novel, her best one yet, Argentine author Claudia Pineiro, focuses once again on the evil that lurks within the hearts of men, even those who seem innocent or numbed by their own circumstances. Honesty does not seem to enter the equation here, as Pineiro also mines this theme in her two previous novels, recently translated for an American audience – All Yours and Thursday Night Widows. As dark as the theme seems to be, the author works it with a light hand, employing surprisingly little violence (which often takes place “offstage”) and creating characters who often bumble their way through the complex mazes of their lives and into situations over which they believe they have little or no control. What follows is a story which resembles something by Chekhov or Guy de Maupassant, as a murder occurs and irony piles on top of irony. Architect Pablo Simi’s predictable life becomes more and more unsettled and eventually goes off the rails. The action is fast and furious, Pablo is suitably dense as a protagonist, and few readers will predict the grand outcomes of this clever and often amusing novel. The biggest crack in the novel ultimately comes in the “wall” of Pablo’s own stultifying and boring life.
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Charlie McCarthy, who is twenty-five as the book begins, is writing about events which occurred five years ago in Ballyronan, outside of Cork, events so traumatic for him that he is still suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. And that’s on top of his problems as a “Gamal,” short for Gamallogue, an Irish word for someone who is “different” – not someone who is developmentally handicapped in the usual sense but someone, like Charlie, who seems to do everything wrong – unintentionally wearing his shirt back to front, forgetting to wear his socks, spilling his Lucozade on his shirt in the pub, and saying the wrong things at funerals. For two years “after the things that happened,” he says, he was unable to do anything at all. “I just was.” The reader knows from the opening paragraph that Charlie’s trauma involved two lovers, his friends Sinead and James, and his early descriptions of Sinead in the past tense lets us know from the outset that she has died. Writing on the advice of his psychiatrist, Charlie delays and delays, but eventually begins to talk about the events which resulted in his trauma.
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As the novel opens, an unnamed forty-year-old man meets a pretty girl at a hotel bar at four o’clock one afternoon in the 1950s, and lonely and cynical, and looking to connect with her, he promises to tell her a story. He confesses, however, that “I don’t know anymore, what things signify; I have difficulty now identifying them; a sort of woodenness has come over me,” a “woodenness” which leads him to use her as a passive sounding board while he relives his previous relationship with another woman whom he believes he loved. What follows are the random maunderings of an insensitive man who has no idea who he is or what he is doing, and since he is the only speaker in the novel, the primary listener to his story becomes, in effect, the reader, rather than the pretty listener at the bar. Alfred Hayes’s brilliance as a writer and careful observer of human nature is challenged to its limits with this novel with only one speaker. Despite the flawed and uninteresting main character, however, Hayes succeeds in making the speaker’s situation intriguing enough that the reader wants to know whether he gets his well-deserved comeuppance, whether he learns anything, or whether he simply moves on to another lover. Outstanding novel.
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