Consisting of nine short stories, all of which are about love, This is How You Lose Her describes whole worlds within the title itself. Four of the stories are named for the speaker’s lovers, and all of them reflect the speaker’s inability to experience love on a plane higher than that of the physical, which drives every aspect of the speaker’s life. With a title that sounds a bit like an instructional manual by a now-frustrated macho man who is telling other similarly frustrated men how they can manipulate relationships in order to get and keep what they have – or at least not lose it – this collection of stories reveals the behaviors of several male speakers who have no clue about how to experience lasting love. Nor, it seems, do most of them even seem to want one single lasting love when two or more loves can provide at least twice as many thrills, twice as often. With Yunior, who appeared in both Diaz’s first story collection, Drown, and in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, as a main character in several of these stories, the narratives move back and forth in time, and for anyone who has read the biography of the author in Wikipedia or elsewhere, they become almost spooky in their closeness to the biography of the author himself.
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The cover description of this novel as “An Inspector Erlendur Novel” is misleading, especially for long-time followers of the dark and damaged inspector from Reykjavic and his grim and often grisly investigations. Erlendur, in fact, does not appear at all, either in person or by telephone. At the end of Hypothermia, the previous novel in the Erlendur series, he has left to go hiking in the sparsely populated East Fjords, taking a break from his personal problems and the frequently horrific problems involving his children, his former wife, and their relationships with him. No one has heard from him in almost two weeks. Elinborg, filling in at the office, is quite different from Erlendur. Living with the supportive Teddi and their two children, Elinborg is a cookbook author in her free time, specializing in desserts, and working on her second cookbook, and she tries to keep the lines of communication open with her children, though her older son, in his late teens, is something of a mystery to her, at this point. Were it not for the nature of the crimes themselves – in this case, the rapes and disappearances of women, the use of rohypnol (the “date rape” drug) to paralyze victims, and a gruesome murder which opens the book – Outrage would come as close to a “cozy” as the darkly noir author Arnaldur Indridason is probably capable of writing. The twisted and often macabre aspects of life seen in the book (and film) of Indridason’s Jar City, for example, have been softened here, reflecting the more feminine, intuitive approach of Elinborg and her efforts to communicate wherever possible with both victims and perpetrators, as she works to solve crimes.
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Setting his latest novel in Vienna in 1948, nine years after the setting for his previous novel, The Quiet Twin, author Dan Vyleta continues the story of the city and some of its characters in the aftermath of the Holocaust’s atrocities, though this novel stands alone and is not really a sequel. Here Vyleta uses characters some readers already know in order to show how they have changed in the nine years that have elapsed since The Quiet Twin, while, at the same time, introducing these characters in new contexts and illustrating their changed lives, which makes them fresh and intriguing to new readers of Vyleta’s work. The Crooked Maid, set in 1948, shows how they have been changed by war’s horrors, by imprisonment (in some cases), by living as refugees in other countries, and by the cumulative trauma of a city which has been in the grips of unimaginable evil and now finds itself uncertain of its values and its future. As the dramatic action begins to unfold, the novel may appear, at first, to be a simple murder mystery within an historical setting, similar, perhaps to those written by many popular, best-selling authors, but Dan Vyleta transcends genre, his writing more similar to that of Dostoevsky than to pop fiction. The many mysteries and even murders that take place during this mesmerizing and fully-developed novel grow out of the moral vacuum in Vienna after the war, the macabre details of these crimes so deeply rooted in the city’s psyche that they feel almost “normal” in the context of the times. Outstanding!
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Thomas Keneally, an Australian National Treasure, winner of the Booker Prize for Schindler’s Ark in 1982, and the author of thirty-one novels and seventeen non-fiction books, has never limited himself to subject matter from Australia, however rich and compelling that might be. Only about a dozen of his novels are actually set in Australia. His other novels, many of them prize winners, have been set in places ranging from Antarctica to Yugoslavia, Eritrea, and the Middle East, so it should be no surprise that Keneally became fascinated enough by the issues involved in the American Civil War that he wrote Confederates in 1979, a dense, epic novel of American history written on a scale reminiscent of Tolstoy’s War and Peace and filled with similar themes, though it is only half as long. Unlike War and Peace, Confederates also spurns romanticism, employing instead the innate dignity of ordinary men and women and the mundane details of real life to convey the horrors of warfare with a realism almost unmatched in Civil War literature. With no comic relief, no hints at happy endings, and no escape from the inevitability of this nightmare, the cumulative effect of Keneally’s novel is staggering. The Confederate army we meet here consists of ragged and hungry teachers, musicians, small farmers, orphaned children, men in their 60’s, conscripts, and even the sorely ill and walking wounded, all people the reader comes to know well through the stories they share and the simple dreams they reveal as they trudge resignedly and painfully across Virginia toward their destiny – the Battle of Harper’s Ferry/Antietam.
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Jim Crace’s powerful and dramatic new novel, set in an unnamed rural farm community in England in an unstated year, wastes no time in shifting the atmosphere from the “jollity” and feeling of community resulting from the hard work of the harvest to the kind of mindless hysteria, based on fear, which American readers will instantly recognize as similar to that which existed during the Salem witch trials (as is seen in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible). Working for Master Kent, whose wife inherited a large portion of land from her family, the farmers who work the Master’s land are all too aware that theirs is a tenuous life, one in which they have a small cottage in which to live and a small portion of the harvest for their own use in exchange for back-breaking work under uncertain weather conditions, with most of the harvest going to Master Kent. On the last day of the harvest, two plumes of smoke are seen—one from a hearth fire outside a hut newly built by three strangers. An ancient ruling allows the right of settlement and a portion of the harvest for any “vagrants who might succeed in putting up four vulgar walls and sending up some smoke before we catch them doing it.” Three people, two men and a woman who resembles a sorceress have staked out a claim on the Master’s land and, with it, a right to a portion of the meager harvest the community of workers has just worked so hard to bring in. The second plume of smoke proves to be the roof of the Master’s haylofts, where his doves live. As the situation continues to deteriorate, Jim Crace quickly advances the novel from its initial feeling of foreboding to a feeling of terrible inevitability, adding details and events which horrify the reader for what they portend. Guilt vs. innocence, the use of raw power to control outcomes, the callous manipulation of resources (such as land) at the expense of human beings who are dependent upon it for their very survival, the question of one’s responsibility to a community as opposed to one’s responsibility to uphold the truth, the question of vengeance, and ultimately, the question of how it is possible to define “right” in a community which has no religion and no legal system are all important themes in the development of the novel.
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