Halloween and spooky novels in general come roaring to life in this Dickensian melodrama, set outside of Norfolk, England, in 1867. Eliza Caine, who has suffered a series of personal disasters which have left her an orphan, has made a sudden decision to leave the family “home” in London, in which she has spent her life, to accept the position of governess for a family she does not know in a city she has never seen. She is anxious for change, however. Just one week past, her father had ignored her pleas that he remain at home to nurse his cold and had, instead, attended a reading by Charles Dickens on a miserable, rainy night. He succumbed to fever shortly afterward. Almost immediately after her father’s death, Eliza is informed that the family home is not, in fact, owned by the family, and that she will have to vacate the house. Seeing an advertisement in the newspaper for a governess, signed by “H. Bennet,” she has chosen to leave her current teaching job at a girls’ school and move elsewhere. From the beginning of the novel, Irish author John Boyne draws parallels between Dickens’ work and his own, with some direct references to characters from Dickens’s novels. All the clichés of Victorian plot appear here, and the dramatic and inexplicable actions by ghosts create an atmosphere of doom which will keep a smile on the face of readers familiar with the novels of the period.
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In this magnificent novel of family relationships, which is also a love story and a story of betrayal on several levels, author Jhumpa Lahiri introduces four generations of one family whose history begins in their home in Tollygunge, outside of Calcutta, and then moves off in many different directions. Traveling back and forth in time, with points of view shifting among several different but interrelated characters, the novel creates an impressionistic picture of events which begin in 1967 with a political uprising, the family effects of which continue into the present. Two brothers, only fifteen months apart in age, become linchpins of the novel. Subhash, the older, more cautious brother, is far more apt to watch any action, even as a child, than his brother Udayan, the more adventuresome brother, who is always participating in the action and testing limits. As the novel expands over four generations, it revolves around the idea that “you can’t go home again,” physically or emotionally, at the same time that it also considers the ideas that we are who we are. Accepting the latter, however, is not good enough, unless we are also prepared to accept the consequences to others of our decisions to “be ourselves.” In this novel the interactions, responsibilities, and consequences are particularly fraught as the novel moves through nearly fifty years of personal and social change within one family through several generations.
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“Everything is falling apart…The parents are demanding to pick up their children. The barricade is crowded with people who intend to help them free the children… They don’t understand what they are risking if the infection gets out and there isn’t any medicine.” This dramatic quotation instantly establishes the intensity of STRANGE BIRD, a novel from Sweden by Anna Jansson, candidate for the Glass Key Award for Best Scandinavian Novel in 2012. Its story concerns a pandemic of bird flu on an island off the Swedish coast. A new name to American readers, Anna Jansson has had a dual career as both a nurse and a writer, and has already sold over two million copies of her Nordic crime novels throughout ten countries in Europe. Now available to an English-speaking audience, Strange Bird will undoubtedly captivate new readers, sweeping them up with the provocative opening chapters, as the action begins on Gotland, a sparsely inhabited island in the Baltic, sixty miles off the coast of Sweden.
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Though he has been celebrated by Roberto Bolano and many other Latin American authors, Guatemalan author Rodrigo Rey Rosa, has been a well-kept secret to most English-speaking readers. Of his almost two dozen works published to acclaim in Latin America, only four have been published in English, and three of those are translations into English by famed American expatriate author Paul Bowles, who was Rey Rosa’s literary mentor. Living in Morocco while he translated several of Paul Bowles’s novels into Spanish, Rey Rosa came to know the country well, finding life on the African shore of the Mediterranean markedly different from that of the European shore represented by France and Spain, both of which had claimed Morocco as a protectorate until after the mid-1950s. Rey Rosa reflects upon these changes as he presents three interrelated scenarios, in which three separate characters express their own points of view and live independent lives which sometimes overlap with other lives within the book. Rey Rosa composes these separate scenarios so carefully that each could stand alone as a short story or novella, and they are often so poetic and filled with lyrical details that critics have described them as “prose poems.” Elegantly written, The African Shore conveys much information about cultures, past and present, along with the people who straddle the worlds of Europe and Africa. The animism of the rural farmers, which infuses their lives with magical explanations; the Muslim culture, which provides comfort and identity to large numbers of people from all levels of society; and the criminality which seems to be filling a vacuum in the wake of the country’s independence from Spain and France, all play a role in the imagery and symbolism which connects the many facets of this marvelous work.
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Belgian author Georges Simenon (1903 – 1989), a prolific author, published two hundred novels and over one hundred fifty novellas during his long career, most of them involving mysteries of some sort. Though he is the author of the Inspector Maigret series, hugely successful in the film versions and TV series in addition to the novels, he was particularly proud of his much more serious novels, his “roman durs,” psychological novels in which he reveals his interest in how ordinary people deal with the many shocks and betrayals of their personal lives. Act of Passion, published in 1947, is one of these romans durs, a novel about which critic Roger Ebert has asked, “Why is there no sense at the end [of the novel] that justice has been done, or any faith that it can be done?…There are questions for which there are no answers. Act of Passion is essentially a question posing as an answer.” Ebert is not being coy. The main character here, a physician named Charles Alavoine, admits from the outset that he is guilty of premeditated murder, but he has had a good relationship with this magistrate, who investigated his story and interviewed the crime’s witnesses over the course of six weeks, and he feels that this magistrate, who is assigned only to investigate the case and not to try it, will understand him if he can only know about his life. If he can understand him, then Alavoine believes he will understand why he committed murder. A NYReviewClassic from 1947.
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