Commissario Luigi Alfredo Ricciardi must deal with his personal ghosts and memories at the same time that he is also working to solve murders as head of the Department of Public Safety in Naples during the reign of Benito Mussolini in 1931. Ricciardi, a compulsively private man who shares nothing about his life with those he works with, lives in his family’s home in Naples with his Tata Rosa, who has taken care of him all his life. The orphan of aristocratic parents, Ricciardi has no siblings and no life outside of his office. Neapolitan author Maurizio de Giovanni, exceptionally sensitive to all his characters and their stories, so clearly identifies with his “people” that he never hits a false note as he develops the action and shows their reactions to what life has in store. Horrific murders take place, and his characters show their weaknesses and personal traumas, but this novel, like the others in the series, is more of a “people novel” than what one thinks of as “noir” or “hard case crime.” De Giovanni is clearly enjoying himself – having fun – as he writes, and while there is little obvious humor here, there are moments that are almost farcical, especially with some of the subplots involving love. Throughout, the author’s smile is easy to hear in his “voice” as he tells the stories within the stories here.
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Set in Chechnya between 1994 and 2004, and moving back and forth through history and the lives of the main characters, Anthony Marra’s brilliant debut novel focuses on the threats to the life of an eight-year-old child, the daughter of a man seized and forcibly “disappeared,” and those who are determined to protect her, even at the cost of their own lives. In 2004, Haava, around whom the action revolves, is ordered by Dokka, her father, to run with her suitcase of “souvenirs” into the woods and hide, as soon as he sees soldiers coming toward their house. The house and all its contents are then burned by soldiers, and Dokka is taken, “the duct tape strip across his mouth wrinkled with his muted screams.” Rescued from the woods by Akhmed, a neighbor and failed physician (who would rather be an artist), Haava leaves the village of Eldar that night with Akhmed, hoping to reach the hospital in Volchansk, miles away. There Akhmed hopes to persuade a doctor he knows to care for Haava. As the novel progresses, Haava, Dokka, Akhmed, Sonja, Natasha, Khassan, Ramzan, their spouses, lovers, and families come fully alive here as individuals, even as they also exemplify broader aspects of life in Chechnya during the horrors of the two wars. The action in Haava’s life in 2004 takes place during only five days, but the book achieves almost epic status in the depth of its pictures of life in Chechnya and its past history. Ultimately, author Mazza touches on the same themes that one sees in other epics of war and peace, with life reduced to its most elemental parts: “Life: a constellation of vital phenomena – organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation.”
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This unusual novel by British author Jonathan Grimwood opens with a child of six, “sitting with my back to a dung heap in the summer sun crunching happily on a stag beetle and wiping its juice from my chin and licking my lips and wondering how long it would take me to find another.” As repulsively specific as the image is, it is not included in the opening scene gratuitously or merely to gain the reader’s instant attention (which it does, anyway). It is part of this character’s obsession with tasting every possible flavor in the world, no matter where it might be found, and no matter how revolting the “food” might be to the rest of the world. At the same time, however, Jean-Marie d’Aumout’s everyday life in eighteenth century France is so fascinating for other reasons – historical, cultural, and political – that even the most squeamish reader is likely to become so caught up in his story, that the food-tasting becomes merely one more aspect of his unusual life. Beginning in 1723 and ending with the “Barbarians at the Gate” in 1790, the novel traces the life of an orphaned young noble as he navigates the political perils in France up to the Revolution, while also pursuing his senses, especially that of taste.
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Posted in 8-2013 Reviews on Nov 12th, 2013
The Longlist for the 2014 IMPAC Dublin International Literary Award has been announced today in Dublin. Here’s the list of the 152 nominees, chosen by librarians from selected libraries around the world. Most of these books were published in 2012, as there is a delay of about a year between publication and the creation of […]
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In his fourth dark crime novel to be published by Europa Editions, Irish author Gene Kerrigan continues his string of successful mysteries depicting the hopelessness among those in contemporary Dublin whose chances to escape their dreary lives vanished when the Irish economic “bubble” burst. Now, as Kerrigan depicts it, a successful life for those living on the fringes consists of making compromises with crooks of all types – developers, real estate moguls, extortionists, drug dealers, hired thugs, organized crime, and even the police. Life is uncertain, the ability of good people to avoid being swept up in crime, through economic and social pressure, is limited, and their goals in life are mainly to survive from day to day. Danny Callahan is having a particularly hard time. Convicted ten years ago of killing mob leader Big Brendan Tucker in a premeditated murder (later reduced to manslaughter as the jury’s way of saying the victim “was a scumbag anyway”), Danny has been out of prison for only seven months, staying clean and working as a driver for his friend Novak, who runs a pub, a transport firm, and a specialty bread store. Divorced by the love of his life while he was in prison, Danny is alone, making do until he can figure out a future direction for his life. Then his life changes.
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