In his best and most complex novel yet, Afrikaans-writer Deon Meyer recreates a mere thirteen hours of life in Cape Town, South Africa, hour by terrifying hour, and those thirteen hours reveal more about the city’s many criminal cultures than you may want to know. The police are only partially effective. Following scandals which plagued the police department and resulted in corruption convictions for some key officers, the National Commissioner has established a new police force, the South African Police Service (SAPS), retaining their best and most experienced officers within new departments, the duties of which are not always clear. Meyer involves his reader in the action from the opening pages, in which a young girl, still in her teens, is tearing through the city, begging for help from people she sees, as she tries to escape five or six young men who are pursuing her. At the same time, the body of a music executive, shot in the head with his own gun, is found at home near his wife, an alcoholic who knows of his flagrant affairs and who has been lying passed out for hours. As always, Deon Meyer has turned an exciting mystery into a heart-pounding thriller with an over-the-top conclusion, but he also has a great deal to say about his country.
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Probably every lover of literary fiction has had a fantasy about creating or finding the ideal bookstore—one which is dedicated to exactly the kinds of novels we like to read, where we can enter and spend an afternoon browsing, reading whatever strikes our eye, all the while knowing that every book there has the potential to become one of our favorites. The main characters in this novel by Laurence Cosse have created just such a bookstore. Ivan (Van) Georg, who manages a shop called The Good Book, and Francesca Aldo-Valbelli, the heiress who is supporting it financially, have committed themselves to a shop which is not “an ordinary bookstore…[and] our customers [are not] ordinary customers.” A committee of eight writers representing different styles of novels is chosen in secret to make the selections of books for the shop, each member having a pen name so that no one, not even other committee members, knows their identities. Only the best novels will be included. The shop is mobbed from the outset, with seven hundred eleven novels being sold on the first day alone. By Christmas time, the shop is a huge success. But success has come at a price. Three members of the selection committee have been attacked and nearly killed. A combination of mystery, fantasy, philosophical analysis, and economic treatise on the book industry, A NOVEL BOOKSTORE raises many interesting questions within a unique story.
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If you have ever wondered what it would really be like to be a woman living in Saudi Arabia, then this novel may answer most of your questions. Confined to a black burqa which covers every inch of skin except for her eyes whenever she leaves her house, even when it is over a hundred twenty degrees outside, an unmarried woman must never be alone with a man. She must always be accompanied by a male member of her family, even, as occurs in one scene here, if the member of the family is only seven years old. Leila Nawar, whose grotesquely tortured body is found washed up along the Corniche in Jeddah as the novel opens, works as a videographer for a television station, but she is also secretly working on her own project about women and their sometimes miserable lives in Jeddah. Because she has made many enemies among those who do not wish to appear in her compromising videos, she keeps most of her film at home, storing it on her computer or on discs. When her body is identified, a rare event for women victims who have no fingerprints available, the police are anxious to study her recent films for clues to her death. Soon an American vanishes, and the US consulate is unable to locate him. City of Veils is compelling, intricate, exciting, and sometimes violent–and readers of this novel will never again wonder why these women do not rebel.
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Posted in 0: 2010 Reviews, England, Humor, Satire, Absurdity, Literary, 2007-09, Mystery, Thriller, Noir on Jul 29th, 2010
Annie Fairhurst, the narrator of this clever, black-humored character study, hooks the reader from the opening scene, which opens with Annie sending a van containing all her possessions to a new address, after which she strips off all her clothes and viciously attacks the “bloody sofa” which she has left behind. It is the sofa on which her husband proposed to her more than a decade ago, when she was seventeen and he, thirty-two. When she arrives at her new house, she envisions herself as Jackie Kennedy, “getting out of an aeroplane.” Author Jenn Ashworth takes the concept of irony to new heights in this psychological novel which rivals Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy in its intensity, and it is in her irony that this novel achieves something that McCabe’s novel does not—it is pathetically funny at the same time that it is terrifyingly slow in its revelations of Annie’s past life.
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The second film from the Millenium Trilogy of novels by Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Played with Fire, like its predecessor, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, hews closely to the plot line of the novel which spawned it. Without preamble, the life story of Lisbeth Salander continues where it left off, as she tries to navigate a world which damaged her to the point that she has difficulty relating to all humans. This film features the same cast in the lead roles as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but a change in the director and cinematographers has resulted in a film which lacks the icy sparkle and brittle atmosphere of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Still, those who thought the book was fun will probably also enjoy the film, despite its excessive violence and explicit sex.
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When Stieg Larsson died at the young age of fifty, he died without a will, creating a monstrous situation for his life companion, Eva Gabrielsson, with whom he lived for over thirty years and who worked with him on the first three novels in the Millenium Trilogy. Because Larsson died without a will, however, his whole estate went to his brother and his father. He lived with his grandparents when he was a child, he was never close to his father, and he had little or no contact with his brother. Long-time rumors of a partially completed fourth novel (thought to be on a laptop in Gabrielsson’s possession) are addressed in an article by Malin Rising for the Associated Press, widely distributed and available on a link provided here. One of Larssen’s long-time friends indicates that the 4th novel was supposed to take place on remote Banks Island in the Canadian Northwest Territories.
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Posted in 0: 2010 Reviews, Book Club Suggestions, Experimental, Humor, Satire, Absurdity, Ireland and Northern Ireland, Literary, 2010 reviews, Mystery, Thriller, Noir, US Regional on Jun 30th, 2010
Once you enter the world of Trevor Comerford, you will not emerge unscathed. Formerly employed in Dublin at the Central Remedial Clinic, Trevor was empathetic and anxious to help his students in his English classes there, creating firm bonds of friendship with them by making them laugh at his vulgarity, by refusing to recognize their significant physical challenges as limitations, and by taking them on day-trips which became shoplifting expeditions to the local shops. His departure from Dublin for a new life in New York City was made in full knowledge of the challenges he would have dealing with the chaos of that city’s street life, which, in many ways parallels the chaos in his own life. When he arrives in New York, he takes a job caring for a teenager who is near death from muscular dystrophy. In a profane and casual stream-of-consciousness style, Trevor reveals all his thoughts as they occur. By correlating these scattered thoughts, the reader soon becomes aware that Trevor is an exceptionally unreliable narrator, a young man with serious problems finding his place in the world. As he and Ed, his charge, negotiate their lives, the novel becomes a psychological study of two people learning how to channel anger into kindness.
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The fraught events in the Balkans leading to the occupation of Greece by the Nazis in April, 1941, form the structure of this complex novel, which begins in Greece and ranges through Albania, France, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Turkey, as small, vulnerable Eastern European countries try to stave off both the Nazis and the Italians. Alan Furst, famous for his carefully researched espionage thrillers focusing on events from 1940 and 1941, recreates the confusions and the complications of the Balkan countries in early 1941, as they try to maintain some semblance of sovereignty against the massive war machine of Nazi Germany. With their different political systems, languages, and cultural sensibilities, their best chance for individual survival lies not within their own, often impotent, governments but within a loosely connected group of individuals from many European countries who may have access to information. Exhibiting little sense of trust of each other, some are associated with police and intelligence agencies, while others are committed private citizens who want to help the Jews escape the onslaught of the Reich. All want to stop Hitler, but all also have separate, private goals.
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