“I don’t discriminate, I sleep with whoever I want, because it’s the New South Africa, but you don’t want to know about that.  You want to ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ us all.  You want us to be a separate tribe, us coloureds; you’re the kind who goes around complaining how hard it is to be a coloured…If you don’t integrate, you won’t.  That’s the trouble with this country, everyone wants to complain, nobody wants to do anything, nobody wants to forget the past.”—“Coloured” woman to white policeman.

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. As one of the force’s best detectives says, “I’ve been working with the Provincial Task Force for four months now, and I still don’t have a portfolio.  No people, no job description…I’m getting too old for all the Commissioner’s monkey business, the racial quotas that change every year; everything is politicized.  And if Zuma becomes President, the Xhosas will be out and the Zulus will be in and everything will change again—a new hierarchy, new agenda, new troubles.”

Racial differences, tribal differences, and changing historical roles add to the complexities here as good people try to prevent crimes in a fraught environment in which the Metro Police, considered by SAPS to be “traffic cops,” are also flexing muscles over control.  Further complicating the issues, many experienced former police are now working for private security firms, hired out to do some of the same jobs as the police.

Captain Benny Griessel, a long-time police officer, now working for SAPS, has been assigned to mentor several new officers, all in their thirties—four blacks, one black woman, and one “coloured.”  Integration of the police is a top priority, and it is Benny’s job to see that they all get the maximum possible experience dealing with a multitude of issues from murder to drug trafficking, graft, extortion, and embezzlement.

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.  And she’s the lucky one.  Her companion, who was also trying to escape, was not so fast.  She lies dead, her throat slit and her backpack stolen.  Benny and his staff are assigned to this case, and soon have their worst fears realized.  The young victim was an American tourist, with all the governmental complications that entails on all levels.  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. She appears to have shot him.  These separate stories interrupt each other throughout the novel as more information is revealed about each crime in the course of the day, and as the police officers being mentored participate in the investigations, often taking the initiative and pursuing leads on their own, sometimes clumsily.  The author keeps the suspense at fever pitch, as Rachel Anderson, the girl trying to escape, manages to evade discovery for many hours as she races through the areas around Table Mountain, and as Benny Griessel tries to keep all the leads for two separate cases, and all the investigating officers, going in the right direction.

The main characters’ own backgrounds and family lives unfold and add depth to the novel, showing how they live, for better or worse, in the newly integrated society.  Because the crimes here are endemic to other countries, the focus is on how the police solve them, the research they do, the assumptions they make, the directions they take, and the risks they are willing to take for justice.  As the novel develops further, the ins and outs of the not-always-honest music business, the roles of Russian owners and managers of clubs and bars, the weaknesses of police officers who may be offered enormous bribes, illegal immigration from other African countries whose governments are in total disarray, the problems of a drug culture, and the corruption which seems to be an unfortunate natural result of power all appear as themes and plot lines.  As one old white man says, “The Afrikaners’…power corrupted them.  The signs are there that the black government is going the same way.  I am afraid they will make the same mistakes.  It would be such a pity.  We are a country of potential, of wonderful, good people who all want only one thing: a future for our children.  Here. Not in Canada.”

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. Despite the darkness which is evident in its plot, Meyer honors people of all races–Benny Griessel (white), bright new detective Vusumuzi Ndabeni (black), no-nonsense female investigator Mbali Kaleni (black), and pathologist, Tiffany October (“coloured”).  These are the future of the country and its hope, and Deon Meyer, an Afrikaaner, celebrates them.

Notes: The author’s photo is from http://petrona.typepad.com His web page is here:  www.deonmeyer.com

Table Mountain dominates the western coast of Cape Town.  This photo is by Jon Hicks/Corbis for www.guardian.co.uk.  “The Twelve Apostles” mountain range, the site of a hospital in this novel, is shown here, facing the Atlantic, south of Table Mountain:  www.capetown.travel/

ALSO by Deon Meyer:  BLOOD SAFARI and    DEAD AT DAYBREAK

“I’m a poet now, searching for the extraordinary, trying to express it in ordinary, everyday words.”

When a sad and desperate man makes this statement in “Jim,” the first story in this small but unforgettable collection of five stories and two essays by Chilean author Roberto Bolano, the reader cannot help but feel that Jim is in many ways the author’s alterego.  Bolano, like Jim, also began his writing life as a poet, something that is obvious in his recognition of the tiny, seemingly insignificant moment or detail which becomes extraordinary within its context. Such “extraordinary” moments or details are worthy of notice, and even wonder, but as the author shows, they are not necessarily “wonderful” in the happy definition of the word.  Extraordinary moments are temporal, and, though meaningful, they can also be shocking or sad.  These moments are always succeeded by other extraordinary moments, sometimes seemingly at random–and emotionally satisfying moments may be followed by those of devastating shock.  For Bolano’s characters, life can be “futile, senseless, ridiculous.”  As one speaker comments, “It’s already too late…for everything.  Weren’t we damned, right from the origin of our species?”

Throughout these stories, the reader becomes hypnotized by the succession of Bolano’s images, by the lives he depicts (including his own in the two essays), and by the metaphysical suggestions and possible symbols of his stories, despite the fact that Bolano does not make grand pronouncements or create a formal, organized, and ultimately hopeful view of life as other authors do.  There is no coherence to our lives, he seems to say: chaos rules.  Although artists of all kinds try to make some sense of life, Bolano suggests that their visions may not be accurate since they have no way of knowing or conveying the whole story, the big picture, the inner secrets of life.  He himself avoids such suggestions of order in life.  Vibrant and imaginative, Bolano’s stories seduce the reader into coming back to them again and again looking for answers or explanations that often remain tantalizingly out of reach.

“Jim,” which takes place in Mexico, one of the many places the peripatetic Bolano lived, tells of a suffering North American who considers himself a poet, someone the speaker once saw staring rapt, bewitched by a fire-eater, who was performing just for him.  “Mexico’s spell had bound him and now he was looking his demons right in the face.”  The symbolism is clear, but the story’s conclusion is less so, leaving much up to the reader.  In “The Insufferable Gaucho,” set in Argentina, where Bolano also lived, an irreproachable lawyer in Buenos Aires is affected by the passage of time and the distancing of his children as they grow up and leave home.  Believing that Buenos Aires is “sinking” under its crime, violence, and failed economy, he returns to his dilapidated family ranch on the pampas and tries to restore it and himself.  The pampas has also changed, however.  “The shame of the nation or the continent has turned [the gauchos] into tame cats.  That’s why the cattle have been replaced by rabbits.”  Unable to feel at home in the pampas or in the city, the disillusioned Pereda must choose where to spend the rest of his life.

“Police Rat,” the grimmest of the stories, features Pepe the Cop, a rat who describes life in the sewers, even taking time to comment on the non-role of the arts in the lives of rats.  The political symbolism and commentary are clear here as Pepe works to capture a murderer, deal with a predatory white snake, and cope with a terrible discovery.  “Alvaro Rousselot’s Journey,” set in Argentina, tells of a writer who discovers that his first two books have been plagiarized and turned into films in France.  He must decide what this says about Argentine literature and what he should do about his own life as a writer.  In “Two Catholic Tales,” Bolano creates parallel stories, telling of a seventeen-year-old boy who is trying to see if he has a vocation for the priesthood, and of a long-time patient at an insane asylum, who    describes his terrible experience with priests.  The two tales taken together reveal much about Bolano’s view of the extraordinary, what we can never know about extraordinary moments, and whether or not they are random.

Two essays at the end are particularly poignant and important for students of Bolano and lovers of literature.   “Literature + Illness = Illness,” dedicated to “my friend the hepatologist, Dr. Victor Vargas,” explores the relationship between writing and the illness which will  claim Bolano’s life at age fifty, soon after writing this.  From the beginning, when the author asks his reader to imagine what it would be like to attend a public event and be told that the speaker is ill and cannot appear, the author’s attitudes toward his inevitably fatal disease loom large.  At times, he says, writing about his illness is liberating since it offers excuses and inspires compassion, even when the doctor’s news has been “unequivocally, spectacularly bad.”  He goes on to discuss “Illness and Dionysus,” in which he says, “When people are about to die, all they want to do is f*ck,”  “Illness and Travel,”  “Illness and Dead Ends,”  Illness and the Documentary,”  “Illness and Poetry,”  “Illness and Tests,” and ultimately, “Illness and Kafka,”  always returning to the idea of the writer and how he regards his work.

In “the Myths of Cthulhu,” an ironic companion essay, he comments on Spain’s Arturo Perez-Reverte as the “perfect novelist,” since his work is famous for its “readability.”  People enjoy his mysteries because they can be understood.  Volunteering that “Latin America was Europe’s mental asylum, just as North America was its factory,” he eventually concludes that “Writers today…are no longer young men of means unafraid to inveigh against the norms of respectable society, much less a bunch of misfits, but [instead] products of the middle and working classes determined to scale the Everest of respectability, hungry for respectability…We think our brain is a marble mausoleum, when in fact it’s a house made of cardboard boxes, a shack stranded between an empty field and an endless dusk…All that carrying on about Proust, all those hours spent examining pages of Joyce suspended on a wire, and the answer was there all along, in the bestseller…Everything suggests there is no way out of this.”

Notes: The photo of Roberto Bolano by Julian Martin, and an article about the “last” interview of Bolano appear on www.guardian.co.uk. A review of the book, Roberto Bolano: The Last Interview by Monica Maristain, which was published in March, 2010, appears here:  www.guardian.co.uk

A fire-eater with a lone observer, the central image of the story “Jim,”  was found here.

The “rabbits” described in the story of “The Insufferable Gaucho” are powerful enough to chase trains, and it is possible that Bolano was thinking about the “mara hare,” depicted here, when he created this image.   Native to the pampas, the hare is the size of a small deer, moves at an extremely high speed, and is capable of making very high jumps.  This photo is from a collection of extraordinary nature photos by Ricardo A. Palonsky (RAP)  on www.treknature.com

The pampas is shown here:  www.destination360.com

“Today, in 1865, in the twenty-eighth year of Her Majesty Queen Victoria’s reign, human understanding of nature and society was surely nearing completion.  Economic science showed the inexorable law by which wealth was generated by the poor and flowed to the rich.  Social science revealed the inevitability that a sizeable segment of the poor would sink towards crime and depravity.  Statistical science showed the precise extent to which this would happen.”

Lovers of Victorian Gothic mysteries will have loads of fun with this one, quite different in tone from the norm, while lovers of literary fiction will admire the author’s ability to describe and bring the period to life, as he simultaneously conveys important sociological and religious issues.  Written by Alastair Sim, great-nephew of the famed actor of the same name, while he was still a student at the University of Glasgow, the novel takes the Victorian police procedural in new directions.  Inspector Archibald Allerdyce, an emotionally damaged man who no longer believes in God, and Sergeant Hector McGillivray, even more damaged from his army experiences during the colonial rebellion in India and the Crimean War, have been ordered by the highest levels of government to solve the disappearance of William Bothwell-Scott, the Duke of Dornoch, wealthiest man in Scotland.

The Duke has amassed a ten thousand-acre estate by having his thugs clear the land of long-time poor residents, also demolishing a small village near the coast which interfered with his view.  Just as cavalierly, the Duke has drastically cut the wages of the workers in his five mines.  When he is discovered shot dead and pitched into a well, formerly a mine, on his estate, the number of potential suspects is so long that the government decides, for political reasons, to announce his death as accidental.  His brother Frederick becomes the eighth Duke or Dornoch, not an improvement, as Frederick, a drunk and a bully, has no conscience at all.  “I’m sorry for William,” he says at William’s funeral, “but it’s an upturn in my own fortunes.”

Allerdyce’s investigation of William’s death takes him into the lower depths of the city, described in terms that “out-Dickens” Dickens—houses of prostitution; bars where the Duke, known to them as Willie Burns, can indulge his desires for young men; gambling dens and dog pits where ratters vie to kill fifty brown rats in five minutes—places so dangerous that Allerdyce needs two men to watch his back.  Despite the information that Allerdyce and McGillivray discover, the police powers-that-be, tied to the government, insist that the murderer must be the head of the Scottish mines or the foreman who cleared the Duke’s lands.  True justice is unimportant—just the appearance of justice, the quicker the better.  Eventually, in true gothic tradition, several other murders occur, innocent people are jailed and quickly subjected to summary trials, an illegitimate child threatens the succession to the estate, coincidences resolve a number of plot issues, and complicated love stories unfold.

As one might expect from the title, the socio-religious changes in Victorian society can be seen in the conflicts faced by some of the main characters here, especially Allerdyce.  Darwin’s Origin of the Species, published in 1859, has challenged the traditional church beliefs in Separate Creation and the Chain of Being, with man at the top of the chain and rich men at the very top.   Spiritualism, a new movement, is becoming popular.  Trade unions are beginning to form, and communism, also new, is gaining followers among the poor. Colonial wars, and the country’s involvement in the Crimea, in which the poor have been used as cannon fodder by their aristocratic officers, have further exacerbated class divisions.  Allerdyce, despite his agnosticism and awareness of the social inequities, still sees the world in black and white, however:  The law is the law, and no compromises are possible, even if the results make no sense on a grander scale.  “Sometimes,” he says grandly, “your duty to the law doesn’t seem to do justice to the people you encounter,” but he does his duty anyway.

In the second half of the book, deliberate religious symbols and parallels appear, causing the mystery to veer off in unexpected directions.  Patrick Slater is seen as a Christ figure, living in the wilderness and doing good deeds, Allerdyce is declared to be a Judas by someone he wants to help, Easter images describe someone who “rises to a better life,” and a character on trial is asked if he believes in the Bible as God’s perfect word for man, his answer determining his fate.

The author’s brilliant imagery makes the setting and atmosphere come alive, while the complexities of the plot reveal the author’s comprehensive vision of society.  The characters, with the exception of Allerdyce, tend to be stereotypes, in the fashion of typical Victorian Gothic novels.  Where this novel differs from most other novels of its genre is in its mood—the customary happy ending, with all details resolved, is omitted.  Instead, the reader is left to ponder the social and religious issues that the author has raised. Though his primary purpose is not completely clear and the themes, introduced and developed late, are sometimes fuzzy, the author’s vibrant depiction of a fragmented, class-based society with its equally class-based system of justice is absorbing and memorable.

Notes: The author’s photo and announcement as recently appointed director of Universities Scotland are here:  www.timeshighereducation.co.uk

Skibo Castle in Dornoch, for which construction started in the twelfth century, may have been a model for the estate of the Duke of Dornoch.  Skibo was restored as the home of Andrew Carnegie in 1898 and remained in his family until 1982.  The Duke of Dornoch’s castle was described as having 10,000 acres in 1865;  Skibo has 7,500 acres now.  Photo by Heather Swinton:   http://travel.webshots.com

Sgt. Hector McGillivray’s younger brother was a member of the 93rd Highlanders and died in the Crimea, an event for which McGillivray still blames Brig. Frederick Bothwell-Scott.  The officers of that regiment (dressed as in the attached drawing) were part of the “Thin Red Line” and The Charge of the Light Brigade:  www.britishbattles.com .

“We have no time to waste on insignificant books, hollow books, books that are here to please…We want books that are written for those of us who doubt everything, who cry over the least little thing, who are startled by the slightest noise.  We want books that cost their authors a great deal, books where you can feel the years of work, the backache, the writer’s block, the author’s panic at the thought that he might be lost…We want splendid books, books that immerse us in the splendor of reality and keep us there…We want good novels.”

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.  It is a fantasy in which all the other browser-readers there enjoy reading and talking about the same kinds of books we do, and the helpful staff has read most of the books and can make recommendations.  The main characters in this novel by Laurence Cosse have created just such a bookstore in Paris.  Ivan (Van) Georg, who manages a shop called The Good Novel, 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.  The eight members each submit individual lists of their favorite six hundred novels, and the book owners stock the shop with these “good” books.  With a choice Parisian location near the famed Odeon Theatre, the shop opens to customers in August, with the biggest percentage of their “good books” representing the best of French literature.  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.  Large numbers of new customers have begun to order pop novels, then fail to pick them up, leaving the shop to pay for them.  Nasty comments appear on their internet forum, and a seemingly organized attack is mounted in the press, with accusations of elitism taking up whole pages,  At one point the shop is described as a “totalitarian undertaking,” an attempt by a small group of elite to control the reading done by the public.  Fascist accusations result. Demands are made that the shop’s financial backer be unmasked, and Van and Francesca are both followed.

Eventually, three attempts to murder members of the secret selection committee, described in the opening pages of the novel, involve the police.  Throughout the attacks, both physical and in print, the author raises questions of who benefits from the destruction of one small bookstore and its people.  Resentful owners of other bookstores?  A general public insulted by the shop’s cultural snobbery?  Publishers of new novels which have not  “made the cut” for inclusion at the shop?  A cabal of disaffected authors whose books are not carried by the shop?  The Good Novel bookshop must now contend with the nastiness of everyday life, the sad effects of media-driven public opinion, and the economic realities of a business that depends totally on individual tastes.

A combination of mystery, fantasy, philosophical analysis, and economic treatise on the book industry, A NOVEL BOOKSTORE raises many serious questions within a unique story.  The novel does have its problems, however.  A love story involving manager Van and Anis, a wispy and only vaguely attentive young woman, is weak and distracting, as Van seems to have no understanding of himself or of her.  She, in turn, seems to be equally dim, an almost ghostly presence flitting through the novel.  The mystery is not well integrated.  The attempts at murder described in the beginning of the novel gain little attention for most of the novel as the ins and outs of book shop business and publishing dominate the “action.”  In fact, some of the most interesting sections of the novel are those related to the decisions of what books to include on the shelves, Cormac McCarthy being the most popular choice among American authors.  Though the novel is obviously fiction and great fun to read, some readers may feel that the plot line and its consequences are too exaggerated to provide  significant new understandings of the real “book world.”

A peripheral issue may provide more insight into publishing than the novel itself does.  On the internet, you will find a web address,  http://www.thegoodnovel.com/ , which appears to be the site for the shop in this book.  This Parisian shop is said to have opened in 2004, the brainchild of author Laurence Cosse.  Books are chosen by a “selection committee,” which lists the same pseudonyms as those of characters in the novel, and the Staff Picks, Latest Selections, and the list of books are fun to read.  The shop is located at: “9 bis, rue Dupuytren, 75006 Paris. Opening hours: 10.00 a.m. – 10:00 p.m.”  Blurbs of praise from L’Idee and Le Vielle Observateur are featured prominently, and readers are invited to nominate books for The Good Novel shop–the selection committee will decide on them.  (I nominated one myself.  See Notes below.)  This website and its Facebook equivalent appear in every way to be real—until the reader looks more closely at the details and discovers that there is no bookshop listed at this address in Paris, the quotations from “famous people” exist only on the website, the quoted magazines or papers do not exist, and there is no way to contact the “shop.”   I do not know who is responsible for this web page or the Facebook page, but it is the cleverest, most imaginative book advertising I’ve seen since Orhan Pamuk created a real Museum of Innocence to accompany his novel of that title.  The website will certainly generate additional publicity for this novel and for the many “Good Novels” and classics by other authors who are listed on the site, and that is a goal we all wish for, I think.  Do take a look at its on-line incarnation.  It’s  fun!

Notes: The book I nominated for inclusion at The Good Novel is WAVE OF TERROR by Theodore Odrach, an important novel about the Stalinist purges by a man who experienced them.  The book was accepted by the selection committee as a Good Novel, and is now their featured novel and “Latest Selection,” see top left of the page:  www.thegoodnovel.com

The author’s photo is from www.arianne.fr

The streetscape near the Odeon, where The Good Novel is said to be located, might have looked like the one above at rue de l’Odeon, Paris, FR, Postal code: 75006.   www.mapmonde.org

The Facebook profile picture for The Good Novel page is here: www.facebook.com The web address is here: www.thegoodnovel.com

“Half the testimony [at the inquiry into the March 3, 1943, events at Bethnal Green] contradicted the other.  The crowd was quiet; the crowd was loud.  The constables and wardens had worked hard; the constables and wardens were nowhere to be seen.  There was light on the stairs; the stairs were dark.  There was a loud blast no one had ever heard before; there were no unusual sounds that night.”

In the midst of the Blitz in London in 1943, an event took place in Bethnal Green that was so extraordinary it is not understood completely even to this day.  On March 3, 1943, when the air raid warning sirens went off, thousands of people headed, as usual, toward the nearest bomb shelter, the local Tube station, a one-entrance location which could accommodate up to ten thousand people within a few minutes of their arrival.  Some had come here many times and knew that they could reserve cots and places to sleep for the night.  Others just took their chances, hoping that the emergency would not last long and that they would be able to return to their homes soon afterward.

On this night, something unique happened.  One hundred seventy-three people died of asphyxia within a minute of their arrival at the station, all suffocated in the crush on the first twenty stairs of the entrance.  Not one of the victims had managed to reach the landing at the bottom, only a few feet away, from which another seven stairs down would have guaranteed their safety.  Ironically, “not a single bomb had fallen in the city that night.”  All these deaths were accidental.

Author Jessica Francis Kane, who found and studied the original government inquiry into the reasons for this catastrophe, draws on the facts of the real Bethnal Green case to create a fictionalized version of what went wrong.  The actual facts, gathered and put into a report by Sir Laurence Dunne within three weeks of the events, had been hushed up by the government so as not to alarm the people, give any information to the enemy, or create questions about the government’s ability to handle crises.  Dunne had interviewed eighty witnesses, some of them more than once, and, wanting to avoid placing blame on one or two individuals who might have become scapegoats, when there were many issues which had contributed to these deaths, he had written his report with a concern for human feelings and for what human beings need in order to deal with such disasters during fraught times such as war.  “Perhaps,” he suggests, “we should only sometimes be held accountable for the unintended consequences of our actions.”

Creating a cast of repeating characters which becomes more and more developed as the action proceeds, Kane shows the involvement of all facets of British society as they deal with this disaster.  The attitudes toward refugees, especially Jews, affect the perceptions of some of the witnesses, while others, actively involved in the protection of lives during the Blitz, assume blame which was really not theirs to assume.   Some have secrets about what happened that night, and others become privy to secrets held by those they know and protect, refusing to reveal these secrets during the inquiry because they know that the person(s) did not mean for any harm to result.  The thirtieth anniversary of the tragedy brings all these issues to light once again when Paul Barber, a twenty-nine-year-old who was an infant orphaned by the disaster, contacts Sir Laurence Dunne for information for a television documentary he is producing.  Soon both are reliving the events and their aftermath.

Kane carefully reveals the facts of the case, but she does so within the context of the lives of her characters, always showing how and why these people say and do what they do, and always leaving the door open for other interpretations of their actions.  As the characters become more fully understood, they elicit sympathy from the reader, and by the time all the details are known, the reader feels the same sorts of conflicts that Sir Laurence Dunne felt when he wrote his report.  James Low, the chief shelter warden, is unable to forgive himself because his conscientious efforts failed.  An eight-year-old who lost her four-year-old sister has seen something that forever affects her life and her relationship with her mother, and she neither forgives nor forgets.  Rev. McNeely, of St. John’s Church, across the street, is hard pressed to see the big moral picture which Sir Laurence Dunne feels is so important as he writes his inquiry, the paster recognizing instead the individual issues which he feels have clear black and white answers.

Kane does a remarkable job of revealing the feelings of these characters, their feelings for others who have been involved, and their feelings for the more general needs of the community, regardless of the strict definitions of right and wrong.  She writes clearly and succinctly and avoids flights of sentimentality, always showing the big picture, the big moral issues, and the big questions of responsibility.  Each reader will decide for himself/herself whether to agree with Sir Laurence’s feelings:  “People think,” he states, “that they want the whole truth, but they’re far happier with only as much as they can forgive.”  A fine novel which deals with major ethical and moral issues within a context which every reader will appreciate and understand, The Report offers a different way of looking at historical events—rationally, but with a kindness toward the participants which protects their integrity and their future lives.  “Speculative journalism” and the rush to blame are not yet a way of life at this time.

Notes: The author’s photo is from her Goodreads page.

More information about this event is posted on www.barryoneoff.co.uk where the sign for the shelter also appears.  More extensive information can be found here:  www.dailymail.co.uk

At the time of the disaster, there was no handrail in the middle of the stairs at the entrance.  The entrance was through a doorway approximately three feet wide, with the stairs going down from that entrance, then turning right at a the landing at the bottom and continuing down for seven more stairs.  None of the victims reached the landing.

The drive for a suitable memorial for the victims of this tragedy has led to fundraising efforts in the UK.  See www.independent.co.uk

Further information about this disaster can be found in this YouTube video:  www.youtube.com

SPOILER WARNING:  For those who have already finished the book, another, longer YouTube video contains much more detail and many more film clips about this event.   www.youtube.com

“No one in [Liberia] gave a damn if a system or an organization didn’t work; no one cared if roads financed by the U.S. aid weren’t built or buildings never finished or machinery, trucks, buses, and cars never repaired—as long as the money to build, finish, and repair kept moving from one hand to the other.  The country was a money-changing station.  Corruption at the top trickled all the way down to the bottom.”

Recreating the events which led to the catastrophic battles for power which engulfed Liberia from 1980 – 1996, author Russell Banks shows how four different home-grown armies, each with their own goals, aggressively engaged in atrocities to ensure victory for their own side.  Employing child soldiers, and killing and maiming anyone who stood in their way, including women and tiny children who simply had the misfortune to belong to the wrong rural tribe, these armies massacred a quarter of a million people and displaced a million others.

Forcing the American reader to pay more attention to the full scale of these horrors, Banks describes this turmoil through the eyes of a radical American anti-war activist named Hannah Musgrove who arrives in Liberia from Ghana in 1976 on a passport which identifies her as Dawn Carrington.  Musgrove is on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List for her activities as a member of the Weather Underground, having been indirectly involved in a New York City townhouse bombing in which three people were killed in the late 1960s.  The “darling” daughter of a well-known pediatrician with ultra-liberal politics and a mother who regards her own life’s role as help-meet to her husband, Hannah grew up in the Boston suburbs and was expensively educated in elite private schools and colleges, including almost two years of study at Harvard Medical School.  For reasons that are never quite clear in this book, she has rejected everything her parents believe in, taking her youthful opposition to the Vietnam War to the most violent extremes, coldly severing relations with her ultra-liberal-but-not-liberal-enough family, and eventually going into hiding to avoid facing the consequences of her actions.

Egocentric and arrogant, Hannah believes so totally in her own definition of what is right that she is almost inhuman, unable to relate to other people, unable to understand or accept any compromise or middle ground on any issue, and unable to work on an equal partnership with anyone else.  Once in Liberia, she meets and marries a government minister in the cabinet of President Samuel Tolbert and has three sons, but she remains not only a detached observer of what is happening in Liberia but a detached participant in the lives of her Liberian family, showing very little feeling or affection for anyone, even her children.  Only the chimpanzees for whom she has set up a sanctuary gain her full attention.

Banks cleverly compresses time and provides “breathing space” from the violence by shifting back and forth in both location and time.  The novel opens in the twenty-first century on Shadowbrook Farm in rural upstate New York, with fifty-eight-year-old Hannah deciding that she must leave her farm temporarily to return to Liberia after a ten-year absence.  She is going, not to look for her sons, who were just boys when she was forced to leave, but to see if she can find out what has happened to the chimpanzees in her sanctuary.  Her missing sons, Dillon, William, and Paul had earned the nicknames of Fly, Worse-than-Death, and Demonology by the time she left, her own life hanging by a thread in the midst of the civil war violence.  Through flashbacks, Hannah’s early life with her husband, Woodrow Sundiata, shows the violent transition from the corrupt government of William Tolbert to that of Samuel Doe in 1980, culminating with Hannah’s expulsion from Liberia in 1983.  While in hiding once again in the US, she meets with Charles Taylor, who had been a friend of her husband, and who later disappears in Africa for many years.  In 1989, “ignorant of maternal instinct,” she is able to return to Liberia and her family.

Shortly after her return, however, a horrific, four-pronged war, much of it tribal, breaks out.  The forces of Samuel Doe, Charles Taylor, now returned, Prince Johnson, and ECOMOG, a multilateral army consisting of troops from other West African countries (primarily Nigeria), begin fighting each other in 1989, the violence as they compete for power so inhuman that it is difficult to comprehend.  Hannah must again flee to the U.S.  Her three trips from the US to Liberia and back in the course of the novel, reveal the changing faces of both countries.

Though Hannah Musgrove suffers from a maddening anomie as a character, one which often makes her fate irrelevant to the reader, the novel vividly depicts the brutal history of Liberia, from the seemingly lofty goals of its founding to the beginning of the twenty-first century.  No one who reads this (or does a Google image search) will fail to understand the inhumanity and the atrocities for which the International Court of Justice in The Hague has put former President Charles Taylor on trial, nor will they be able to ignore the horrors also committed by Prince Johnson (and recorded on video), who is currently serving as a duly elected senator in Liberia.  The high-minded goals of the country are in tatters, the economy is a disaster, the poor are still hungry, tens of millions of dollars in US aid have lined the pockets of the country’s politicians, and as the novel ends, Hannah Musgrove is living in New York State as a wealthy heiress with a successful commercial farm.  Nothing good seems to have resulted from any of this for the people of Liberia.

Notes: The author’s photo by Nancie Battaglia is from www.nytimes.com

A downtown Monrovia street “paved” with bullet casings from the fighting appears on www.pulitzer.org

Former Liberian President Charles Taylor, who had been living in Nigeria, is captured as he tries to flee that country in 2006:  http://news.bbc.co.uk He is currently on trial for war crimes at the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

Recent testimony from Mia Farrow and Naomi Campbell on Charles Taylor:  www.dailymail.co.uk

Hannah Musgrove and her family lived on Duport Road, in Monrovia.  “On Saturday 30 May 2009, over 200 people gathered at an old school compound in Duport Road, a suburb of Monrovia and the scene of two massacres perpetrated during the Liberian civil war, as well as several mass graves.”  See www.ictj.org

“There are no accidents.  Every so-called ‘accident,’ every piece of turbulence, is part of a sequence, bigger or smaller, whose scale you cannot see.  At least, you don’t see it until it’s too late, and then you start to panic, beause you realize how foolish was your original fantasy of understanding.”

How long has it been since you have read a novel with a thematic line so unusual and so well explicated that reading the book changed your way of seeing the world?  This novel was one such experience for me.  Metaphysical, historical, and utterly different from anything I have ever read, Giles Foden’s Turbulence kept me (neither a mathematician nor a student of physics) turning the pages, no matter how theoretical and dense the novel sometimes became with its science.  Fascinating personal stories are interwoven with the scientific plot, giving the novel immediacy, even for a devout non-scientist.

Set in London and Scotland from January through June, 1944, the novel is a study of weather forecasting and all the factors which must be considered in making long-range predictions.   Henry Meadows, a young academician at Cambridge with a doctorate in mathematics/physics, has written his thesis on fluid dynamics, focusing on the idea of turbulence and other complex flows which move constantly, are difficult to quantify, and have unpredictable effects on other physical measurements.  Though he might have remained in his lab at the university forever, he wants to do something for Britain’s war effort, and when he sees an advertisement for a training post in the Meteorological Office, he applies, is accepted for the Central Forecasting Unit, and is eventually sent to Scotland.  His job is to observe and eventually help forecast weather patterns over a five-day period for fifty miles of German-occupied French coastline so that an invasion can be planned and a window of opportunity identified for D-Day.

The task will eventually involve the US under Gen. Eisenhower, the RAF, the Royal Navy, and the Met office and will require the establishment of a network of several hundred weather stations on land and sea, spanning a distance of twelve-hundred miles from Iceland to England.  Each of these stations will report by telegraph to a central facility.  Forecasting at this time is inexact, however, with accuracy declining for every day after the first day of observations.  Forecasts beyond two or three days are often wildly inaccurate, and a five-day forecast seems impossible.  Though the air pressure, the winds, and the temperatures can all be measured, these measurements can be compromised, sometimes fatally, by the unexpected effects of turbulence and by measurements which may not take into account all the variables.  Discovering some valid way to add turbulence into the calculations would help explain the seemingly random changes which occur in the weather, a crucial element in the D-Day plans.

Over 2.5 million men and three thousand landing craft are depending on the accuracy of the forecast.  The Germans are expecting an invasion, and Allied surprise and ultimate success depend on finding a window which the Germans will not also foresee.  Only one person has found a way to deal with this kind of turbulence and its effects on forecasting—Wallace Ryman, a famed mathematical researcher who is also a pacifist and conscientious objector. Ryman lives on the remote Scottish coast and has no intention of having his life’s work used for warfare, but Henry Meadows hopes to convince him to share the application of his “Ryman number” in the pursuit of a weather equation to aid in meteorological forecasting.

Foden uses real people as his models for the characters in the novel.  Main character Wallace Ryman is the fictional equivalent of a real man, Henry Fry Richardson, whose real life (and Richardson number) parallel that of Ryman in virtually every respect except the nature of his death, and the other named characters (including Geoffrey Pyke and Sverre Petterssen)  are also real.  The novel has been fully researched, and, though it is fictional, the concepts behind it have actual bases in reality and science.  Where the novel may raise some questions for some people is in the subplots.  Some “researchers” in the novel believe that the formula for dealing with turbulence in the weather can also be applied to problems in sociological and interpersonal relationships—from the tendency of countries to go to war to the disagreements among lovers.  This makes the subplots seem sensational and unrealistic, at times, an attempt to show that turbulence is responsible for the random events which affect the personal lives of the characters, and also to show that “random” events may not be random at all.

The main character, Henry Meadows, is not fully developed, and his excessive use of alcohol make him a difficult character to know.  The  history of weather forecasting, the opinions of the cleric with whom Ryman argues about the interpretation of God’s will, the issues of science which have not yet been resolved (a solution for the problems of the Rh factor in pregnancy, for example), and the desire to find one formula which will explain the as yet unexplainable future, all relate to the idea of turbulence and seemingly random outcomes but do not necessarily provide insights or answers.  Filled with vibrant descriptions, an assortment of characters whose views of the world differ greatly from that of the twenty-first century, a setting that reflects a critical moment in time, and philosophical/scientific themes and insights of great originality, Turbulence is a novel which manages to raise questions and explore them in ways I have not seen before in literary fiction, and I loved it.

Notes: For those interested in the science and math behind the “Ryman number,” which is really the “Richardson number,” please see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richardson_number for a complete discussion and illustration of the numerical ratio.

The author’s photo is from www.faber.co.uk

The photo of Henry Fry Richardson appears on Wiki:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

The D-Day photo appears on www.theodoresworld.net

Geoffrey Pyke’s bio is also on Wiki:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Pyke

ALSO by Giles Foden:  LADYSMITH

“For twenty years King Lear had been watching the world spin without him.  For twenty years he had not budged from the blue house where my cousins had left him.  From his ruined palace, he had witnessed the exodus of the runaways, the year when Saigon had changed hands.  And now he saw the return of the saprophytes, and King Lear snickered by his window.”

Vietamese-born Linda Le, one of France’s most popular authors, moved to Paris in 1977 when she was fourteen, accompanying her mother, grandmother, and three sisters soon after the fall of Saigon.  In this energetic, sometimes raucous, and always surprising novel, Le describes the lives of three other young Vietnamese  women who have also emigrated to France—now totally assimilated after twenty years of living there.  Two sisters, known as Elder Cousin, or Potbelly, who is pregnant, and her younger sister, Long Legs, a “cutie” who is living with someone she hopes is a ticket to wealth, have decided to invite their estranged father, King Lear, to come from Saigon to Paris for a three-week visit.  Potbelly will pay for the trip, since she is married to a wealthy French “Hardware Man” in the “nutsandbolts business” who, significantly, will be away during the visit;  Long Legs has no money, spending her small salary on clothes, makeup, and trinkets.  The third member of the Three Fates, Southpaw, referred to at one point as Albatrocious, is their cousin, a young woman who has lost a hand.

The sisters have few expectations regarding their reunion with King Lear, and Long Legs does not even remember the Vietnamese language, but they do plan to impress their father with their financial and social success in France and show him how “French” they are.  They were kidnapped from King Lear by their wealthy grandmother, Lady Jackal, who informed her penniless son-in-law of their departure for France through a photograph of their leave-taking which the photographer delivered to him after the boat had sailed.  Left behind in Saigon, King Lear has observed the changes in the country for the past twenty years, accompanied not by any family members but by The Wheezer, a priest who was tortured, his vocal cords and tendons cut by the communists, and who no longer celebrates the Mass, referring to God now as the Butcher on High and the Great Deaf-Mute in the Sky.  He hangs around King Lear hoping for a meal of his favorite fried eel.

The story, such as it is, is told primarily through Southpaw, but it switches, without warning, to other characters, sometimes in succeeding sentences.  Since the author has chosen not to include any paragraphing (which leads to many pages of gray, margin-to-margin text), there are few visual clues regarding shifts in voice and changes in speakers, a challenge for the reader, who must depend on context clues.  Despite this, the story is relatively easy to follow at the beginning of the novel.  As the scenes become a bit more complex, and the author conveys dream sequences, memories, and imagined events, however, the novel begins to resemble a long, symbolic poem rather than a novel.  Remarkably little symbolism relates to the Shakespearean play of King Lear, and that conceit is relatively undeveloped, the characters not really paralleling King Lear as Shakespeare has created him.  But other symbols, of Bluebeard, dragons, witches who remove hands, soldiers, and even of a shrimp which is about to be fried take their place.  The fairly straightforward narrative of the early part of the novel becomes much more “internalized” by the author, and the voices of the speaker(s) become more dream-like and nightmarish as a torrent of words and images is disgorged for the reader to interpret.

Many great scenes will stick in the reader’s mind, especially as King Lear remembers the reunification of Vietnam and the departure of the American soldiers, but among the most memorable are those which connect to the characters with whom the reader can really identify. When Elder Cousin (Potbelly) gets married, for example, she sends the lonely King Lear photographs from the wedding, but he cannot bear to open them, leaving them in their envelope for days until he can be dressed appropriately for the special occasion. That one scene does more to convey emotion than almost any other scene in the novel, and it is among the most “honest” scenes in the book.

The novel is difficult to judge—or to give stars to, if one were to do that—since it is obviously revealing connections which the author has to the past, close to the heart but not necessarily things that the reader will identify with or understand.  Sometimes the novel feels like an aria being sung to an audience in an operatic language which the reader does not       understand, but just as often it feels like a poem being read to a sympathetic audience of people who can identify with the feelings, if not the events.  The artificiality of the construction and the sometimes arch, even academic, attitudes—including a large amount of mockery of people—may add to the “humor” of the narrative, but it is a cynical, sometimes snide humor which trivializes the way others deal with the lives that fate has handed them, and it gets in the way of more thoughtful communication.  The descriptions and the musicality of the language are superb, but I sometimes felt as if I were being involved in a literary free-for-all when what I wanted was to understand the feelings of the characters who were facing very real and difficult problems.

Notes: The author’s photo appears on http://www.nyu.edu

The blue house in Saigon, and other photos from Vietnam, are here:  http://thestirlingnews.blogspot.com/

The Wheezer’s favorite meal, fried eel, can be found on http://www.ehow.com

“They hate women.  They hate them and they fear them….There’s an old Islamic saying…that heaven is crowded with beggars, and hell is overflowing with women.”

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.  Each week a list of new fatwas is released—prohibitions regarding even the smallest aspects of behavior (including one against the reading of fiction)—and the “religious police” are empowered to arrest and detain anyone, even foreigners, who violates these rules.  Women may not drive cars in Saudi Arabia, and they are discouraged from working outside the house, which creates some strange situations when women need to shop for personal items–underwear, for example.  Sometimes their husbands must purchase it for them; at other times, a shop will hire a woman specifically to wait on other women.  Women who do work outside the home often work for the media or for the police, but these women are nearly always married (because single women cannot interact with men), and whoever hires them must provide separate offices for them.

When a grotesquely tortured female body is found washed up along the Corniche in Jeddah as the novel opens, the police are hard pressed to identify it, as no fingerprints are available, a common problem with female victims which leaves many of them unidentified and their killers free.  In this case, however, they are able to identify the body that of as Leila Nawar, a TV videographer who has been working secretly 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, and the police are anxious to find and investigate her data.  Detective Inspector Osama Ibrahim of the Jeddah Police/Security Department, calls upon his women officers to help him by interviewing female witnesses and victims, without their male escorts present. He depends on Faiza, and later Katya, within his department, to bridge the gap with women who need help, women like Miriam Walker, an American whose husband Eric, working in private security in Jeddah, has vanished.  The US consulate has been unable to find him.

As the death of Leila Nawar and the disappearance of Eric Walker, the American, are investigated, several other plot lines also unfold, involving a large number of overlapping characters who are dealing with other kinds issues.  Two unusual love stories provide personal interest and fascinating perceptions of Saudi religious culture.  In one, the husband discovers that his adored wife has been using birth control pills, contrary to his religion, and he is devastated at what he regards as her betrayal.  In the other, a young couple, very attracted to each other, separate for months, maybe permanently, because the man is more religious than the woman, and he fears that loving her will make him less “worthy” in the eyes of Allah.

Author Zoe Ferraris writes this compelling and insightful novel from experience.  Having lived in Saudi Arabia with her then-husband, a Saudi-Palestinian-Bedouin, she has packed her novel with information about the Saudis’ unique culture, one which has become more strict over the past ten years.  We learn, for example, that organized sports for young girls are now banned, though they had been popular.  At the age of eleven or twelve, the girls now disappear from view, becoming part of the women’s culture and wearing full burqas from then on.  Even small details are revelatory—one woman is excused from “immodesty” in her conversation because, having reached the advanced age of thirty-seven, she has “passed into the sanctuary of perceived sexlessness.”  One cleric even approves “summer holiday marriages,” marriages of convenience contracted for short periods of time—because he does not regard women as people.

As the daily lives of the women here become increasingly claustrophobic and frustrating,  the limitations and, more importantly, the seeming impossibility of any change—ever—become increasingly obvious and increasingly difficult for the western reader to understand. The death of Leila reveals the hidden underside of Jeddah society, while the disappearance of Eric Walker reveals the attitudes toward foreigners (infidels under religious law) and the inabilities of the US government to solve his disappearance within the Saudi system.

Though Ferraris keeps the story moving, she also relies strongly on coincidence to connect characters and resolve plot issues.  Characters just happen to know other characters—or find their lives unexpectedly overlapping with them in surprising ways that bear no resemblance to reality.  A number of extraneous subplots and many new characters seem to have been included to allow the author to show additional aspects of Saudi life, rather than because they contribute to solving the mysteries at the heart of the novel, and those who have read the author’s previous novel, Finding Nouf, will have a distinct advantage here, since many of the main characters here were introduced and developed in that earlier novel.  Despite its flaws, however, 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.

Notes: The author’s photo is from www.kqed.org

The photo of the Corniche in Jeddah, where Leila’s body is discovered, is from www.tripadvisor.co.uk

The photo of Jeddah women (with cell phone) is from: www.hyscience.com

For a novel written by a Saudi about the society, see MUNIRA’S BOTTLE by Yousef  al-Mohaimeed.  For another terrific novel about women’s lives, set in Kuwait, see SMALL KINGDOMS by Anastasia Hobbet.

“Fragile images of departure, the village back then.

I curse the river of time; thirty-two years have passed.”—Mao Tse-Tung

When Arvid, the protagonist of this remarkable character novel, remembers these lines, he is reminiscing about his past in Oslo.  As a youth there, he was a devout Communist with a photograph of Mao above his bed, one in which Mao is shown writing.  “I always…hoped,” Arvid says, “that it was not one of his political or philosophical articles he was writing, but one of his poems…for it showed the human Mao, someone I was drawn to, someone who had felt time battling his body, as I had felt it so often myself…”

Arvid is fifty now, and he has witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall, the massacre at Tiananmen Square, and the demise of Communism, along with major changes in his own life and in the lives of his family members.  He, too, feels like cursing “the river of time,”  seeing himself as “a man out of time,” one who has learned that “in the end [beautiful experiences] could be ground into dust.”  The novel opens in the middle of a swirl of memories:  Time has flashed back to 1989, and Arvid is thirty-seven, at a major crossroads in his life, the details of which evolve slowly.  Taking an oblique approach, author Per Petterson embeds Arvid’s story within these memories, conveying them in language which twists and turns in upon itself while slowly moving forward in strong, musical cadences. Vibrant imagery, some of it symbolic, connects past, distant past, and present, as Arvid’s story, propelled by his recollections of family relationships and his own life choices, evolves to show how he became the person he is.

As the novel begins, Arvid’s mother has just discovered that she has a recurrence of cancer, and she has decided to take the ferry from Norway back to her “home,” on Jutland. Arvid has had a testy relationship with his mother over the years and has not talked with her in a while, trying to avoid telling her that he and his wife are getting a divorce, but when he gets a message that his mother has left home, he, too, takes the ferry to Jutland to see her.  During this time, he is inundated with memories, which come, seemingly at random, from different times in his life—his decision to become a communist, and then to leave college and join the “proletariat” in the factories (like his parents);  his memories of vacationing in Jutland as a child; the loss of the brother who came just after him in birth order; working at a bookshop; and taking a neighbor’s dog to be put to sleep.

Throughout, however, Arvid returns to stories of his mother, who, though hard pressed for cash herself, still gave him money for minor luxuries when he was in college, but who, when he decided to leave college and give up his chance to escape the kind of life she and her husband had been living, smacked him, hard, across his face.  The story of his eldest brother, “born in shame and secrecy,” which was, of course, part of his mother’s story, was something he never asked her about, though he openly expressed his own concern because he did not look like his siblings.  And even worse for Arvid’s confidence, he was said to look like his father, to whom he was not close.  On his trip to Jutland, he sees constant change, does not recognize someone who was an old friend, and sees that even the “permanence” of the local cemetery is impermanent:  a grave marker is routinely vandalized.

Homely details and intense descriptions of nature give weight and importance to Arvid’s experiences and what they reveal of him.  On Jutland with his mother, “There were hares and hedgehogs..and pheasants with chicks that were full grown now, in November, and rodents in abundance, and hawks in the sky above, and buzzards that came sweeping out of nowhere, and falcons hanging cruciform in the air before hurtling down, and there were owls in the oak tress, all quiet at night, where they perched on a branch in the dark and stared their prey to death, and in the black night a marten darted between the trees and up across our roof, and we could hear it, and there was plenty to eat for everyone.”  The selection of these bleak details, so complete, so haunting, and so full of compelling movement, not only reveals Arvid’s dark state of mind but also the (very) small comfort that there was plenty to eat for everyone.

Though Arvid is coolly reserved and often tamps down his feelings, the reader comes to know him, understanding his mixed feelings about his mother while also recognizing his need for her, accepting his distance from his father while regretting their lack of connection, accepting his decisions even when they seem to be wrong for him, and seeing the effects of change upon him at every stage of his life.  Often ineffective in his actions, clumsy in expressing his inner feelings, especially in matters of love, and unable to give himself fully to others, Arvid lacks the stature of a “hero.”  It is in this very characteristic, however–his imperfect humanity–that he comes to life, becoming a character so real that even the author has said, “I recognize myself in him…[and]  I could have behaved like Arvid, given a different set of circumstances…Sometimes I call him not my alterego but my stunt man.”**  This is an extraordinary novel of a character facing life changes by one of Europe’s most esteemed authors.

Notes:  **These quotations from Per Petterson come from a thought-provoking and wide-ranging interview conducted by Gin Enguehard of PowellsBooks.blog. Lovers of Petterson should not miss this interview.

The photo of the author appears on www.dagsavisen.no

The Holger Dansk ferry from Norway to Jutland is on:  www.photoship.co.uk

The dunes of Jutland, which appear in a major scene, are from Wiki.

ALSO by Petterson:  To Siberia

“This night is not an average night….Veronica hasn’t come back from her drawing class.  When she returns, the novel will end.  But as long as she is not back, the book will continue… until she returns, or until Julian is sure that she won’t return.  For now Veronica is missing from the blue room, where Julian lulls the little girl [her daughter] to sleep with a story about the private lives of trees.”

Described as “the greatest writer of Chile’s younger generation,” Alejandro Zambra has won numerous prizes, including Chile’s National Critics’ Prize for his previous novella, Bonsai.  Like that novella, The Private Life of Trees is also a small, carefully constructed work which achieves elegance and significance through its careful pruning of unnecessary detail from the story at its heart.  Like Bonsai, too, this novel calls little attention to itself, preferring to let its reflection of universal truths and its grounding in reality speak for themselves.

Zambra is a unique writer, one who belies the stereotype of a writer as someone who becomes impassioned by an idea, then hies off to his quiet garret to write furiously, developing, refining, and then ultimately promoting it.  Zambra, like his alterego Julian, also an author, ties himself to the most mundane aspects of everyday life, which he then describes succinctly and, at times, lovingly.  There are no spectacular scenes, no dramatic displays of emotion, and no real plot here, just the story of  Julian, a university professor who teaches all week, entertains his stepdaughter with a continuous story of the private lives of trees every night, and on Sundays works on his novel, a long project which was once three hundred pages but which he, calling himself  a “self-policeman,” has whittled down to a mere forty-seven pages.  His novel is about a young man tending a bonsai tree, similar to the one given to him by his friends, and which he has neglected to the point that it may die.

Julian has been happily married for three years to Veronica, who brought her five-year-old daughter Daniela into the marriage, and it is for Daniela that he tells his never-ending story of trees, in which a poplar tree and a baobab tree are the protagonists.  On most evenings after Julian and Veronica put Daniela to bed, they go into the “green room,” a studio/library of sorts, where Julian reads and writes, and where Veronica does her artwork.  On this evening, however, Veronica has gone to her art class and has not come home.  Julian is not worried about her at first, but before long, he begins to wonder whether she will, in fact, return to him.  He passes the time that night writing about her, their life together, and their past lives, and he says he will stop writing when she returns home, or when he is convinced that she will not return.

As he writes, the reader comes to know something about all the characters and about the writing process.  Time passes as in a dream during Julian’s long night of writing, with present and past overlapping, memories surfacing and vanishing, and Julian’s imagination creating new scenarios which get interrupted and then change directions.  He envisions Daniela someday reading the thoughts he has recorded about her mother and him and about their marriage—maybe when she is thirty.

When Julian’s writing ends,  author Zambra continues.  Using the point of view of Daniela, he shows her as an older woman as she considers reading Julian’s novel, which she thinks may be, like all fiction, just “novelists’ absurd farces.”  As Zambra touches on the process of writing fiction, what it means, and whether it is important, however, he moves into the future, giving a conclusion to Julian’s thoughts and demonstrating the power of fiction to create whole worlds.

Filled with warmth and a sly sense of humor about writing, about life in Chile, and about his main character Julian, who is often ineffective, Zambra creates a wonderful irony—it is almost impossible to remember that the main character is Julian and not Alejandro Zambra, a similarity he cultivates throughout, especially with his references to the art of bonsai (which was the main subject of Zambra’s previous novel) and the act of “self-policing” by an author who reduces big stories to very small novellas.  Those who believe that “more is better” may be surprised at how much Zambra can reveal in the belief that “less is more.”

Notes: The author’s photo is from http://www.lanacion.cl

The bonsai depicted here is from: www.bonsai4me.com

“I’m not to everybody’s taste.  A friend of mine, Boris, told me I was a minority interest, like collecting Stilton jars or learning to fold paper birds.”—Annie Fairhurst

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 on the other side of Fleetwood.  As soon as it is out of sight, she strips off all her clothes and viciously attacks the “bloody sofa” which she has left behind, the sofa on which her husband proposed to her more than a decade ago, when she was seventeen and he, thirty-two:  “I filled the room: as large and white as the removal van…My thighs wobbled, dimpled with fat and puckered with stretch marks, and I saw myself kick again….[and] at the sound of his voice [in my head] I kicked it again…My little episode went on some time; could have gone on longer but I stubbed my toe and had to stop, gasping, eyes watering, laughing in spite of the pain.”  Then she takes the tags off a completely new wardrobe and gets dressed:  “I didn’t want to smell like this house, or even like the fabric conditioner Will and I used.  Had used…I wanted to leave all reminders of my old life behind me.”

When she arrives at her new house, she envisions herself as Jackie Kennedy, “getting out of an aeroplane.  She’s tiptoeing down the steps her hair like sculpted soap, waving gently with white-gloved hands to the people waiting for her and looking smiley and sophisticated…”  She is disappointed that her new neighbors have not provided her with the same sort of welcome.  Clearly this main character, who has a problem with anger and with her perception of herself, has a lot to learn, but the reader quickly discovers that she plans to work on her issues, reminding herself of “important” advice from virtually every self-help book ever written.

British 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.  In the first six pages, Neil, Annie’s new next door neighbor, asks her if “the family,” especially her little girl, have arrived yet.  Annie asserts that he must be confused–that she and her cat are alone, no husband, no daughter.  Though it is tempting to feel sorry for her, Annie’s continuing comments reveal that she did, in fact, tell the realtor that she had a husband and daughter, that this is indeed the truth, and that something has happened to both of them.   Suspicions become suspense as the novel unfolds.

Every remark and every action from this point on capitalizes on the reader’s understanding of real life as the author shows it being played out in conversations among the neighbors and other residents of the community, while Annie twists and manipulates what she sees and hears so that her reality will be what she wants it to be.  Her obsession with the unfortunate Neil, who is happily living with Lucy, a young woman whom Annie abhors, leads her into many unneighborly acts—putting garbage through Neil’s mail slot for his lover Lucy to clean up, eavesdropping on conversations, peering through windows, and misreading Neil’s lack of interest in her as his clever way of hiding his love for her from Lucy.  She eventually comes to the attention of the association’s Neighborhood Watch.

All the conversations between Annie and everyone else are classics of dramatic irony.  The reader recognizes bits of the truth while the real story of Annie and her past are withheld for most of the book, thereby sustaining suspense while drawing the reader into Annie’s twisted world.  Though her actions from the beginning are one step beyond what is “normal,” and the reader knows this, the cumulative picture of Annie’s mind as the plot develops further becomes positively terrifying—and pathetic.  Her childhood, as it unfolds, does elicit sympathy for her, but at the same time, Annie is dropping hints about what will unfold in the future, increasing the ironies, since the reader does not want to be tricked into believing in someone as devious (and deviant) as Annie.  When the author finally begins to reveal details of Annie’s past which one must accept as true, the reader still cannot help wondering how the author will ever reconcile the information gleaned from several scenes which seem to conflict with one another.  The conclusion is sly and clever, with the full impact coming very gradually.

Ashworth’s eye for the character-revealing detail is unerring, as is her control of Annie’s “voice.”   A couple of obvious examples of foreshadowing are a bit clumsy, but overall, the author’s control of her details and her pacing are meticulous.  Ashworth manages to depict a main character with a perverted sense of self and gross ignorance of the conventions of social intercourse while, at the same time satirizing the very suburban society which Annie wishes to be part of—a major achievement pulled off with panache and darkly humorous flair.  This is the kind of escape reading one dreams of.

Notes: The author’s photo appears on http://uk.linkedin.com

The suburban Fleetwood residential community into which Annie moves may have resembled this Fleetwood community:  www.findaproperty.com –attached houses with gardens behind each unit.

The author’s website is here:   http://jennashworth.co.uk/ Her award-winning blog,”Every Day I Lie a Little,” is here:  http://jennashworth.co.uk/blog/

“[Imagine] that an unscrupulous man, a born whoremonger, points a pistol at your head and says to you: ‘Leave, or I’ll pull the trigger!’ What would you do?….Of course you leave, the way I left and so many young men from this town left…Farming, with the little patches of land that we have, was barely enough to keep starvation from our door…[and] our children would be condemned to the same goatish lives as us.”

Author Carmine Abate grew up in Carfizzi, a small Arberesh village in the toe of Italy, and he returns to that area again* with this warm and embracing novel about a young man’s growing up and his search for his place in the world.  Marco has a different life from that of boys in other parts of Italy.  Like his father, he may be destined to leave his home in Hora, one day, to spend long periods of time in the mines and fields of France earning enough money to support a family in Italy.  Marco and his family are Arberesh, descendants of Albanians who emigrated to southern Italy from the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries, citizens who keep their ethnic ties, their language, and their culture alive within their small communities, which remain poor “while the world outside [gets] better.  While the rest of Italy progresse[s].”  As his father explains to the son who desperately misses him for the large part year that he is in France, “If I come back [home to stay], who’ll send us money so that Elisa can go to University?  What are we going to eat if I come home: nails?”  For Marco, however, “My father was a chronic source of pain under my skin.”

Filled with everyday details which bring the community of Hora and the difficult maturation of this young boy to life, The Homecoming Party is a coming-of-age novel, a small morality tale, a domestic drama, and a paean to the beauty which still exists in the hills of southern Italy—“This is what I imagine heaven to be,” Tullio, the father, says.  Lyrical and poetic without being sentimental, the novel opens with Marco and his father sharing the Christmas bonfire when Marco is thirteen and concludes with the same memories, but in between these “bookends,” the chronology and the point of view change with the seasons and the holidays, and good times alternate with hard times as the family dynamics and mysteries unfold.  In flashbacks, the father’s life in France before Marco was born becomes clear and makes him human, also explaining his older sister Elisa’s role within the family, while Marco’s difficult life without him also makes him understandable as he grows from the age of nine to thirteen.  “I was a child who could not stand losing,” he says, explaining how he would take away the almost-sacred football, given to him by his father, and leave the other boys and the game if he were not winning.

Throughout his early life, his sister Elisa and her relationships become Marco’s introduction to love and sex, and he must defend her to his friends while also trying to figure out what is going on with “the man with the light blue eyes,” a man who is much older than she, with “salt-and-pepper hair.”  When Marco becomes deathly ill and misses two and a half months of school, his father is away, and the man with the light blue eyes begins to play a major role in his life.

All the events from the past and all the symbols that have evolved in the course of the novel—Spertina the dog, the football, the imagery of Christmas and Easter, and the wild boar Marco has hunted with his father—come together in the conclusion.  His father has an opportunity to become a real father, and Marco has a chance to become a hero.  “Leave or I’ll pull the trigger,” takes on new meaning in the course of the novel, as the importance of family and the responsibilities associated with it become clearer for Marco.

Abate has created a book with epic themes in a novel which is almost as short as a novella, using clear and often poetic imagery, natural dialogue, a limited number of characters, and meticulously planned, non-linear chronology to allow him to say all he needs to say in very few words.  The novel never becomes saccharine and never patronizes the reader, despite the emotional connections the author deliberately cultivates.  By emphasizing the characters’ natural, uncomplicated reactions to important events, and keeping those reactions consistent with the ages of the characters, he allows readers from other parts of the world to participate in a family whose culture is very different from their own.

*Carmine Abate’s previous novel, Between Two Seas, was also set in Calabria, in the toe of Italy.

Notes: The author’s photo appears on www.young-lions.it

The photo of the road sign to Hora, Marco’s town, is from www.skyscrapercity.com

The traditional Arberesh wedding dress (above) is shown on Wiki.  While most brides prefer the traditional garb, some brides now also choose the more familiar white dress.

In the contest for Miss Arbereshe 2009, over two dozen young women gather in their most elaborate Arberesh dresses and parade for the audience.  www.youtube.com

Another video of two Arberesh villages in Sicily shows women wearing the traditional dress: www.youtube.com

A video of an Arberesh wedding, one of the most delightful I’ve ever seen, with great music, reflects the conflicting emotions of the bridal party.  The first three minutes show the community and its people up till the point of the bride’s arrival for this Eastern Orthodox ceremony.  Watch the faces.  The bride has chosen not to wear the traditional garb, the little veil-carrier is wearing sneakers, and the bride and the matron of honor clearly reflect through their facial expressons their desire that the whole thing just be OVER.  This is a classic wedding video!   www.youtube.com.

“A brave and beautiful account of one young woman’s struggle with the adversities of the Great Depression….Town Conscience and rememberer, Kitty Robertson tells us who we are and where we live.”—John Updike, fellow resident of Ipswich, Massachusetts.

In this extraordinary memoir from 1932-1934, Kitty Crockett Robertson describes her life on the North Shore of Massachusetts during the Depression, a time when she, a Harvard graduate, became a hard-working apple farmer to save the family farm in Ipswich. Her physician father had died, and Kitty, wanting to keep the farm from being sold for development, which her Boston-based brothers favored, decided to give up her job working at the Harvard Library to try to make the orchard profitable enough to save the land.

Working almost single-handedly, she spent the next two years doing all the dirty work, learning in the process that “The Depression was that time of leveling when she and her neighbors kept going on the strength they learned from each other.” From her earliest days on the farm, she personally pruned trees, cleared land, repaired sprayers and tractors, gathered swarming bees into hives, hired five workers at twice the going rate (because they, too, needed to make ends meet), dealt with an arrogant banker anxious to foreclose, protected her apples at gunpoint when necessary, and then fought the weather, storms, and a December temperature drop to twenty degrees below zero in her efforts to bring the crop to market.

In the process she earned the love of her workers (who had regarded her, at first, as an idle “North Shore millionaire”), gave up everything in her personal life to devote herself completely to her task, worked up to 16 hours a day for two years during the apple and peach seasons, and gained new appreciation for the values she saw every day among her workers, the wholesaler who bought her drops and cider apples, and the purchasing agent of Harvard, who helped her make commercial connections to sell her crop.

Robertson, who became a newspaper and radio columnist in her later years, was a formidable writer who always recognized the values which unite people, regardless of their “class,” and this quality pervades her personal memoir. Unfinished, because her life became too busy to finish it after 1934, it was discovered upon her death in 1979 by her daughter, and it is she who moves the story to its conclusion after 1934. Filled with personal detail and wonderful tributes to those who helped her, Robertson is never self-serving, readily admitting her weaknesses while stressing her efforts to succeed. A unique look at one farm and its history during the Depression, The Orchard is an extraordinary record of the times, written by a truly extraordinary woman.

Notes: The author’s photo appears on the book jacket.  For a photo of the house where Kitty Robertson lived and built her orchard, see:   http://newenglander.smugmug.com

“This girl has problems, no?”

Yellow Bird films has just released the US version of the Swedish film The Girl Who Played with Fire, with English subtitles.  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. 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—the stunning Noomi Rapace as Lisbeth  Salander (computer hacker extraordinaire), Michael Nyqvist as Mikael Blomquist (publisher of Millenium magazine), Lena Endre as Erika Berger (former publisher of Millenium), and Peter Andersson as Nils Bjurman (Lisbeth’s slimy legal guardian).  Where this film differs significantly, is in its direction by Daniel Alfredson (who replaces Danish director  Neils Arden Oplev) and in its cinematography–Peter  Mokrosinski replaces Jens Fischer and Eric Kress.

Lisbeth has returned from a year of traveling the world, compliments of a huge bank account which she acquired in the previous novel.  Only Blomqvist knows where this money came from, and he’s not telling (though people familiar with the previous novel will know).  With Salander out of the country for over a year, Blomqvist has moved on with his life and his loves, and he and Salander have had no contact.  Millenium Magazine is investigating the sex trade and its relationship to the drug trade, and a young freelancer who has been hired by Millenium has uncovered evidence that officials at the highest levels of the legal and political system are involved.

In a separate plot line, which eventually overlaps with the Millenium plot, Lisbeth finds out that her former legal guardian, Nils Bjurman, is about to hire a plastic surgeon to remove the tattoo she gave him (which announces to the world that he is a rapist and a pervert), and she goes to his apartment at night, threatens him with his own gun, and swears that she will release a damaging video of him if he dares to touch that tattoo.  Three violent murders later, with her fingerprints on the gun used in the murders, Lisbeth is shocked to discover her photo in all the newspapers—she is wanted for these murders.  She contacts Blomqvist for help.

Rapace as Lisbeth and Nyqvist as Blomqvist had remarkable chemistry in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but they are rarely even in the same scene in this film.  Like the book, this film is Lisbeth’s story, and as her background unfolds, the reader comes to know how and why she was institutionalized and why she is so damaged.  Like the book, this film is also weaker than its predecessor, though lovers of the trilogy will still find it fun to watch.  Some nudity, horrific violence, and explicit sex also appear here, as they did in the previous film.  Overall, there is more blood and violent action here, though it seems somehow less dramatic, more formulaic.

The change in director and cinematographers has resulted in a film which lacks the icy sparkle and brittle atmosphere of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The scenes in this film are as dark as they were in that film, but the sharp visual contrasts and dramatic changes of lighting, which added to the suspense and mood, are missing here.   It becomes more of an action film than an intense character-based study filled with menace, mood, and almost palpable suspense, and it is less involving and less coherent than the previous film.  That said, some viewers may actually find the film better than the novel of The Girl Who Played with Fire because the pacing is better.  Though parts of it are completely unrealistic, as they were in the novel, the visuals and the sudden shocks keep the reader intrigued for the film’s two hours and nine minutes, whereas many people became annoyed after reading more than six hundred pages of the novel only to find that they had been manipulated by the author  to accept some unrealistic “solutions” to some of Lisbeth’s problems.

Two characters, Ronald Niedermann (played by Micke Spreitz), the sadistic giant who cannot feel pain, and Holger Palmgren (played by Per Oscarsson), the man who was Lisbeth’s early and much admired guardian before he was replaced by Nils Bjurmann, add special drama to the film, the first because he is so terrifying, and the second because he seems so needy and so honorable.  Unfortunately, Holger Palmgren, who is known to readers of the previous novel, is not clearly identified in this film, and newcomers to the series will have little, if any, idea who he is or what his role has been in Lisbeth’s past life, despite some touching scenes.  Miriam Wu (played by Yasmine Garbi) has a much smaller role in the film, and her exact connection, aside from the obvious sexual one, is unclear.

All in all, this is a film which will probably be enjoyed most by those who love the series and are already familiar with the story.   It is not as moody and atmospheric as the first film, it is not outstanding for its cinematography, and  I cannot imagine anyone who is unfamiliar with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo being able to follow what is happening here.  It is messy in its construction (as was the novel), but it moves the story line along so that those who see it will be waiting anxiously for the final film installment, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. No doubt those viewers who saw this film in the Boston area, as I did,  will also be hoping that for the last film Lisbeth ditches the Yankees paraphernalia!

Notes: The three posters for this film–from the US, Italy, and Denmark–are available here:  www.moviegoods.com

The final photo is from http://lisbethclothes.com.

Reviews of all three books, a review of the film version of THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, video trailers for all three Swedish films, and a story about the possibility of a fourth Stieg Larsson novel may all be accessed on this site by looking up Larsson under the Author tab.

“Outside, the pigeons on the roof were picking at each other, presumably removing insects.  Perhaps this is all that we as human beings can do for each other, Letty thought.”

Subtle and remarkably witty,  British novelist Barbara Pym published her debut novel in 1950 when she was thirty-seven, publishing another novel every two years from then through 1961.  In 1963, when she submitted An Unsuitable Attachment to her long-time publisher, however, the novel was rejected.  She was suddenly  considered “old-fashioned,”  that novel being subsequently rejected by twenty more publishers.  Sixteen years would elapse before any more of Pym’s novels saw the light of day, and it was not until 1977 that she emerged from her creative “wilderness” and succeeded in having a novel accepted for publication—Quartet in Autumn, which was subsequently shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

Filled with dry, ironic humor, Quartet in Autumn is a poignant depiction of the lives of four elderly people, who have worked together for several years.  All of them live alone, and none of them have much of a life outside of their repetitive and intellectually deadening jobs.  They treat each other only as colleagues and not as friends, both in and out of the office.  The two women consider the two men to be merely “part of the furniture,” and the men have no interest in the women beyond their function in the office.  As a result, they have never socialized, visited each other’s houses or apartments, shared a lunch hour together, or come to know each other as human beings.

Pym develops her wonderfully unique characters separately, rotating the point of view and the narrative among them.  And just as these lonely characters keep to themselves at the office and share almost nothing about their private lives, they tell separate stories about their separate problems to the reader, and not to each other.   Letty, “fluffy and faded, a Home Counties type,” is the most adventurous of them, having traveled to foreign countries.  She regrets that she never had the opportunity to marry;  by the time the war ended she was thirty and Opportunity had passed her by.  She still has dreams of her earlier days, however, when she was able to lie on the grass with “Stephen.”  Marcia, by contrast, is eccentric.  She wears her dyed-too-dark hair looking like a helmet, and her “marmoset eyes” peer through thick glasses.  Living in the decaying house which once belonged to her dead mother, she does not maintain even a semblance of neatness, and still has not bothered to remove from a bed a hairball that was coughed up by her long-dead cat.

Edwin, “a large man with a pinkish face,” is a widower with a married daughter who entertains him on holidays.  He fills his free time with church activities, enjoying his “lunchtime church crawl” and his evenings filled with Masses which celebrate obscure church events.  Norman, the least developed character, “never had a Mum,” and has no social skills.  He alternates spending his lunch hour at the the library, where he reads the newspaper but little else, and at the British Museum, where he is observed viewing  the mummified crocodiles.

When the two women retire, life for all of them changes dramatically.  Letty has to move, an unexpected development, and her long-time plans to move to the country with a friend change.  Marcia becomes even more of a recluse, refusing to let the social worker assigned by the hospital come into the house.  When the men decide to take the “old dears” to lunch several weeks after they retire, the four of them have their first social occasion, with mixed results.

Though the novel has little “plot,” it is an extraordinarily memorable and moving novel of characters who are dealing with their own aging and mortality.  Pym is so good at capturing the real feelings of real people and revealing their unspoken needs that careful readers, regardless of their age, will be stunned at the amount of information Pym is able to convey within a few words, images, or sentences.  The characters’ commitment to minding their own business and “not being any trouble to anyone” overwhelms their abilities to reach out.  It is the death of one of the characters which eventually draws the three survivors together again, and as they consider what kind of funeral services the person would want, what memories each of the others has of that person, and what this implies regarding their own mortality that they finally begin to interact and become truly human.

Pym is very funny, her images and description of events incomparable.  On one occasion, for example, Letty is in the Underground, where she sees an elderly woman who might have been a school contemporary slumped on a seat on the platform.  Letty, shy and reserved, hesitates to offer help, but she is concerned.  While she dithers, a caring young woman bends over the slumped woman and speaks to her.  “At once, the figure reared itself up and shouted in a loud, dangerously uncontrolled voice, ‘F*ck off!”  Pym calls a spade a spade, and her ironic depiction of old age is one that no one nearing that age will ever forget.

Notes: The photo of Barbara Pym is from www.fantasticfiction.co.uk.

The reference to mummified crocodiles, though a small image in the novel, could on many levels be a symbol for the characters themselves.  The colored photo is from http://hearstmuseum.berkeley.edu.  The second pair of mummies, in which the heads and teeth are more obvious, appears on www.athenapub.com.

British filmmaker James Runcie’s BBC film, Miss Pym’s Day Out, won the Royal Television Society Award for Best Arts Program in 1992.  In this he mixes actors and real people (Pym’s sister and her real-life love) as they recreate Barbara Pym’s life leading up to the Booker Prize ceremony for Quartet in Autumn. http://jamesruncie.com

The many devotees of Barbara Pym’s work have formed the Barbara Pym Society:  www.barbara-pym.org.

Also reviewed here: Pym’s EXCELLENT WOMEN

“Only two people know about the content of the manuscript: Larsson’s longtime partner Eva Gabrielsson, who has refused to talk about it and won’t reveal the whereabouts of the last installment in the series, which started with “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”; and Larsson’s friend John-Henri Holmberg, who received an e-mail about the book from Larsson less than a month before his death on Nov. 9, 2004.”—from the Associated Press article by Malin Rising, published July 12, 2010  (See link below)

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 had lived for over thirty years and who had worked with him on the first three novels in the Millenium Trilogy.  In a video interview (twenty minutes long, with subtitles), Gabrielsson discusses her life after the death of Larsson and the publication of the first three books.   www.stieglarsson.com

She indicates that the reason that they never married was for their mutual safety.  Larsson, a journalist who was a dedicated crusader against the active neo-Nazi party and other far right organizations in Sweden, was aware that he might be killed for his efforts, as other crusaders had been.  If he and Gabrielsson were married, they would have had to post their addresses with their names on the door to their apartment.  If they were not married, this requirement could be bypassed and their safety increased.  They avoided being photographed together and interviewed together, and Gabrielsson kept an unusually low profile, again for their mutual safety.

Because Larsson died without a will, however, his whole estate went to his brother and his father.  Larsson 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.  Still, they inherited the entire estate, and Gabrielsson inherited nothing.  Under Swedish law, she has no rights.  She is not allowed to challenge the distribution of his property in court and cannot receive a court settlement.  Her only hope is an out-of-court settlement with his family, but their talks were suspended in June.

The New York Times details some of the inheritance issues here, in an eight-page article by Charles McGrath published just before the release of THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET’S NEST.  www.nytimes.com

Eva Gabrielsson gives her own story in a book supposedly being published this summer, but it is not yet listed on  Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk (where the Larsson books were each published a year or so earlier than in the US), or on Amazon in France, where rumors say it will be published first.  Gabrielsson has indicated that she will say nothing more about her book until her publisher releases it, though rumors say it will be this September.

In the meantime, her story continues here:  http://publishingperspectives.com/?p=291

Long-time rumors of a partially completed fourth novel (purported to be on a laptop in Gabrielsson’s possession) are addressed in the Gabrielsson interview at 8:30 and 15:06 of the 20-minute video, and in an article by Malin Rising for the Associated Press, widely distributed and available here:  www.today.msnbc.msn.com .

The Ottawa Citizen claims that one of Larssen’s friends said Larssen planned to set the fourth book in Sachs Harbor, on Banks Island, part of Canada’s remote Northwest Territories, a dramatically different setting from the Swedish setting of the first three novels.  Gabrielsson, however, says that the fourth novel will never see publication.  www.ottawacitizen.com. Larssen’s publisher remains mute.

In the meantime, the film of the second novel in the trilogy, THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE, has just been released in the US and is now available in a few select theatres.

Notes: The photo of Eva Gabrielsson by Rob Schoenbaum appears in the LA Times:  www.latimes.com

The photo of Stieg Larsson is by Jan Collsioo and appears here: www.svd.se

Reviews of all three Millenium Trilogy novels, video trailers for all three of the films (all released in Sweden last year and being released in the US with subtitles), and a review of the first film released in the US, THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, are available on this site.  See listings under the Author tab.

“One of these days I am going to forget myself, I shall leave [myself] forgotten in some corner of the house, forget to take myself out for a walk…There are fewer and fewer people in the town, and with reason, anything could happen, everything could happen, and whatever happens there will be war, screams will echo, powder will explode.”

Within the two hundred fifteen pages of this short, allegorical novel, Evelio Rosero creates a microcosm of Colombian rural life in the fictional community of San Jose, where no one knows who will attack them next—the army, the paramilitaries, the guerrillas, or the drug lords.  Though the residents are peaceful small farmers and businessmen with few, if any,  ties to the “outside” world and virtually no interest in the country’s politics, every militant faction vying for power in Colombia somehow believes that these residents constitute an imminent threat.  They convince themselves that specific San Jose residents must certainly be allied with their enemies, since their “enemies” are whoever has not declared allegiance to their own vague goals.  The four militant groups each want  to dominate and control the area simply to prevent any other group from controlling it, and they are willing to massacre innocent men, women, and even babies to achieve their bloody but elusive goals.

In the hands of Colombian author Rosero, every character in the novel becomes a sort of Everyman, an ordinary person living his own life, just like the ordinary people in any other country, with similar kinds of goals, a similar desire for love and family, and a similar belief (or non-belief) in a higher spiritual power.  Because Rosero also creates intriguing, quirky personalities for his characters, they are livelier than most other generic, “Everyman” characters, and they therefore generate sympathy and understanding of their individual problems while they also represent broader, more elevated themes.  As the village comes under fire from bloodthirsty enemies as undifferentiated to the residents as they are to the reader, the author’s universal themes of good vs. evil, power vs. subservience, and human kindness vs. barbarism become allegorically obvious.

Ismael Pasos, a seventy-year-old retired teacher, lives with his wife Otilia, also a teacher, on a small farm, the highlight of his life being his daily climb up the ladder to pick his oranges—and to peer over the wall of his neighbor’s house to watch the neighbor’s young wife, Geraldina, sunbathing nude.  Though Ismael likes to believe that no one notices, his own wife is humiliated by this behavior, and his neighbor, “the Brazilian,” is amused, considering him an inoffensive Peeping Tom.  The scene on the ladder, however, is immediately juxtaposed against the story of how Ismael met his wife–on the same day that he saw a middle-aged man shot between the eyes by an eleven-year-old child at a bus station.  This contrast of scenes sets the immediate tone of the novel, emphasizing the contrasts between the sweetness of everyday life and the hopelessness of a political and social culture in which no one at the bus station even bothers to chase the murderer.

Now elderly, Ismael and Otilia are getting ready to visit Hortensia Galindo on the fourth anniversary of the disappearance of her husband, captured by some unknown militant group and now “disappeared.”  Because Ismael has a lame leg, he lags behind Otilia as she walks to Hortensia’s anniversary, and, in excruciating pain, he decides to climb the mountain to see Maestro Claudino Alfaro, a well-known folk healer.  Though the Maestro actually saw Hortensia’s husband being arrested, four years ago, he has no idea which group took him.  Within days of Ismael’s trip up the mountain, several of Ismael’s neighbors disappear, even though one of them regularly paid protection money.  Nothing is being done to find the missing, the Mayor blames the Minister of Defense for giving him only one battalion of infantry, and the police captain has not mounted a search party.

Gradually, the horror expands, taking over every aspect of life for Ismael.  “The atmosphere, from one moment to the next, is unbreathable,” he notes.  “A slow feeling of unease overtakes everything, not just human, but plants, the cats…the unmoving fish; it is as if one were not inside one’s house, despite being so.”  As circumstances become progressively worse, with the atrocities becoming ever more brutal, Ismael becomes less lucid, less able to care for himself, less interested in continuing to live at all.  The final scenes challenge the reader to see any hope for a peaceful life for these villagers, any hope for the future, any hope that beauty and kindness and love can possibly exist within such a culture.

Though some readers may become frustrated at not knowing exactly which factions are perpetrating the various acts of violence, others will find that not knowing the answers puts them into the shoes of the villagers more directly.  Some may also feel that the characterization of Ismael becomes vague and hard to follow when he begins to lose his hold on reality, while others will feel it makes him even more human and damaged by events.  The novel leaves many questions regarding the future of this area, but it leaves no question at all about the courage of the author to raise these issues in print while they are still continuing.

Notes: The author’s photo appears on this Spanish language site:  www.tusquetseditores.com

An interview in which the author discusses this novel with Maya Jaggi is here:  http://www.independent.co.uk

A symbolic funeral procession (pictured here) for the one hundred fifty victims out of the one thousand residents of San Jose de Apartado is from www.wri-irg.org. Though the San Jose in the novel is fictional, the action there closely resembles what has happened in this real community.

San Jose de Apartado is located on a line southeast from Turbo, near the border with Panama.  It is 25 miles from Medellin.

In 1997, San Jose de Apartado became the first of fifty “Peace Communities” in Colombia, and “On March 23, 1997, we declared ourselves the PEACE COMMUNITY OF SAN JOSE DE APARTADO, with the hope that the armed actors would respect us and that we would not have to abandon our lands.”  Unfortunately, numerous massacres and assassinations have taken place in this Community of Peace since then, driving people out of their homes.  Other Peace Communities have had better success, however. www.forcolombia.org

A report on the massacres, presented to the US Congress, is here: http://www.colombiasupport.net

“Why should I be so shaken up?  Somehow I had never seen a person die in front of me, but I had known plenty to go missing.  Some of whom I missed very much.  Nice people who talked to me and then the next day were gone without explanation…”—Peter Niels

Forty-six-year-old journalist Peter Niels, who has traveled the world since his youthful marriage ended, is touring Taiwan, a country he thoroughly enjoys, when he and his photographer, Josh Pickett, have a day free from professional responsibilities.  Deciding to visit the famous Taroko Gorge, they become involved in a strange disappearance.  A group of ninth grade Japanese students has come to Taroko for an end-of-the year class trip, and Niels and Pickett run into three of the girls in their “sailor-suit” school uniforms singing as they explore the area.  Niels then takes a snooze, and when he awakens, he sees that Pickett has just returned from a sidetrip.  Immediately afterward, he hears a Japanese boy and girl calling for some of their fellow students who have not returned from exploring.

In this debut novel, author Jacob Ritari alternates his points of view from Peter Niels to Michiko Kamakuri, one of the schoolgirls on the trip who decided not to go exploring on her own;  Tohru Maruyama, the ninth grade Class Representative with whom several of the girls are “in love”;  and Detective Hsien Chao, the stodgy Taiwanese policeman called in to investigate the disappearances.  The chaperone of the Japanese trip, Mr. Tanaka, who is their homeroom teacher, is under great pressure to find the girls and ensure a happy ending.

In the course of the novel, Ritari delineates many different characters, giving the three missing girls unique characteristics which distinguish them from each other.  Since the Japanese   characters are sometimes known by their personal names and sometimes by their family names, however, readers will find it useful to keep track of both names in order to keep from confusing the characters.  One of the missing girls, Kari Hiraoka, is a member of a new Buddist sect, the Mahikari, and she believes in okiyome, a kind of healing magic which radiates from her hands.  Since she is both tall and pretty, several members of the opposite sex find her especially attractive, and some of the girls are jealous of her.  When a typhoon hits Taiwan before the girls have been found, the tension increases exponentially.  Everyone suddenly begins to see everyone else in a new light, and the hidden resentments among the various groups—Taiwanese, Japanese, and Americans—begin to be revealed.  Taiwanese Det. Hsien Chao admits he hates the Japanese and does not like Americans.  Chaperone Tanaka finds the Taiwanese lazy.

While all the adults are dealing with the missing students and their own issues, some of the young students left at the campsite are exploring the world of love and sex, and at this point, it may be difficult for some readers not to be reminded of the plots of Young Adult fiction.  Throughout the emergency, spiritual portents and religious references emerge.  A monk from the nearby Buddhist temple appears and offers help, Neils hears a mysterious voice, and the ghost of one of the missing students appears.  A mixture of commentary from Catholicism, Buddhism, and New Age religions adds some spiritual significance to the inner searches which the participants engage in during the crisis.

As the author deals with issues of one person’s responsibility for others (or not) and the nature of inner peace vs. guilt, the investigation shows the characters rapidly descending into mistrust and open allegations against others, raising the tension.  The resolution comes naturally from the plot and ties up the loose ends without any major surprises.

Told in clean and simple prose, this uneven novel emphasizes plot and the effects of the disappearances on individual characters, though there are few complications and surprises.  Some characters with things to hide reexamine their pasts, while others rationalize their actions in order to move on to new lives.  (“Why should I have to be unhappy forever just because of something that happened by accident?” one wonders.)   Since the majority of characters are about fourteen, the level of complexity in their lives revolves primarily around puberty, their ability to deal with the pressures of their competitive school lives, and their fear for their missing friends.  Though the characters are Japanese, Taiwanese, and American, their different cultural values and behaviors are far less important here and have far less impact on character than what one might expect or hope for in a novel with this setting.  Ritari’s sense of pacing, his experimentation with point of view, and his willingness to tackle big themes, however, augur well for future novels.

Notes: The author’s photo by Anna Jekel appears on the Unbridled Books website and on the book jacket.

The photo of Taroko Gorge is courtesy of the Taiwan Tourism Board.

The photo of the Buddhist Temple at Taroko Gorge is from Cultural Tourism Taiwan:   http://tour.cca.gov

“In my father’s culture there is no room for self-righteousness or even earnestness.  To take something seriously is to be a fool.  It has to be all irony, disdain, and mockery.  Passion is allowed only for athletics…Achievement in any realm other than sports is a tell-tale sign of having taken something seriously.”

John Updike made the life of Boston’s suburban elite his territory—emphasizing their sense of entitlement and superiority, their “clubbiness,” their alcoholism, and their sexual experimentation as a way of proving they exist.  One generation later, Lily King, like her fellow Massachusetts authors Susan and George Minot, shares her own insights into what sometimes passed for family life in a similar, but more “Brahmin” suburban setting.  The fathers they depict, contemporaries, might have belonged to the same club, attended the same cocktail parties, and drunk the same brand of gin.  Their mothers were the rocks of the family, with values more closely allied with the real world, until their deaths or divorces left the children without a strong anchor as they faced the storms of adolescence.

Dividing her novel into three parts, Lily King tells the story of Daley Amory, daughter of Gardiner and Meredith Amory, from her eleventh birthday, during the Presidency of Richard Nixon, through her forties and the election of Barack Obama.  Though she lives for long periods of time during those years without contact with her alcoholic father, she never really escapes her need for him, even, on occasion, subsuming her own “best interests” to care for him. In the hands of a lesser author, the novel might have devolved into outrageous melodrama during its long chronology, but King is too good an author to allow that to happen.   With a fine eye for imagery, an unerring ear for dialogue, and a firm grasp of the depths of emotion that underlie the interplay between Daley and Gardiner, she creates a novel that establishes her themes about daughters and their fathers, a surprisingly rare subject for fiction.

The novel opens on Daley’s eleventh birthday.  Her mother has sworn her to secrecy that week, telling her that she intends to leave her father and wants Daley to come with her to her parents’ house in New Hampshire for the summer.  When her father takes her to get a new “birthday puppy,” Daley, knowing about the impending separation whereas her father does not, chooses the ugliest puppy in the shop.  An ugly puppy, she believes, will be easier to leave behind.  Her mother, an activist, is entertaining inner city children in their pool that week; her father, at home because he has lost his job for mysterious reasons, mocks their accents, their skin color, and their poverty, then persuades Daley to join him in streaking nude through the gathering. Three months later, after a summer in New Hampshire, Daley returns to her former home to visit her father–and finds him living with someone else, her child sleeping in Daley’s bed.

Part II takes place during a going-away party for Daley in Michigan sixteen years later.  Having completed her advanced degree, she is about to begin work in California.  Then she gets a call saying that her father needs her.  The call reawakens her feelings for him at some cost to her own future.  In Part III, Daley is the mother of two children.  She has had no contact with her father for fifteen years.  And then she gets another phone call asking her to return to see him.

Gardiner Amory is an almost impossible person to like, primarily because he is so ignorant and self-satisfied.  Surrounding himself with people who behave as he does, he has no interests beyond the elite little world of his town and his club.  Snide and snobbish, he is a manipulator, willing to do anything to get his own way.  Insensitive in the extreme, especially to the needs of his children, he does whatever he wants, encouraging Daley to see the world through his own blinders.  His profanity, his alcoholic tantrums, his insulting behavior toward his succession of wives, and his flagrant sexual performances are more than many readers will want to know about.  It is this last issue which, unfortunately, casts a clinker into the mix of scenes—several sexual episodes in various sections of the book so gratuitously explicit that they border on pornography.  These add nothing necessary to the novel, and they bring the otherwise thoughtfully observed mood and style to a crashing halt when they occur.

Daley is sympathetic and largely believable, a character whose childhood activities—experimenting with smoking, drinking, and necking—are not unusual.  Her love of reading makes her eventual academic achievements plausible, though there is no early hint that she will achieve at the level that she does.  In Part II, Daley’s adult decision to help her weak father after sixteen years of alienation emphasizes her overwhelming need for him, but the length of her stay with him is difficult to understand.  Her father rejects (and even mocks) everything she has worked years to achieve personally and professionally.  He has no idea–and does not care to know–what she is giving up for him, and my own empathy for her waned during this period in which she makes enormous sacrifices on the remote chance that she can be the one person who will rescue this self-involved man from himself.  A fascinating look at the extent to which one woman yearns for a father, and what it takes before she finally gains perspective on her own life and sees her father for who and what he really is.

Note: The author’s photo comes from her author page:   http://authors.simonandschuster.com A fine interview with Lily King appears here:  www.bookbrowse.com

The photo of the rotunda and harbor is from the small Massachusetts town where Lily King grew up.  http://www.flickr.com

The local carnival plays a role at the beginning and ending of this novel.  http://utbfsa.wordpress.com