In this newest installment in the Harry Hole series of Nordin noir novels, the eleventh in the series, Norwegian author Jo Nesbo continues the career of Harry Hole, including most of the characters who have filled his previous novels with life, conflict, and even romance. Three years have passed since the last novel, Police, took place, during which Harry has been working as a lecturer at the Police College, a job in which he has inspired young officers without having to stare into the gunsights of criminals on a daily basis. He is getting his life back after being almost killed in the last novel, and he is now happy and sober, married to his long-time love, with his stepson Oleg studying to become a full-fledged member of the police corps. The novel opens quickly with the murder of a female lawyer who has specialized in rape cases. She has been viciously bitten in the throat, though Nesbo is quick to say that the enemy in this book is not a vampire but a vampirist, someone who drinks blood but is not a supernatural character. As the Oslo Police begin to investigate, readers may want to keep a character list of repeating characters as there are about forty characters who appear in this carefully crafted and complex novel, and their relationships may have changed. Many surprises bring together all the threads of this complex novel in a grand conclusion, and they do so in a way which makes sense, deductively, not just by accident. Eventually, the reader believes that there has been a happy ending for the first time ever in a Harry Hole novel, until the Epilogue sets up a new complication, paving the way for yet another suspenseful and addictive story in yet another volume.
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A purple swamp hen from the famed mural of Pompeii is the speaker of the first story in this collection of short stories by Penelope Lively. As the hen describes, the garden was unlike anything any of us have ever known, hosting “fornication, incest, rape, child abuse, grievous bodily harm – and that’s just Quintus Pompeius, his household, and his associates.” And, the hen states, the humans were far more imaginative than the fauna, which “simply got on with the business of copulation and reproduction.” Clearly establishing the satiric tone of this and many other stories in her new story collection, her first in almost two decades, author Penelope Lively continues to prove that great writing – elegant, precise, completely attuned to nuance, and committed to using exactly the right word and not one word more – still exists for lovers of fine prose. She further shows that fine writing need not be stuffy or effete, that humor is an integral part of life, and that satire may be more effective in conveying ideas than polemics and criticism. Best of all, she shows that stories, though short, may convey big ideas and that collections of stories may represent different times and different forms and still develop a broad thematic unity within the collection.
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Written by Jean-Christophe Rufin, one of the founders of Doctors Without Borders and former president of Action Against Hunger, Checkpoint provides a new look at the whole idea of humanitarian service, in this case during the Bosnian War (1992 – 1995) which followed the breakup of Yugoslavia. The author, both a doctor and writer of popular novels, puts all his talents to use in this novel in which a team of four young people and one middle-aged man joins La Tete d’Or in Lyon, France, to deliver food, clothing, and medical supplies to people stranded without resources in the war zone. Each of the five volunteers has his/her own reason for risking all in the name of humanity, and none of them are acting purely out of altruism as they work their way through Bosnia on their way to Kakanj, a place where the Muslim, Croat, and Serb populations are so integrated that some adjacent areas within the same community have become enemies. As the two-truck convoy heads into the Bosnian war zone, they must pass regularly through checkpoints, operated by local warlords, where “the only true subject, the ultimate motor of all behavior and all thought, was fear. Would make a good film.
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Serialized simultaneously in two newspapers in Tokyo and Osaka in 1918, this short novel found a ready audience in a country already well familiar with Edgar Allan Poe, and author Tanizaki added some twists of his own, making his novel even more attractive to his audience – it is far more psychological, even twisted, and more obviously sexual than Poe. Romantic, even gothic in its approach, it is a tale which entices the reader through the speed of its narrative, moving so quickly that Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief” is intensified – the reader wants to get on with the excitement of this wild story and does not want to be bothered much about the obviously bizarre (and unrealistic) circumstances which make the excitement possible. The atmosphere and tone of the novel are set when the narrator, Takahashi, recalls a telephone call he received from his friend Sonomura, who asks him to come to his house immediately. Takahashi, a writer, has been up all night, working on a deadline, and is not able to travel to Sonomura’s right away. He is nervous about the call, informing the reader that mental illness runs in Sonomura’s family, and that he has concluded that “This time…Sonomura really had been stricken with lunacy.” Sonomura, quoted in the opening lines of this review, tells Takahashi (and the reader) that he knows, for sure, that at one o’clock that night, a murder will take place in a certain part of Tokyo. He does not know exactly where, but he wants to go see it happen. He also wants Takahashi to be there with him.
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Posted in 4-2017 Reviews on May 3rd, 2017
A 56-year-old lawyer in Copenhagen, Irene Beckman discovers that after more than thirty years, she is being divorced. Her husband Martin has fallen in love with another woman, and the “light” by which she views her life has now been “altered.” Every aspect of her existence, which she has taken for granted, has changed, and she must now figure out who she really is. In the hands of Grondahl, this age-old story takes on new life as Irene reminisces about the past and how she met Martin when she was a 17-year-old au pair in Paris, tells about her parents and their relationship, mourns for her unknown twin brother who died at birth, shares stories about her children, explores her present life, and tries to plan for the future. Her “journey to self-discovery” takes on added importance when her mother, facing surgery from which she thinks she may not recover, gives Irene an unexpected gift and changes her life even more. Those who enjoy novels of self-analysis will love this one, which is leavened with dry humor but which also makes important points about how much we can expect a relationship to bear when the individuals involved do not truly know or reveal their “inner selves.” But it also makes the point that a relationship must not completely subsume the individuals, that there are private places and events which are also important, and that one must always be ready to begin again, if necessary.
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