As Israeli author Yoel Hoffmann begins his wild metafictional, and often metaphysical, tale, he invites the reader along with him, as he experiments with his format, lets his mind wander in new directions as one idea leads to the next, remembers the past and the people in it, thinks about God (or not) and death, and creates a tale that is both serious and full of fun at the same time – not a description which can be applied to many other novels these days. As the author himself says, later in the book, “At first glance this book would seem to be a hybrid. That is, a book that sometimes laughs and sometimes cries. But in fact (as logicians say), it’s laughing and crying at once, and to the same degree.” The book challenges the very nature of genre, emphasizing that all books are stories, just as life is, and the best way to distinguish between them is to classify them by their feelings – happy or sad, “a book that can laugh or smile or cry. The book itself. The reader can behave however he likes.” Through flashbacks, Hoffmann recreates his own life, imagines new lives, and returns to the image of his father wearing his Schaffhausen watch, emphasizing that the men who created this watch are now either dead or very old and that their wives are also dead. Music, and dreams, and poetry, and parallel languages also gain attention from an author so alive and so full of ideas that anyone who chooses to read this marvelous book will be profoundly affected.
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Daniel Silva’s fourteenth novel featuring Gabriel Allon, an Israeli secret service agent who also works as a restorer of fine art, starts with the gruesome torture murder of a former diplomat to the Middle East, found hanging by his wrists from the chandelier of an estate on Italy’s Lake Como. The victim, suspected of being both a collector and an exporter of stolen paintings from Italy, is well known to General Cesare Ferrari, head of the Art Squad of Italy, and Ferrari knows whom to contact to investigate this case about stolen art, who buys it, and why. Gabriel Allon, who is currently in Venice restoring an altarpiece, made his reputation with the Israeli secret service when he was a young man, when he personally tracked down and executed six Black September terrorists who killed eleven Israeli athletes during the Munich Olympics in 1972. Ferrari asks him to help find the murderer of Jack Bradshaw at an estate along Lake Como. Bradshaw is believed to have been a collector of stolen art masterpieces, and he may also have been an exporter of them. The condition of Bradshaw’s body, which bears the marks of extreme torture, lead Ferrari and Allon to speculate that the murderer may have succeeded in gaining whatever information he needs to retrieve and sell the paintings Bradshaw is believed to have in his possession. Allon must follow the money trail, and it points in the direction of the leader of a Middle Eastern country.
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Opening in 1978, three years after the death of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, this stimulating and provocative novel comes to life through the point of view of Gafitas, a naïve, middle-class sixteen-year-old drawn into the alien world of Zarco, a school dropout who lives in the poorest section of the city of Gerona, in the far northeast of Spain. With no guidance, no prospects, no hope, and no future, Zarco and his friends have only the miserable present to look forward to, and their primary goals are to do the best they can with what they have and to take what they don’t have if they can get away with it. Forming a gang of quinquis, they commit petty crimes, and as the novel opens, Gafitas, cruelly bullied by his former school friends, has made informal contact with them during his school vacation. Dazzled by Tere, who may or may not be Zarco’s lover, he is easy prey for the gang, which needs an innocent-looking accomplice for a robbery. In the course of the summer, Gafitas experiments with drugs, sex, and the excitement of behaving in a way that is totally alien to everything his family believes in. A foiled bank robbery changes his life and those of the gang. Part II takes place thirty years later, when Gafitas, now a lawyer, is approached to defend his former gang leader Zarco. Highly literary in its approach to the subjects of identity, moral responsibility, and truth as each person sees it, the novel illustrates how a person’s past influences his perception of the present and how that, in turn, influences that person’s actions which affect the future.
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Maurizio de Giovanni, whose Neapolitan noir novels have sold almost a million copies, may be the only author who has ever featured a murder committed with a “snow globe” containing a hula dancer playing a ukulele. Famous primarily for his series of seven noir mysteries set in Naples during the rule of Benito Mussolini and featuring Inspector Luigi Alfredo Ricciardi, de Giovanni has also developed a second series, this one set in contemporary Naples. Following the stand-alone The Crocodile, the most violent and horror-filled of all de Giovanni’s novels, The Bastards of Pizzofalcone, the first in this new series, includes some of the author’s trademark elements of dark humor and irony, missing from The Crocodile. Returning to the character-based novels which made the Ricciardi series so popular, de Giovanni develops a large cast of characters, who may become “regulars” in future novels. These include four “damaged” police officers, the “bastards,” who have been assigned to work in Pizzofalcone, a steep, hilly area to the southwest of central Naples. All have had career problems and must now prove themselves in Pizzofalcone, where a widespread scandal involving police corruption and connections to the Neapolitan Mafia, known as the Camorra, has led to massive dismissals. These new officers will have only a short period of time to prove their worth or they will be dismissed and the Pizzofalcone precinct closed. As they begin to investigate a murder and the possible detention of a young woman against her will, they all begin to learn more about themselves.
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Both a journalist and a novelist, British author John Prescott puts all his writing talents to use in this stimulating work which straddles the line between reality and fiction. The Dig, set in June, 1939, near Woodbridge, on a North Sea estuary about a hundred miles northeast of London, engages the reader from the opening Prologue. Basil Browne, a local resident with great sensitivity to the both geology and archaeology, has returned at night to the site where he has been digging for several weeks and where he has already found evidence of a ship, its outline preserved by elements from the local soil which have replaced the material from which the ship was originally constructed. This Prologue sets the scene, the tone, and the atmosphere for the narrative which follows. Sutton Hoo is a real place, and its excavations, along with the internecine rivalries which emerged among local and national historic preservation groups, as they are described here, parallel what really happened in 1939, bringing the author’s journalistic skills to the forefront. The novel really excels, however, in the vibrant personalities created for Basil Browne, Grately the butler, Mrs. Pretty, and all the other participants in the drama of the excavation. These emerge from the characters’ conversations and behavior during the action, which though plausible, are not factual. Adding dialogue and some imagination to his reality allows author Preston much more flexibility in telling his story. His characters become much “rounder” and more realistic, allowing modern readers to identify with them and be drawn into the expanded story. A book that is hard to put down.
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