Swiss author Peter Stamm has accomplished a remarkable feat. He has written a fascinating story in which marriage is less the result of true love than it is of logic, the resulting union resembling a merger more than a deep human relationship. Passion here has more to do with self-gratification than with true feeling. And Alex, the main character, is so ego-centric that it is difficult to imagine any thoughtful, sensitive woman wanting to have anything at all to do with him. But that is part of the point. None of the three main characters here—one man and his two lovers–are emotionally mature, and none of them grow much during the almost twenty years that pass in the course of this novel. Still, by the end of the novel, the reader will have a fine picture of what true love is, however negatively the characters behave in their own lives and however much damage they may do to the other people in their lives. The negative emphasis actually accentuates the wonder of the positive for the reader. Tightly organized and unusual in its focus on characters who are insensitive and self-involved, the novel has more intellectual than emotional appeal (again, appropriate to the characters), and it is up to the reader to decide to what extent each will be able to understand and feel real love—or become fully human.
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Camilla Lackberg is the most profitable author in Swedish history, outstripping even Stieg Larsson in total book sales. Setting her novels in Fjallbacka, Sweden, a small fishing village in western Sweden (and her home town), Lackberg shows that even small fishing villages hold secrets, including murder. In this second novel in the Fjallbacka series, Chief Investigator Patrik Englund learns that six-year-old has discovered a woman’s naked and beaten body in a ravine. Underneath that body are the skeletons of two more women who disappeared in 1979. Autopsies prove that all three had been slowly tortured over the course of many days before merciful death interceded. Lackberg spends as much time on the lives and motivations of her characters as she does on plot development, and when yet another young girl disappears from town, Patrik and his crew (which also has frictions and rivalries) realize they may have a chance to find her before she dies of the same tortures which were inflicted on the previous young women. Good psychological insights by a young author.
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A reporter of cricket matches who also wrote the cricket-tour book Pundits from Pakistan, Indian national Rahul Bhattacharya spent some time in Guyana covering matches in 2003 – 2004, so enjoying the country that he decided to return again later to spend an entire year meeting new people and exploring places most outsiders never come to know. The result is a unique travel book of great originality, chock full of outlandish characters, trips to places the reader will not even have imagined, and risky adventures to the interior. Not a “novel” by any stretch of that word’s definition, the book feels, overall, like a wonderfully described diary, with events unfolding more or less at random. It is a lively account of those who live on the fringes, taking big risks and chances, and surviving any way they can and at any cost. Trips to the interior for diamond-hunting, an analysis of the drug wars involving the East India vs. African gangs, and a bewitching woman with whom the author travels to Venezuela are part of the action. Those who are looking for a balanced picture of Guyana, a country of extraordinary beauty and much charm, will want to look elsewhere.
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Julio Llamazares will win many new readers with this powerful and richly atmospheric novel, a classic in Spain for the past twenty years, but only recently available in English translation. Capturing the love of an old man for his land and for the village in which he and his ancestors were born, it is also a study of the inexorable effects of time and the pressures it exerts on isolated communities and the human inhabitants who lack direct connection with a wider world. Told from the point of view of a now-elderly man who, along with his faithful, unnamed dog, is the last remaining inhabitant of Ainielle, a crumbling village in the Pyrenees, the novel details his physical and emotional deterioration as he observes the parallel collapse of the town, “whole buildings kneeling like cattle,” the village itself a mangled and sad “unburied corpse.” His wife Sabina, who had remained with him after all the other inhabitants gradually departed, has now been dead for ten years, and as the novel opens, Andres believes that this is the last day of his life.
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Julian Trevelyan-Tubal, the second son of Sir Harry, is now the eleventh generation of Tubals to have run the family’s bank, an old and prestigious institution which has, now, not surprisingly, fallen victim to the same deteriorating economic forces as every other bank and investment company in London and around the world. With Sir Harry in Antibes, where he is recuperating from a stroke, Julian has been responsible for managing the “firm.” Julian wants to accept an offer to sell the bank to an American, Cy Mannheim, but he has found it necessary to borrow two hundred fifty million pounds from the family trust for a limited time to shore up the bank, which now has eight hundred million pounds worth of toxic assets and useless mortgages in territories the bank has never even visited. Justin Cartwright, an award-winning author who was born and grew up in South Africa and now lives in London, uses his dry wit and sense of satire to tell the story of the Tubals, a family which has few inner resources to deal with the crisis the bank is facing: “The money simply imploded. It no longer exists. Nobody can explain it.”
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