Posted in 8-2013 Reviews, Historical, Italy on Sep 2nd, 2013
When Elena Ferrante created her long epic about the women in Naples as they faced major cultural changes from the early 1950s to the present, it was issued in installments as three separate books. My Brilliant Friend, the first installment, released in 2012, focuses on a broad spectrum of Neapolitan life in the 1950s, and this year’s volume, The Story of a New Name, focuses on the same families and main characters as they continue their lives into the 1960s. Readers of My Brilliant Friend, will remember from the Prologue to that novel, that Elena Greco, then sixty-six and living in Turin, received a long-distance telephone call in 2010 from the son of Lila Cerullo, once her best friend, asking for help in locating his mother, who disappeared from Naples two weeks before. Out of touch with Lila for years, Elena is convinced, based on past experience, that the dramatic and spontaneous Lila does not wish to be found, and she decides to write down everything she can remember of Lila and her life from her birth in 1944 to 2010. The trilogy which results recounts the life of Lila and illustrates her own long relationship with her as a child and young woman, their two lives intertwining but moving in dramatically different directions in the course of the action. At over eight hundred pages for the first two volumes, this trilogy is truly epic in length, and in its depiction of Naples in the aftermath of war, primarily in My Brilliant Friend, it adds epic themes and ideas. In this second novel, however, the novel focuses more specifically on the minutiae of their daily lives, especially their turbulent love lives.
Read Full Post »
The cover description of this novel as “An Inspector Erlendur Novel” is misleading, especially for long-time followers of the dark and damaged inspector from Reykjavic and his grim and often grisly investigations. Erlendur, in fact, does not appear at all, either in person or by telephone. At the end of Hypothermia, the previous novel in the Erlendur series, he has left to go hiking in the sparsely populated East Fjords, taking a break from his personal problems and the frequently horrific problems involving his children, his former wife, and their relationships with him. No one has heard from him in almost two weeks. Elinborg, filling in at the office, is quite different from Erlendur. Living with the supportive Teddi and their two children, Elinborg is a cookbook author in her free time, specializing in desserts, and working on her second cookbook, and she tries to keep the lines of communication open with her children, though her older son, in his late teens, is something of a mystery to her, at this point. Were it not for the nature of the crimes themselves – in this case, the rapes and disappearances of women, the use of rohypnol (the “date rape” drug) to paralyze victims, and a gruesome murder which opens the book – Outrage would come as close to a “cozy” as the darkly noir author Arnaldur Indridason is probably capable of writing. The twisted and often macabre aspects of life seen in the book (and film) of Indridason’s Jar City, for example, have been softened here, reflecting the more feminine, intuitive approach of Elinborg and her efforts to communicate wherever possible with both victims and perpetrators, as she works to solve crimes.
Read Full Post »
Dr. Raj Kumar, the speaker of this ambitious and often exhilarating novel, decides, ultimately, that “What holds things together is more important than what separates them,” but by the time he discovers this, he has explored the world on more levels and examined life in more detail than many other authors do in ten novels. I cannot recall a novel which has kept me reading so slowly and so happily for so long as this one did. Brimming with unusual insights, the novel remains firmly focused on life itself, not just on the speaker’s life, but on the grandest and sometimes most horrific aspects of life—socially, historically, artistically, scientifically, and even cosmically. As I read this, I was breathless, in awe of author Jaspreet Singh’s creativity, vision, and his literary execution. The speaker, Dr. Raj Kumar, has just returned to Delhi for the first time in twenty-five years. He has been a professor at Cornell, but he is now trying to understand himself and his own search for information about an event which has left him traumatized for more than two decades. Married and the father of two American children, Raj is essentially a loner, preferring isolation and solitude as he returns to India. Here he sorts through the flow of his own memories and tries to understand them and their significance in the context in which they have occurred. In the process, he also discovers that events that he knows nothing about have affected those around him in extraordinary ways. Ultimately, he must uncover the whole past if he is to understand who he really is and what his obligations are, if any, as a human being.
Read Full Post »
Reading something fun by Daniel Silva always seems to be connected with my summer reading, and this novel is no exception – though not as interesting or challenging as his previous novel, The Fallen Angel, which dealt with on-going Arab-Israeli conflicts, a planned terrorist attack on an Israeli site in Europe, and the possibility that there is a very early Jewish temple built underneath the al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount. The English Girl, by contrast, feels much more “domestic,” concerning itself for much of the book with the kidnapping of a young woman who has been the lover of the Prime Minister of England, a circumstance which the prime minister’s political friends want resolved privately and as quietly as possible. Gabriel Allon, an Israeli art restorer who also works for the Israeli secret intelligence agency, has connections to intelligence services throughout the world as a result of his international work, and when he is contacted by the deputy director of MI5 in England, he agrees to try to find and free Madeline Hart, the woman being held hostage in some unknown place. The novel divides into two parts In the second part, and the novel becomes more complex and more relevant to present day international relations. When, during his investigations, Allon finds evidence that the Russians are interested in drilling for oil in the North Sea, he calls on Viktor Orlov, once one of the richest oligarchs of the Russian oil industry, for more information. The maneuvering for the European oil market becomes the main plot in the second half of the novel.
Read Full Post »
Charlie McCarthy, who is twenty-five as the book begins, is writing about events which occurred five years ago in Ballyronan, outside of Cork, events so traumatic for him that he is still suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. And that’s on top of his problems as a “Gamal,” short for Gamallogue, an Irish word for someone who is “different” – not someone who is developmentally handicapped in the usual sense but someone, like Charlie, who seems to do everything wrong – unintentionally wearing his shirt back to front, forgetting to wear his socks, spilling his Lucozade on his shirt in the pub, and saying the wrong things at funerals. For two years “after the things that happened,” he says, he was unable to do anything at all. “I just was.” The reader knows from the opening paragraph that Charlie’s trauma involved two lovers, his friends Sinead and James, and his early descriptions of Sinead in the past tense lets us know from the outset that she has died. Writing on the advice of his psychiatrist, Charlie delays and delays, but eventually begins to talk about the events which resulted in his trauma.
Read Full Post »
