Instinctive and natural as an actress, and impulsive and romantic as a person, Bergman conveyed sensuality at the same time that she conveyed innocence, and the public loved her. They saw her as Sister Mary Benedict in Bells of St. Mary’s and as Joan of Arc, never knowing much about her private life, and ignoring the fact that she left her young child and husband, Petter Lindstrom, at home in Sweden to come to the US to make movies. Her affairs with Gary Cooper and Victor Fleming were never reported. Alfred Hitchcock was unabashedly in love with her and was devastated, as was her public, when she became involved with Roberto Rossellini in 1950, while working on the film of Stromboli. Her flagrant affair, her pregnancy, and her out-of-wedlock child in 1950 became the subject of a speech on in the US Congress and were regarded as a complete betrayal of the public trust which had believed her image. “As it was, Ingrid Bergman was only really “Ingrid” from Casablanca [1942] to Under Capricorn [1949]—seven years,” in which she made ten hit films.
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In September, 1957, Joseba, the speaker who opens the novel, and his friend David Imaz are both eight years old when they introduce themselves to the new teacher at their Basque school in Obaba, near Guernica, Spain. David, sometimes called “the accordionist’s son,” is, like his father, an accordionist–an “artist” at his craft–and almost instantly, he finds himself perched on top of a desk, playing for his delighted class. Forty-two years later, the accordion is put away, and Joseba is visiting David’s widow, not in Basque country, but at Stoneham Ranch in Three Rivers, California, where David’s uncle once lived. Joseba, a published author who also participated in the events in Obaba with David, discovers when he reads David’s book that “events and facts have all been crammed” into the book, “like anchovies in a glass jar.” He suggests to Mary Ann that he rewrite the book, expanding David’s memoir and setting the record straight, promising that “any lines I add…must be true to the original.” Mary Ann agrees, and three years later Joseba has completed the book which becomes the text of this novel. (On my Favorites List for 2009)
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Luisa, a Madrid single mother, has written several successful mysteries starring her two detective heroes, psychoanalyst Carmen O’Inns and her partner Isaac Tonnu. Luisa, aged fifty-two and gifted with a “rampant imagination,” has just moved into a new apartment in Madrid with her eleven-year-old daughter Elba, named for the island where Luisa, then aged forty, conceived her while on a “mating trip.” The new apartment will allow Elba to attend the private English High School which Luisa attended as a child. What follows is an unusual variation of metafiction, in which Luisa simultaneously creates her over-the-top novel about the death of a child at a private school, describes the similar death of a child forty years ago when she herself was an eleven-year-old student at her private school, and then relates details about another remarkably similar death of a child at the same private school during the time that her daughter Elba is a student. Three young boys. Three deaths. Three mysteries.
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Deon Meyers just keeps getting better and better with each thriller. Setting his novels in contemporary South Africa, he raises the bar for thrillers by infusing each of his novels with national political tensions—historical, racial, and economic—emphasizing the urban and rural disparities which make the country so complex and so difficult to govern. Main character Lemmer, working for Body Armor, the premier bodyguard service in the country, has been hired to guard Emma le Roux, a wealthy young woman who, after seeing a news story on TV, believes that her brother Jacobus le Roux, thought dead for twenty years, is, in fact, alive—and a suspect, under an assumed name, in a mass murder in Kruger National Park. Emma herself has recently been targeted by unknown assassins and has barely escaped from her house after a violent attempt on her life. This is a terrific and unusual thriller, the fifth of Meyer’s novels, all of which are written in Afrikaans and translated.
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Set in Sweden in 1990, Henning Mankell’s first Kurt Wallander mystery begins with a dramatic, Raymond Chandler-esque scene. An elderly farmer from Lannarp, an “insignificant farming village” in southern Sweden, awakens at 4:45 a.m. with a sense of unease: “Something is different. Something has changed.” As the farmer gazes at the farm next door, he begins to notice a series of homely, seemingly insignificant details, and he and the reader slowly conclude that he is not overreacting in his growing alarm. Kurt Wallander, substituting for the absent police chief of Ystad, some distance away, answers the farmer’s panicked call for help and investigates the “methodical violence” of a bloody crime scene. The press quickly concludes that the crime may have been committed by foreigners. Public threats are made against the foreigners by extremists, and Wallander knows that “The [threats] had to be taken seriously. It is in the examination of these attitudes that this novel is different from the typical whodunit.
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